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Year One at Boundary Dam 3
Year One at Boundary Dam 3 — Or, You Can Catch Some of the Carbon Most of the Time or Most of the Carbon Some of the Time and Still Do Better than EPA’s New Source Performance Standards for New Coal-Fired Units. On November 9th, Senator Joe Manchin of West…
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Putting Out the Fire: Low-cost Solutions are Available to Prevent Flaring in Tight Oil Fields
Flaring of associated natural gas from oil wells in shale formations like the Eagle Ford in Texas and the Bakken in North Dakota has been growing rapidly for several years. Some well developers have acted responsibly, ensuring that gas pipelines with enough capacity are in place at wells before oil…
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The Wait is Over, But the Job is Not Done: BLM’s New Rules for Fracking
Today, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management released its long-awaited updates of its rules for hydraulic fracturing in oil and gas development. It’s about time. As BLM Director Neil Kornze has put it: “The portfolio of oil and gas wells overseen by the BLM has expanded at the same time…
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Recent Expert Reports: Diverse Zero Carbon Options Needed to Manage Climate
As we enter Climate Week, it’s a useful moment to review some recent expert reports suggesting the need for a broad suite of zero carbon energy technologies to manage climate change. In particular, these reports highlight the potentially critical role of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and nuclear energy alongside…
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Do CO2 Injections Pose Risk of Harmful Earthquakes?
How common are measurable earthquakes in association with oilfield operations? The answer is: exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, another scientific paper has raised the possibility of seismic events occurring as a result of injection of CO2 to stimulate new oil production from depleted oil fields. Since this process, known as enhanced oil…
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Carbon Capture and Storage – Why It’s Essential
EPA’s move last week to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants marks the beginning of an era of widespread use of carbon capture and storage (CCS) in fossil power generation. Going forward, in the absence of any other technology allowing emissions reductions, all new coal-fired power plants must…
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First Things First: Capping Corn-Based Biofuel Production
When Congress dramatically expanded the Renewable Fuel Standard in 2007, supporters of the revised RFS—which is supposed to push 36 billion gallons of biofuel into the US fuel market by 2022—touted the program as a solution to our overdependence on foreign oil, a cure for flagging rural economies, and a…
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Seismicity and carbon storage: MIT responds to Zoback
In the December 2012 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a published letter by MIT researchers Ruben Juanez, Howard Herzog and Brad Hagar provides several cogent geophysical counter-arguments to a 2012 PNAS Perspectives piece by Stanford researchers Mark Zoback and Steve Gorelick. The two had…
