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Poland Says Russian Produce Ban Is Payback for Sanctions
Warsaw says Russia’s ban on most fruit and vegetable imports from Poland has nothing to do with food safety, as Moscow contends, but is political retaliation for new, tough Western sanctions on Russia, particularly its lucrative oil sector.Alexei Alekseenko, a spokesman for Russia’s Veterinary and Phytosanitary Surveillance Service, issued a statement on July 30, a day after the new sanctions were announced, saying Russia will limit imports of Polish fruit, citing “the violation of certification and the identification of quarantine products.”The EU expressed surprise at Moscow’s move and said it was studying the details of the ban. Russia is the…
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Humanity May Face Choice By 2040: Conventional Energy or Drinking Water
A set of studies based on three years of research concludes that by 2040, the need for drinking water and water for use in energy production will create dire shortages.Conventional electricity generation is the largest source of water use in most countries. Water is used to cool power plants to keep them functional. Most power utilities don’t even record the amount of water they use.“It’s a huge problem that the electricity sector do not even realize how much water they actually consume,” says Professor Benjamin Sovacool of Denmark’s Aarhus University, one of the institutions involved in the research. “And together…
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US Naval Research Team Powers Radio-Controlled Aircraft With Seawater
A US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) team has turned seawater into a hydrocarbon fuel, and used it to power a radio-controlled aircraft with an unmodified internal combustion engine. According to Dr Heather Willauer, the team’s leader, the fuel could eventually be used to power the Navy’s fleet of ships, allowing them to stay at sea longer and avoid travelling to dangerous refuelling regions. The process takes the CO2 and hydrogen in seawater and recombines it over a catalyst, similar to those used for Fischer–Tropsch reduction and the hydrogenation of carbon monoxide, to create the liquid fuel. Although initial production costs…
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Taking The Ion Out Of Lithium-ion To Increase Power Storage
Lithium-ion batteries are everywhere because today’s technology allows them to hold the most electricity of any other portable power source. But they could hold more if they ditched the ion in the battery’s anode and used only lithium.But lithium alone makes for an unstable battery – until today. Stanford University researchers say they’ve taken a major step toward developing a lithium-only device that could hold up to four times the power of comparably sized lithium-ion batteries. Their research was published July 27 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.“You might be able to have cell phone with double or triple the battery…
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Methane Emissions: EPA Need To Do More To Stop Leaking Pipelines
The Environmental Protection Agency isn’t doing enough to prevent methane from escaping from natural gas pipelines, according to a new report from the agency’s internal watchdog.The report, published Friday by the EPA’s Inspector General, stated that in 2011, more than $192 million worth of natural gas was lost due to leaks in pipelines. The report said that the agency, which until now has “placed little focus and attention on reducing methane emissions from pipelines in the natural gas distribution center,” needs to take steps to better prevent methane from escaping. It recommended that the EPA work with the Pipelines and…
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U.S. Judge Orders Seizure of Kurdish Oil from Tanker Off Texas Coast
At the request of the government of Iraq, a U.S. judge has ordered the seizure of 1 million barrels of Kurdish crude oil from a tanker off the Texas coast near Galveston.The oil had been pumped from wells in Iraq's northern Kurdish region, then sent via a new pipeline to Cehyan, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, before being loaded onto the tanker United Kalavrvta and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.The ship, which stopped near Galveston Bay with its $100 million cargo, is too big to enter ports in the area. On July 26, the U.S. Coast…
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Russia Will Challenge Ruling on Compensating Yukos Investors
Moscow says it will appeal a decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ordering the Russian government to pay more than $50 billion in compensation to shareholders in the now-defunct oil giant Yukos because it seized the company's assets.The Russian Finance Ministry issued a statement on July 28 saying it had found “serious flaws” in the decision, and called the ruling “politically biased.”In 2006, Yukos went bankrupt after Moscow accused it of massive tax evasion and demanded that it pay $27.5 billion in alleged arrears. The company's former shareholders, in documents filed with the Hague court, have…
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Rosneft Says Profits Rising Despite Western Sanctions
Rosneft, Russia's largest oil producer, says it's working out ways to maintain its profitability despite increasingly tougher Western sanctions, and that its revenues so far are still soaring.Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin issued a statement on July 25 saying the company has been developing steps to cope with the sanctions imposed by Western nations because of Moscow's actions in neighboring Ukraine this year. “Together with our partners – the world's leading oil companies -- we are working on a plan to minimize the consequences of including Rosneft on the sanction lists,” the statement said.Two of those partners are the Exxon Mobil…
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Spongy Mass Uses Sunlight To Produce Steam Efficiently
Spongelike structures are beginning to show their worth in improving energy efficiency.Already, the U.S. Department of Energy has developed a porous silicon that can replace graphite in lithium-ion batteries and therefore hold 10 times the charge of conventional cells. Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a spongy mass of inexpensive graphite to generate steam.Steam power has an exemplary, 300-year-old track record. And though it is no longer used in such modern machines as railroad engines, it’s “important for desalination, hygiene systems, and sterilization,” says Hadi Ghasemi, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT who led the research team.“Especially…
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Gas Prices Don’t Reflect Record Levels Of U.S. Refinery Output
The price of gasoline in the United States will remain fairly static for the immediate future, even though refineries are working at record levels because of the surge in oil production.The U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA) said July 24 in its weekly petroleum report that refineries took in 16.8 million barrels of crude per day for the previous two weeks, more than the last record set in 2005.The refining output broke the old record in the week of July 13 with input levels at 16.6 million barrels a day, particularly at refineries in the Midwest and the Gulf coast, the…
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