gas – Page 5 – Things Are Good

Europe Meets 2020 Emissions Targets Early

Europe has already beat its 2020 gas emissions target and it’s only 2015! This is good news because we need to reduce our energy consumption and our global output of greenhouse gas emissions. This demonstrates to the rest of the world that not only is it economically feasible to reduce emissions it proves that it can be done quicker than climate change deniers claim.

A report by the EU’s environment agency on Tuesday said 2014 emissions were 23 percent lower than in 1990. The EU’s goal is to achieve 20 percent reductions by 2020, but the report said the bloc is headed for 24-25 percent cuts with current measures to fight climate change.

Coal Continues to Falter

Coal was a great power source at the turn of the last century because it was easy to transport and plentiful. The obvious problem is that it basically kills the planet when you burn it and that’s not going to change despite the whole ‘clean coal’ propaganda. The good news is as we enter the 21st century coal is losing out to better energy sources. This is great because coal is the worse thing ever.

Slate has an article looking into the fall of coal and notes that less-destructive natural gas is being used. We need to curb the use of natural gas too but at least getting rid of coal is a step in the right direction.

Simply put, the U.S. energy industry has stopped building coal-fired plants, and is adding plants that donâ€™t use coal. So far this year, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commissionâ€™s April infrastructure report, no new coal capacity has been added, while natural gas (1.5 gigawatts), solar (937 megawatts), and wind (633 megawatts) have each added a decent amount of production capacity. Of the nationâ€™s installed electricity-producing capacity, coal only accounts for 27.5 percent, compared with 42.2 percent for natural gas.
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Wall Street has soured on coal producers like Walter in part because todayâ€™s results look bad, but largely because tomorrowâ€™s results look even worse. The stock market is famously a futures marketâ€”investors are making bets based on future cash flows they expect companies to produce. Itâ€™s difficult to see a positive future when the main coal customers are literally dismantling the machines that burn coal.

Morocco Leads in Cutting Subsidies to Oil and Gas Industries

Oil and gas companies get a ton of subsidies from governments which holds back the adoption of renewable energy. In most countries, the gas industry is supported by policies encourage car use and other related infrastructure decisions. Sometimes, like in Morocco, fuel is directly subsidized and recently the country found that it was just too expensive to augment the market so bluntly.

Morocco should be held up as a â€˜poster childâ€™ for effective green policymaking, according to the World Bankâ€™s top climate official.

Speaking at an environmental meeting in Pori, Finland, Rachel Kyte said the Rabat governmentâ€™s recent decision to cut tax breaks for petrol and gas used a template other developing nations could follow.

â€œWhat Morocco did was remove subsidies on fossil fuels, because they couldnâ€™t afford it, not because they had a big climate goal, but because they couldnâ€™t afford the subsidies,â€ she said.

â€œThen they started to incentivise investments in renewable energy, domestic and foreign.â€

German Coal and Gas Power Plants Closing Due to Cheap Renewable Energy

Germany has been so effective in tranisitioning from unsustianble (econmically and environemntally) energy sources to renewable ones that it is uncompetitive to burn fossil fuels for power!

“Due to the continuing boom in solar energy, many power stations throughout the sector and across Europe are no longer profitable to operate,” RWE said in a statement.

“During the first half of 2013, the conventional power generation division’s operating result fell by almost two-thirds. The massive reduction in power station margins is a major factor in this development.”

On Tuesday, E.On said it had shut down or left idle 6,500 megawatts of generating capacity.

It had previously announced plans to close a total of 11,000 megawatts, but now says it may close more.

Bacteria Creates Fuel Compatible with Gasoline Engines

The need for a biofuel that can be used in standard automobiles is needed more everyday as the bloody global thirst for oil only increases. Thankfully researchers have engineered a bacteria that can produce a fuel substance that can be used in standard internal combustion engines.

To be used as a mainstream alternative to fossil fuels â€“ desirable because biofuels are carbon-neutral over their lifetime â€“ engines would have to be redesigned, or an extra processing step employed to convert the fuel into a more usable form.

To try to bypass that, John Love from the University of Exeter in the UK and colleagues took genes from the camphor tree, soil bacteria and blue-green algae and spliced them into DNA from Escherichia coli bacteria. When the modified E. coli were fed glucose, the enzymes they produced converted the sugar into fatty acids and then turned these into hydrocarbons that were chemically and structurally identical to those found in commercial fuel.