News

Southern Co. has partnered with the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB) to inject carbon dioxide captured from Alabama Power’s Plant Barry into a 9,000-feet-deep saline reservoir north of Mobile, Ala.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) last week signed an agreement with three Chinese companies to develop and demonstrate the use of thorium fuel and to study the commercial and technical feasibility of its full-scale application in CANDU reactors like the twin CANDU 6 that are being built in Qinshan III, southwest of Shanghai.

More consumers would buy electric vehicles if the battery could be leased on a pay-per-mile service contract, argues a new study from the University of California at Berkeley.

A federal appeals court last week struck down parts of a 2005 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule governing power plant and factory pollution in areas where levels exceeded the federal 8-hour ozone standard. Also last week, an agency official told a Senate panel that the EPA was quickly moving forward to replace the Clean Air Interstate Rule (CAIR) and Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR).

The $3.5 billion Taylorville Energy Center (TEC), a hybrid integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) power plant proposed for Illinois by Tenaska and MDL Holding Co., has been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for final term-sheet negotiations under its loan guarantee program.

UK business group CBI on Monday released a report warning that the country’s current policy of incentivizing investments in wind power would result in too little investment in other forms of low-carbon energy, such as nuclear and clean coal. The approach will make energy security harder to achieve, and it could jeopardize the UK’s ability to meet climate change targets, the group said.

Fifteen environmental groups and a western Colorado county last week filed suit against the federal Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, and Energy, saying that the government’s “sprawling, hopscotch network” of 6,000 miles and 3.2 million acres of federal land designated as electricity transmission corridors promote coal- and gas-fired power generation, not renewable generation from sources like solar and wind.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is preparing to conduct what it says is the world’s first large-scale project to design, build, and test a warm gas cleanup system to remove multiple contaminants from coal-derived syngas. The federal agency has teamed with Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International, a scientific research firm, to demonstrate the 50-MW system at Tampa Electric Co.’s 250-MW integrated gasification combined-cycle (IGCC) power plant.

Duke Energy has filed testimony with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission for a proposed project that would store a portion of carbon dioxide emissions from its Edwardsport coal gasification power plant underground in southwest Indiana.

The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works kicked off efforts to pass climate change and energy legislation in a general hearing on Tuesday, presenting a variety of perspectives on a potential federal cap-and-trade program.