gas – Page 6 – Things Are Good

A Proposal to Label Gas Nozzles

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The overwhelming majority of personal cars use planet-killing, people-damaging, production-intesnive engines that consume a product that literally kills us. Most everyone understands this at some level, but it seems they don’t connect their fuel consumption with world hunger, polar bears dying, or even smog. A new organization in Toronto wants to change that.

Our Horizon wants to label gas nozzles at gas stations the same way that cigarette packages are labelled to warn users of potential harm.

â€œImagine if we see these labels every time, how long will it be before we demand more from government institutions,â€ said Shirkey.
Canada led the world when it placed health warnings accompanied by images on cigarette packages, and Shirkey said that he hopes Canada can once again be a pioneer.
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â€œIf youâ€™re concerned with helping people but not the environment, itâ€™s like putting a bandage on someone sitting in a boat that has a giant hole in the bottom,â€ Neville said. â€œWeâ€™re all dependent and addicted to fossil fuels.â€

Wind Power Is Getting Even Better…

A new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance has shown that wind power will keep coming down in price until it becomes cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear, and cheap natural gas power generation. Wind power is already competitive (or even better than traditional energy sources) in the long run when emissions, natural resource mining, and health side effects are taken into consideration but this study suggests that the new price parity expected in 2016 will be independent of externalities.

After analyzing the cost curve for wind projects since the mid-1980s, BNEF researchers showed that the cost of wind-generated electricity has fallen 14 percent for every doubling of installation capacity. These cost reductions are due to a number of factors: more sophisticated manufacturing, better materials, larger turbines, and more experience with plant operations and maintenance. Those improvements, combined with an oversupply of turbines on the global market, will bring the average cost of wind electricity down another 12 percent by 2016.

Read a summary of the Bloomberg report at Grist.org.

Brazil: Wind Power Now Cheaper Than Natural Gas

In Brazil a recent energy auction has shown that wind power is cheaper than natural gas in the country, and also a better investment opportunity. The competitiveness of sustainable energy sources continues to impress everyone (even with the subsidized resource-extraction industries), it’s only a matter of time until other sustainable energy options get this cheap.

They even expect the cost of wind power to decrease in the coming years!

EPE president and chief executive Mauricio Tolmasquim said the auctions show that wind and natural gas are competitive, predicting wind prices will continue to fall in Brazil.

“That wind power plants have been contracted at two digit prices, below 100 reals per MWh, showcases the energy market competition through auctions,” he said. “That wind power could reach these lows versus natural gas was unimaginable until recently.”

The energy auctions for a total of 92 projects were the first in Brazil for 2011, and also featured biomass, hydro-electric and natural gas projects.

Investments amounted to 11.2bn reals in total, for 3,962MW of energy that is slated to start generating in 2014.

No Fracking way! Quebec Says no to Fracking

Fracking, also known as hydraulic fractiruing, is the process of extracing gas from shale using copious amounts of water to destroy the environment so you can drive, err get gas. Quebec has a made a great move to ban fracking in the province, let’s hope that other places follow Quebec’s lead!

Normandeau said the ban will apply to fracking both for gas and oil, but that fracking could be done for scientific purposes.

A panel of independent experts, which the government has yet to name, will determine whether an individual fracking operation will add to scientific knowledge about the impact of the controversial technique used to extract natural gas from shale rock formations.

In announcing the ban, Normandeau noted that the BAPE, Quebecâ€™s Bureau dâ€™audiences publiques sur lâ€™environnement, said in its report recommending further study before shale-gas exploration goes ahead that there is a lack of knowledge.

Solar Power for Gas Production

Here’s a novel idea to conserve energy, use the sun to separate chemicals which can then be used as fuel thereby consuming less energy to create fuel.

Researchers have developed a novel thermochemical reactor that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into hydrocarbon-fuel precursors at a relatively high efficiency.
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The new thermochemical reactor is believed to be more efficient than previously developed ones, whose efficiencies could not be comparably measured. And it is amenable to continuous operation, suggesting that an industrial-scale version of the process could be developed for solar towers.