Tag: biofuels

  • Creditors Given OK to Foreclose on WA Biofuel Facility

    - by Kristi Pihl, August 23, 2014, Tri City Herald Some of Green Pow­er’s Tri-City cred­i­tors have received the green light to fore­close on the trou­bled bio­fu­el com­pa­ny’s unfin­ished Pas­co plant. Franklin Coun­ty Supe­ri­or Court Judge Cameron Mitchell recent­ly approved a request by the cred­i­tors to fore­close on the liens they hold against the com­pa­ny’s per­son­al property.…

  • Proposed Incinerator a Bad Choice for Island

    - Lin­da Damas Kel­ley, August 6, 2014, West Hawaii Today Just hav­ing returned from a month­long main­land trip, I found that the waste-to-ener­gy con­tro­ver­sy has reached a boil­ing point. I just read recent com­men­taries by Hunter Bish­op and Nel­son Ho; like them, I too worked for the Depart­ment of Envi­ron­men­tal Man­age­ment dur­ing the May­or Har­ry Kim…

  • USDA Funds Genetic Engineering Research for Switchgrass Biofuels

    -  July 24, 2014, Farm­ers’ Advance Michi­gan State Uni­ver­si­ty (MSU) plant biol­o­gist C. Robin Buell has been award­ed $1 mil­lion from a joint U.S. Depart­ment of Ener­gy and U.S. Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture (USDA) pro­gram to accel­er­ate genet­ic breed­ing pro­grams to improve plant feed­stock for the pro­duc­tion of bio­fu­els, bio-pow­er and bio-based products. Specif­i­cal­ly, the MSU Col­lege…

  • Biomass Burning Kills 250,000 People a Year

    -  by Jo Nova, August 5, 2014, JoanneNova.com.au The head­line at Sci­ence Dai­ly is that wild­fires and oth­er burns lead to cli­mate change. The paper itself asks: “As such, par­ti­cle burn-off of clouds may be a major under­rec­og­nized source of glob­al warm­ing.” For me what mat­ters are the deaths in the here and now: “We cal­cu­late that 5 to…

  • Forest Thinning Will Increase Wildfire Risk

    - by Charles Thomas, The Ore­gon­ian As fires again rage across the West, sen­a­tors from John McCain, R‑Ariz., to Ron Wyden, D‑Ore., echo the refrain “thin the forests” to pre­vent wild­fires. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, most of the advo­cat­ed thin­ning will actu­al­ly stoke the wild­fires of the future rather than lessen their occur­rence and impacts. Thin­ning pre­scrip­tions pro­posed in…

  • Biomass Rejected in Favor of Solar in Springfield, VT

    -  by Susan Small­heer, July 17, 2014, Rut­land Herald North Spring­field, Vt. — Out with bio­mass, in with solar panels. Win­stan­ley Enter­pris­es announced Wednes­day that it was seek­ing state approval to build five, 500-kilo­watt solar arrays in the North Spring­field Indus­tri­al Park. Some of the land that will be used was ear­li­er pro­posed to be the…

  • Shuttered Texas Biomass Incinerator to Reopen

    -  June 23, 2014, Bioen­er­gy Insight Inven­tivEn­er­gy, an asset man­age­ment firm, has select­ed NRG Ener­gy Ser­vices, a whol­ly owned sub­sidiary of NRG Ener­gy, to restart the Aspen Pow­er bio­mass plant locat­ed in Lufkin, Texas. NRG will also oper­ate and main­tain the facil­i­ty once it resumes oper­a­tion. The plant first opened in August 2011 and was the…

  • Activists Shut Down Seneca Biomass Incinerator in Eugene, Oregon

    - by Cas­ca­dia For­est Defend­ers, July 7, 2014, For­est Defense Now Scores of activists with Cas­ca­dia For­est Defend­ers and Earth First! con­verged on the Seneca Jones bio­mass plant this morn­ing to protest the company’s pri­va­ti­za­tion of pub­lic lands in the Elliott State For­est and ongo­ing pol­lu­tion in West Eugene. Cur­rent­ly sev­er­al peo­ple have locked them­selves to…

  • On Biomass, EPA Should Follow the Science

    Oth­er than the author’s sup­port for so-called “sus­tain­able” bio­mass, over­all a decent piece. — Josh - by William H. Schlesinger, June 18, 2014, The Hill In America’s South­east­ern states, there’s a boom­ing ener­gy trend that’s as big a step back­ward as imaginable. In fact, it stretch­es back to the time of cave­men. Pow­er com­pa­nies are burn­ing trees…

  • Half the Wood for New Hampshire Biomass Incinerator from Out of State

    - by Chris Jensen, May 23, 2014, New Hamp­shire Pub­lic Radio About 51 per­cent of the wood pur­chased for the new Burgess BioPow­er bio­mass plant in Berlin dur­ing its first two months of oper­a­tion came from New Hamp­shire, accord­ing to a new “sus­tain­abil­i­ty” report filed with the state’s Site Eval­u­a­tion Committee. Thir­ty-five per­cent came from Maine. Five per­cent from Vermont.…