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Tag: biofuels

  • U.S. Added 254 Megawatts of Biomass Energy in 2014

    - by Erin Voegele, Feb­ru­ary 6, 2015 Bio­mass Magazine The Fed­er­al Ener­gy Reg­u­la­to­ry Commission’s Office of Ener­gy Projects has released the Decem­ber edi­tion of its Ener­gy Infra­struc­ture Update, report­ing the U.S. added 254 MW of bio­mass ener­gy capac­i­ty last year. In Decem­ber, the U.S. added five bio­mass gen­er­at­ing units with a com­bined capac­i­ty of 23 MW. Dur­ing…

  • Exploiting Private Forests for Bioenergy

    - by Roy Keene The debate over a sin­gle wood pow­ered elec­tri­cal gen­er­a­tor in Eugene has been myopi­cal­ly focused on just one project and one pro­posed fuel source. Sup­port­ers for Seneca Sawmill Co.’s pro­posed pow­er plant have yet to pub­licly men­tion that slash could be replaced with chipped trees as fuel prices rise, or that this…

  • What a 20-year Biomass Battle Tells Us About Environmental Justice Policy

    - by Brentin Mock, Feb­ru­ary 24, 2015, Grist It’s well-estab­lished that the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency has been quite flac­cid when it comes to enforc­ing civ­il rights issues. The online news out­let E&E recent­ly took the time to remind us how bad it is last week, report­ing from Flint, Mich., where envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice com­plaints about a bio­mass ener­gy plant built…

  • Green Crony Capitalism: Oregon’s Governor and the Grifter(s)

    - by Michael Don­nel­ly, Feb­ru­ary 13, 2015, Salem News Oregon’s Gov­er­nor-for-Life John Kitzhaber, 68, resigned Fri­day the 13th. His res­ig­na­tion let­ter was the usu­al lawyer­ly-parsed, blame-the-medi­a/­take no respon­si­bil­i­ty sham we’re used to seeing.  He had been gov­er­nor from 1995–2003 and again from 2011 until now.  The basic alle­ga­tions which forced the rest of the state’s Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty…

  • Out of the Garbage Can and Into the Fire

    - by Mike Ewall So-called “waste-to-ener­gy” (WTE) is usu­al­ly a euphemism for trash incin­er­a­tion, dis­pos­ing of waste while mak­ing mod­est amounts of elec­tric­i­ty and some­times steam for heat­ing pur­pos­es. Now, waste-to-fuels (WTF?) — turn­ing waste into liq­uid fuels for trans­porta­tion — is start­ing to emerge as a sub­set of WTE. Not­ing their acronym prob­lem, the indus­try has…

  • Biofuels Company Won’t Pay State of Mississippi After Bankruptcy

    - Jan­u­ary 10, 2015, Fuel Fix Bank­rupt bio­fu­el mak­er KiOR and con­trol­ling share­hold­er Vin­od Khosla say the state of Mis­sis­sip­pi is using legal tac­tics in an attempt to squeeze mon­ey from the company. KiOR, based in Pasade­na, fired back Thurs­day at the Mis­sis­sip­pi Devel­op­ment Authority’s Decem­ber call to con­vert KiOR’s case from Chap­ter 11 reor­ga­ni­za­tion into…

  • New Report Urges Western Governments to Reconsider Reliance on Biofuels

    - by Justin Gillis, Jan­u­ary 28, 2015, New York Times West­ern gov­ern­ments have made a wrong turn in ener­gy pol­i­cy by sup­port­ing the large-scale con­ver­sion of plants into fuel and should recon­sid­er that strat­e­gy, accord­ing to a new report from a promi­nent envi­ron­men­tal think tank. Turn­ing plant mat­ter into liq­uid fuel or elec­tric­i­ty is so inef­fi­cient that the approach is…

  • Biomass Destruction Entirely Predictable

    - by Matt Miller and Ray­mond Plouride, Feb­ru­ary 4, 2015, Chron­i­cle Herald In a Jan. 9 sto­ry about dam­age to our forests as a result of the need to feed the giant new Nova Sco­tia Pow­er bio­mass gen­er­a­tor in Port Hawkes­bury (“Bio­mass project rais­ing green con­cerns”), Asso­ciate Deputy Min­is­ter of Nat­ur­al Resources Allan Eddy sug­gest­ed that…

  • Nova Scotia Power Biomass in Cape Breton Raising Green Concerns

    - by Aaron Beswick, Jan­u­ary 9, 2015, The Chron­i­cle Herald About 2,790 hectares. That’s a rough esti­mate of how much wood­land will need to be cut annu­al­ly to feed Nova Sco­tia Power’s bio­mass boil­er at Point Tupper. “It seems that more of the fears are com­ing true than the ben­e­fits we had envi­sioned from that facil­i­ty,”…

  • Citizens Urge EPA and Congress to Choose Public Interest Over Politics on Energy Policy

    - Mike Ewall and Saman­tha Chirillo In Decem­ber, 900 Amer­i­cans, includ­ing 100 orga­ni­za­tions across the U.S. col­lec­tive­ly voiced their con­cerns about major parts of Pres­i­dent Obama’s Clean Pow­er Plan, in com­ments sub­mit­ted to the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA). Cit­i­zens specif­i­cal­ly asked the EPA to: ·      set more aggres­sive tar­gets and address envi­ron­men­tal justice ·      not encour­age more…