petroleum

Thailand's energy minister ceremonially broke ground Thursday on what will become the largest solar farm in Southeast Asia.

The outskirts of Bangkok, Thailand, will be home to a 44-megawatt solar farm to be completed by the end of 2011. The plant dovetails with the country's aim to get 20 percent of its energy from renewable resources by 2022.

Suntech Power, which bills itself as the world's largest producer of crystalline silicon solar panels, has signed a deal to provide 34.5-megawatts worth of solar panels for the first phase of the Bangkok solar project.

When complete, the … Read more

BP moved ships and workers back to a Gulf of Mexico oil spill as a storm diminished on Saturday, but work to permanently seal the blown-out well could be delayed at least a week.

Ships and rigs working to drill a relief well intended to halt the leak for good were expected back in place on Sunday, but reconnecting the piping to the well could delay the operation seven to nine days, officials said.

Retired Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, head of the U.S. spill response, said the launch of a "static kill" operation to plug the … Read more

MOSCOW/WASHINGTON--His face wracked by age and his voice rasping after decades of chain-smoking coarse tobacco, the former longtime Russian minister of nuclear energy and veteran Soviet physicist Viktor Mikhailov knows just how to fix BP's oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

"A nuclear explosion over the leak," he says, nonchalantly puffing a cigarette as he sits in a conference room at the Institute of Strategic Stability, where he is a director. "I don't know what BP is waiting for, they are wasting their time. Only about 10 kilotons of nuclear explosion capacity and … Read more

In Duck vs BP for iPhone, it's your job to save the world's last surviving duck by plugging oil-spewing pipes.

If only life could imitate app. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could fix this catastrophe and rescue wildlife with a few screen taps?

I suppose it was only a matter of time before an app directly referenced the BP oil spill. This one's a game, and a decidedly simplistic one at that, but it is filled with interesting and educational facts about the environment.

Using your iPhone or iPod accelerometer, you "steer" your … Read more

OPX Biotechnologies is a bit different than the other companies out there trying to make fuel from microbes.

It's not touting that it's found a magic microbe for turning wood chips into ethanol or synthetic petroleum. In fact, it doesn't even have a microbe in mind yet. Instead, the company has devised a system that speeds up the process for figuring out how the genome in a particular microbe functions and how it can be better exploited.

The tool, developed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, lets researchers test the function of different genes simultaneously. Right … Read more

Algae's not the only organism that can be used as a feedstock for biofuel.

BP will collaborate with Arizona State University to try to figure out a way of using cyanobacteria, a photosynthetic form of bacteria, as a feedstock for diesel or synthetic petroleum. Ideally, the bacteria could be cultivated in large, contained plots of land baked by the sun--Arizona has a lot of that. The bacteria also consume carbon dioxide to grow. Thus, carbon dioxide could be pumped in from a power plant into the contained bacteria farm. The company could thus make money from selling carbon credits … Read more

Start-up LS9 has stated in the past that they plan to produce a synthetic version of petroleum with the help of microorganisms. This week, it will provide some information on how the process works.

Stephen del Cardayre, who heads up LS9's research, will deliver a paper this week on the process at the annual meeting of the Society of Industrial Microbiology taking place this week at Denver.

Industrial microbiology, one of our favorite topics here, essentially revolves around exploiting the properties of naturally occurring or genetically enhanced organisms. Microorganisms, after all, are little chemical factories. Feed sugar to certain … Read more

Those friendly Russians want to bring more energy directly to your doorstep if you live in North America. That means digging the world's longest tunnel. The proposed project would dig a tunnel over 60 miles long beneath the Bering Sea, surfacing at two islands en route.

Next week a coalition of Russian businesses will present this plan to Canada and the U.S. If it moves ahead, the tunnel would be twice as long as the one now connecting Britain and France.

The tunnel would connect major highways and pipelines yet to be constructed. The hope is to deliver … Read more