Energy Transfer Partners LP, the Dallas based Fortune 500 natural gas company which owns more than 17,500 miles of natural gas pipelines, has agreed to buy Sunoco Inc. for $5.3 billion; a deal that will add oil terminals and transportation assets to its portfolio. Darren Horowitz, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates Inc. in Houston, said that the takeover “opens the door for greater growth,” allowing Energy Transfer to meet its goal of diversifying both the extent of the company’s pipeline network and the products that…

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A study featured in the journal Nature suggests that the latest victim of the green-versus-clean debate is the wind turbine. Researchers looking at wind farms in Texas found that overnight temperatures could increase over time compared with areas that don’t have wind farms. This prompted a flurry of media massaging over the global warming link to wind farms, but there were a few “ifs” in the study that might quiet the alarm bells. The study, published in the journal Nature, found that while wind energy was among the fastest growing renewable…

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Expensive to buy, cheaper to operate and of course friendlier to the environment, the electric car is traveling a bumpy road globally, with the added barrier of a bit of high-voltage politics Stateside – the toll it must pay for its bailout bounty. EVs (electric vehicles) and PHEVs (plug-in hybrid vehicles) are intended to help reduce fuel usage and CO2 emissions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s energy watchdog, hopes to see widespread adoption of electric vehicles by 2050. The IAEA envisions sales of electric…

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On 11 March 2011 TEPCO’s Fukushima nuclear power plant was rattled by an offshore 9.0 on the Richter scale earthquake. The tremor subsequently generated a tsunami that effectively destroyed the complex, sending shock waves worldwide through the nuclear power industry, hoping that 24 years after Chernobyl, public amnesia and governmental commitments to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power was moving back into the mainstream.Instead of a nuclear renaissance, Fukushima refocused a most unwelcome spotlight on existing nuclear power…

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“Renewable energy” has two fundamental conceptual flaws. It’s not really renewable, and it’s not really energy.What is “Renewable”?“Renewable” in most definitions approximates to something like “naturally replenished” and it often contrasted with allegedly inferior, “finite” sources. It brings to mind the image of a pizza where a slice, once eaten, magically reappears. There is no such phenomenon in nature, though. Everything is finite. The sun and the photons and wind currents…

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When we think of oil spills we tend to think of large slicks in the ocean, killing seabirds and damaging marine ecosystems. Following BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico back in 2010, and Chevron’s spill off the coast of Brazil in 2011, there has been a lot of focus on oil spills and there prevention. Companies are looking into more efficient and quicker ways of containing oil spills in the ocean, and more effective ways of extracting the oil from the water. New regulations are being introduced to increase safety,…

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The days of dumping trash into overcrowded landfills may be over. Just as you would not dump gold, diamonds, or hundred dollar bills into garbage bins, you soon will hesitate to throw out your plastic water bottle, as the once typical trash is taking on a whole new value. New developments in technology seem to have done the unfathomable—and scientists have now found a means to turn plastic pollution into oil.Scientifically referred to as “Thermal Depolymerization” the depolymerization process reduces complex organic materials—usually…

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