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Cleantech

AEP to ditch carbon capture, clean coal plan

Utility American Electric Power plans to announce on Thursday that it will suspend its project to capture the carbon emissions, at a commercial scale, from a coal plant in West Virginia, reports the New York Times. Read More »

UK Stands By Green Energy Amid Big Budget Cuts

The UK government unveiled major spending cuts today, taking bites out of welfare benefits and other public programs while pledging to provide £2.2 billion pounds (about $3.5 billion USD) for renewable energy and carbon capture projects and preserving a feed-in tariff for solar power. Read More »

 
 

Khosla-Backed Calera Scoops Up $19M for Carbon Recycling

Calera Corp., a startup working to capture emissions from industrial flues and recycle it into pavement and building materials, has won a $19.9 million vote of confidence in a government program for projects recycling carbon emissions in to useful projects. Read More »

6 Ideas for Recycling Carbon

If six research projects awarded funding by the Department of Energy this week pan out, they could enable tons of captured carbon to be put to use as a building block for chemicals, fuels, concrete and other products. Read More »

Stealthy Sequoia-backed C12 Energy on Dealmaking Out West

Sequoia Capital-backed carbon capture startup C12 Energy now has “several early stage CCS projects,” in the works, according to testimony from founder Kurt House, who pulled back the curtain on what he sees as keys and challenges for deployment of carbon capture tech. Read More »

Peabody Energy Pours $15M Into Carbon Recycler Calera

Peabody Energy, the world’s largest coal company, has taken a shine to an idea from a Silicon Valley startup to capture and recycle carbon emissions. The coal giant announced today that it has invested $15 million into 3-year-old Calera, which has developed technology to capture … Read More »

Codexis Files for IPO, Again

Updated: From where Codexis stands, the market for initial public offerings is looking up. The 7-year-old startup — which develops catalysts for drug and fuel production, and aims to break into carbon capture — filed a prospectus for an IPO of up to $100 … Read More »

Daily Sprout

Wildlife vs. Energy in the Mojave: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) says she plans to introduce legislation today to establish two national monuments on roughly 1 million acres of Mojave Desert outback…Its centerpiece, Mojave Trails National Monument, would prohibit development on 941,000 acres of federal land and … Read More »

Carbon Capture Out of the Running for UN Offset Projects

Should developed countries be able to meet their targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions by investing in carbon capture projects in developing nations? That’s one of the many questions negotiators in Copenhagen have considered this week at the ongoing international climate talks, weighing the case for … Read More »

Codexis Aims to Bridge Biotech and Carbon Capture

Codexis, a Redwood City, Calif.-based startup that counts oil giants Shell and Chevron among its backers, is in the business of so-called evolved biocatalysts: It takes a natural microbe or enzyme and tweaks the DNA sequences to create new variants, then searches for the variants best … Read More »

Three carbon capture and sequestration projects valued at a total of $3.18 billion have scored $979 million in stimulus funds, according to a release from the Department of Energy. In all, the three projects — each a commercial-scale demonstration of a heretofore experimental technology … Read More »

Daily Sprout

Dutch to Try Road Tax Alternative: The Dutch government has approved a plan to replace the annual road tax on cars with mileage fees in an effort to reduce traffic congestion and vehicle emissions. Starting in 2012, GPS devices will be used to monitor vehicles, tracking … Read More »

More Must Reads

Carbon capture technology is like a half-baked web tool, according to Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt: in need of some “debugging.” The chief of the search engine giant made the comments at Google’s headquarters this morning, where he interviewed Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. Chu, who … Read More »

No fewer than 100 large-scale carbon capture and storage projects within about a decade, at a cost of some $56 billion — that’s what International Energy Agency chief Nobuo Tanaka said the world needs in order to help address climate change, Reuters reports. And … Read More »

“Carousel Fraud” Strikes Carbon Markets: Carbon credit fraudsters are increasingly “setting up complicated import and export schemes between EU member countries, charging buyers for value-added tax in the country of destination, and then absconding with the tax rather than handing it over to the governments.” — … Read More »

So much for the “rapid restart” that Department of Energy Chief Steven Chu had in mind for the FutureGen project, a controversial public-private initiative to test experimental carbon capture and storage technology at a new 275 MW coal plant. Less than two weeks after Chu … Read More »

Noble Nixes IPO Plans: Connecticut-based wind developer Noble Environmental Power has withdrawn its registration, filed last year, for a $375 million initial public offering. — Mass High Tech GM Suspends China Import Plans: Under pressure from the United Auto Workers union and members of Congress, General … Read More »

EU Gets Another Fuel Sipper: What’s not a hybrid, doesn’t have a plug and isn’t available in the U.S. — but gets 59 MPG? A new aerodynamic Corsa ecoFLEX from GM’s European brand, Vauxhall. — AutoblogGreen The Problem With Carbon Capture: Carbon capture and storage could … Read More »

It takes an optimist to see bright spots in today’s biofuels industry. As Lux Research puts it bluntly in a new report on the future of biofuels, the industry “has plunged over a cliff amidst rancorous debate over its near-negligible carbon mitigation, competition for arable land, … Read More »

Policymakers and academics agree: Capturing greenhouse gas emissions and shoving them permanently underground is a nice idea, in theory, but it needs more research. Some of the loudest advocates of cleaner coal technology (exhibit A: Duke Energy) haven’t been putting up the cash to actually … Read More »

FutureGen, a planned 275 MW cleaner coal demo project, essentially bit the dust last year when the Bush administration pulled funding. But with support from top officials in the new administration, the effort to build a coal-fired power plant equipped with experimental carbon … Read More »

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say a shorter-term solution, with cheaper start-up costs, could help spread the use of carbon capture and storage at coal plants and still clean up a large amount of carbon dioxide. Read More »

Coal has been both a major sponsor of and a political weapon during the presidential campaign. And there’s a lot of news from the coal industry this week. A DOE-funded clean coal project began in Colorado, while, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity said … Read More »

A new report from the International Energy Agency urges the world’s governments to invest $20 billion in near-term, full-scale carbon capture and storage demonstrations. Read More »

RGGI Auction Sells Out at $3.07 a Ton: All 12.5 million allowances auctioned last week by the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, North America’s first cap-and-trade system, sold for $3.07 each, raising some $38.5 million for the member states – Green Inc. McKinsey Sees Clean Coal Viable … Read More »

In the last two days, the Department of Energy has announced $24 million worth of new investments in solar energy while also revealing it’s putting a whopping $340 million into yet more clean coal research. In conjunction with the funding announcements, the DOE says … Read More »

The answer to our carbon emissions woes lies far below the sea, at least according to a new paper from researchers at Columbia University (hat tip Wired.com). The paper, entitled “Carbon dioxide sequestration in deep-sea basalt,” which was published in the latest issue of … Read More »

When the U.S. Department of Energy pulled the plug on the FutureGen project, the clean coal industry was left adrift, aimless in the cleantech sea. The DOE said FutureGen’s ballooning cost required “restructuring” of the program. That restructuring has come in the form of … Read More »

Ever since the Department of Energy cut its support of the FutureGen project, the fossil fuel-based energy industry, so dependent on effective carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology for the future of their business, has been rather directionless in its approach to CCS. The latest attempt … Read More »

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