Pecologix Political Ecology Blotter

The National Bioeconomy Blueprint describes five strategic objectives for a bioeconomy with the potential to generate economic growth and address societal needs. 1. Support R&D investments that will provide the foundation for the future U.S. bioeconomy.“Coordination of Federal bioeconomy-related research activities can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of those investments and is especially important when [...]

CLEAN GREEN SCAMBiofuel producers and oil refiners were roiled last October when the federal government charged Rodney Hailey, the owner of Clean Green Fuel, with carrying out a $9 million scam involving the distribution of 32 million fake credits, or renewable identification numbers.Oil companies are required to purchase RIN credits from producers of renewable fuel [...]

In California, OriginOil reports that, in recent independent third-party testing, the company’s algae harvesting process was able to remove 98% of hydrocarbons from a sample of West Texas oil well ‘frac flowback’ water in the first stage alone. Frac flowback describes water used in a drilling process called ‘hydraulic fracturing’, or ‘fracking’.This test sample was [...]

The Intermittency Challenge and the approaching need for massive storage of rapidly dispatchable energy has led the concept of the National Battery, a unified facility that holds the aggregated outputs from an array of intrinsically episodic renewable sources, releasing energy as demand requires. In this contribution, the original demonstration of Murphy that lead-acid batteries are [...]

This paper quantifies the relative cost-savings of utilizing a greenhouse gas emissions-weighted Clean Energy Standard (CES) in comparison to a Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS). Using a bottom-up electricity sector model for Hawaii, this paper demonstrates that a policy that gives “clean energy” credit to electricity technologies based on their cardinal ranking of lifecycle GHG emissions, [...]

We find that the potential for sustainable bioenergy from residues and waste, complementary fellings, energy crops and algae oil in 2050 is 340 EJ a−1 of primary energy. This potential is then compared to the demand for biomass-based energy in the demand scenario related to this study, the Ecofys Energy Scenario [1]. This scenario, after [...]

In Washington, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency approved the first applications for registration of e hanol for use in making gasoline that contains up to 15 percent ethanol – known as E15.To enable widespread use of E15, the Obama Administration has set a goal to help fueling station owners install 10,000 blender pumps over the [...]