Biofuels

Micro-algae have considerable potential for the production of biofuel, but at present the process of producing fuel from algae would appear to be currently uneconomic. If fuel from micro-algae is to be economic the entire algal biomass should be utilised and anaerobic digestion could play an important part in the exploitation of algae to produce algal energy.

-What’s Missing from the New Clean Energy Agenda?
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-America Is Not Yet Lost
-Seven States of Energy Debt

In a busy week for energy policy, UK energy watchdog Ofgem finally acknowledged what has been obvious for years: that liberalized markets cannot deliver energy security in the era of carbon reduction and resource depletion.

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-Peak Oil Theory: implications for Australia’s strategic outlook and the ADF
-The Iraqi Oil Conundrum
-A New Clean Economy — With Old Sources of Energy
-Business as Usual: Hooked on Foreign Oil
-Stop the Green Tech Coup, Military Industry on the Offensive

-Shell stakes green future on sugar biofuel in $2bn Brazil venture
-Obama Set to Outline Biofuels Strategy
-Biofuel requirements for cars may help destroy the rainforest, watchdog says
-Biofuels: the Biggest Supply Response to the 2000s Oil Shock

Jeff Rubin, former chief economist at Canadian investment bank CIBC World Markets, is not your typical economist. He gets peak oil...And now, in his bestselling book Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, he argues that oil prices, temporarily dampened by the deepest post-war recession on record, will soon be vaulted to new highs as the economy begins to recover, which in turn will thrust the world into yet another recession right on the heels of this one.

-UK Government Classifies Eco Activists as 'Extremists' Alongside Al Qaeda
-UK call for European CAP farming subsidies reform
-Moorlands and hills targeted to grow crops for biomass and biofuels

A weekdly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Prices and production
-Record Asian demand
-The Alberta oil sands
-Quote of the week
-Briefs

Because many of the proposals for adaptation to climate change require further extensive release of greenhouse gasses, they will only make climate change worse.

"as mankind proceeded to get bigger and bigger we silently crossed a threshold"

Three weeks ago the US Government Accountability Office released a 50-page analysis of the nexus between biofuel production and water resources.

We cannot be lulled into a false sense of security: though oil prices have declined from their historic highs, there is little doubt that peak oil is real. A 2008 research project completed at Washington University in St. Louis found strong evidence in support of the theory. Please feel free to circulate this academic document as a primer on peak oil.

Thanksgiving Day is a special day for those following the peak oil news. Geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, author of Hubbert's Peak, predicted that Thanksgiving Day 2005 would mark the peak in world oil production. After that, oil production would decline, irreversibly. And he may have been right.

-Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
-Could Peak Phosphate be Algal Diesel's Achilles' Heel?
-A Rock That Helps Out In a Hard Place

-Coping With Climate Change: Which Societies Will Do Best?
-GM's Money Trees
-The Carnivore’s Dilemma
-USDA Research: Does No-Till Really Capture More Carbon?
-Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy
-Pachauri Still Sees a Chance for Success in Copenhagen Talks
-The Inferno