California wants 1.5 million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2025 — more than 15 times the number now. So the state pays buyers $2,500 per car, on top of a $7,500 federal tax credit, to help speed development and promote widespread adoption.
An ethanol plant in Hopkinsville, Ky is leading the way for cleaner, more efficient gasoline. Commonwealth Agri-Energy is ran by Hopkinsville Elevator Company and Kentucky Corn Growers Association.
In 2013, ethanol production contributed more than $44 billion to the Gross Domestic Product and generated more than $4.5 billion in federal tax revenues. And in 2013 alone, the ethanol industry created and supported nearly 400,000 new jobs across the country. Contributing to food production, as well, ethanol supports the livestock industry by producing dried distiller’s grains, or DDGs—a high-protein livestock feed and ethanol by-product. Every 56-pound bushel of corn processed by a dry mill ethanol plant generates 2.8 gallons of ethanol and approximately 17.5 pounds of animal feed.
The United States is a rising oil exporter. That sentence is amazing when you consider that federal law technically bans crude oil exports. Last week, the BW Zambesi oil tanker left Texas City, Texas, with $40 million worth of minimally processed condensate, a form of oil, and headed to South Korea. This was the first shipment following a Commerce Department determination that decades-old federal restrictions on crude oil exports do not apply to condensate from which drillers have removed various natural compounds.
Oil might not seem like it could be home to, well, anything. We’ve seen what oil spills can do to ecosystems, and it’s hard to imagine that anything would actually live in the black blood of industry. However, researchers have discovered tiny organisms do indeed make their home there, and they are an essential part of the reason that oil degrades over time.
Tesla’s (NASDAQ: TSLA ) Model S has been an enormous success. Not only has the all-electric luxury sedan been outselling all comparably priced cars in North America in 2013, but Tesla is expecting sales to increase by more than 50% this year. Most surprising of all, however, is that Tesla is achieving this without spending any money on advertising. How long can this trend continue?
What if a clever business model could lower the retail price of a Tesla compact sedan to less than $20,000, or make an extended range option like BMW’s i3 attainable for under $30,000? Could such pricing make electric vehicle adoption a no-brainer for a larger group of drivers? The business model that helped make the smartphone widely indispensable may offer a clue.
First the good news: Gasoline prices are at their lowest level in months, according to AAA. Now more good news. Flex-fuel prices have been falling, too, and are about $1 less per gallon than regular gasoline now, according to the Kiplinger Agriculture Letter.So maybe you’re scratching your head wondering what flex fuel is and why you should care that it’s cheaper than gas.
E85, or flex fuel, is a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline that can be used in vehicles specially designed to run on it as well as regular gasoline. There are more than 10.6 million flex-fuel vehicles on the road, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. You might even be driving one and not realize it.
A powerful new tool that can help advance the genetic engineering of “fuel” crops for clean, green and renewable bioenergy, has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), a multi-institutional partnership led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
The world’s oil prices have stayed high since 2010 — bouncing around $100 per barrel— for two basic reasons. Oil demand keeps rising, and production is struggling to keep up. But why is production struggling to keep up? One big factor has been geopolitical conflict. Wars, unrest, and sabotage have increasingly plagued oil producers like Iraq, Libya, and Syria since 2011. The US and EU sanctions on Iran’s oil industry have also removed a lot of oil from global markets.
