Energy

It took nature tens of millions of years to turn dead plants and other organic matter into coal and petroleum. Now GE has teamed up with researchers at the University of Illinois who can do the same in the lab with pig manure in as little as ten minutes.
This [...]

Renewable energy projects such as solar and wind farms have been pumping increasingly more electricity into the grid. For example, data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency show that the output of American solar farms grew 16 times over the last decade.
But challenges remain. One of the largest [...]

Much of the developed world still feels the aftershocks of the great recession. Not Australia. The country motored through the downturn and its economy is set to grow steady in the years ahead. The expansion has been anchored by the country’s energy and mining industries and its vast lode of [...]

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy has proposed to the U.K. government to build an advanced nuclear reactor that would consume the country’s stockpile of radioactive plutonium. The technology called PRISM, or Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, would use the plutonium to generate low-carbon electricity.
The U.K. has the world’s largest civilian stockpile [...]

With the global economic recovery pushing oil prices again above the $100 mark, Saudi Arabia, which holds some 20% of the world’s proven petroleum reserves and ranks as the largest oil exporter, may feel cheerful about its future.
Perhaps. But rather than just relying on oil revenues, which currently contribute some [...]

Later this week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set to release a special report on managing the risks of extreme events and disasters. The findings will likely cover a wide spectrum of contributors to climate change and hardly settle the global warming debate.
But by the time consensus [...]

The steel industry has had an image problem. According to recent data, steel makers generate some 40% of global CO2 emissions and represent a third of global energy demand. American steel manufacturers alone generate 1.8 tons of carbon dioxide per each ton of crude steel they make.

But engineers at [...]