Category: Energy

The new POTUS offshore drilling plan may be more aggravating for what it does not include (drilling in the Pacific, for instance) than pleasing for what it does. And as the Houston Chronicle points out:

But it is unlikely to win strong support from the fiercest drilling advocates in Congress and the energy industry, who have accused the administration of slow-walking conventional oil and gas production. They are expected to oppose many of the administration’s decisions — including the cancellation of planned lease sales in Alaska and potentially years-long waits before new drilling along the East Coast.

Me: And is it, along the WH nuke power plan, to make some version of cap-and-trade palatable? I don’t think it will be enough to get a comprehensive energy bill passed, Here is a bit from my RBV column today:

Even so, America will continue to be depend on imports to meet its vast energy needs. In the case of oil, nearly 60 percent of consumption is supplied internationally, including half from OPEC and a fifth from Canada. Similarly, Obama’s recent announcement of new loan guarantees for nuclear power plant construction is unlikely substantially change that sector’s share of the U.S. energy portfolio. But the White House hopes both efforts will help supply needed momentum to its energy and climate change agenda. Many Republicans and centrist Democrats favor an “all of the above” energy policy. Although a bill containing a nationwide cap-and–trade scheme for limiting carbon emissions passed the House, a parallel effort is dead in the Senate. Such caps are anathema to coal-state members of both parties.

Sustainable Energy week just wrapped in the European Union, where the focus was on renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport and alternative fuels. A number of GE technologies are playing a part in that effort – with one project, the Hungarian Schools Illumination Program, having just received a Sustainable Energy Europe Award. As described in the video below, GE upgraded the lighting systems in schools throughout the country. Financed primarily by the energy savings — which were as high as 40 percent – the schools were able to participate in the program without accessing additional state funds for their investment.

Light touch: Accepting the award are (from L to R); Nani Beccalli-Falco, President & CEO, GE International; Tamas Vamos, GM Eastern Europe, GE Lighting; jury member Patrick Lambert, Director, Executive Agency Competitiveness & Innovation.

As we described in recent stories about GE’s sustainable cities work, projects such as the Hungarian lighting initiative are designed to leverage GE technologies and areas of expertise and create a coordinated solution on a large scale. It’s then hoped that successes in one city can then be applied to other cities facing similar issues. GE currently has projects in France, Italy, Spain and Hungary that are among the first to be awarded “Benchmark of Excellence” status under the European Commission’s sustainable energy technology initiative – and the winning school project is one of them. A Benchmark of Excellence is an example of world-class sustainable energy technologies in an urban setting.

Speaking on why GE won in the “Demonstration & Dissemination” category, jury member Patrick Lambert, Director, Executive Agency Competitiveness & Innovation, said it is “an excellent example of a rolling program which is self-sustaining and has a high replication potential for municipalities in other countries; [it] shows how public administration and private companies can work together to save energy; and it inspires other countries who recently joined the EU to develop fully competitive projects of a similar nature.”

* Read the announcement
* Learn more about the awards
* Learn more about EU Sustainable Energy Week
* Read the European Commission’s awards announcement
* Learn about GE’s Benchmark of Excellence projects
* Visit our Sustainable Cities website
* Learn about energy saving products

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “European Alt Energy Summit: Tailoring tech by region”
* “Port of Rotterdam sailing to sustainability on tech wave”
* “GE’s “sustainable cities” road show tours Europe”
* “Google & GE call for home energy info in Copenhagen”

It is very, very rare to see Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) agree with President Obama on anything, let alone energy policy. The conservative ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee has generally been the president’s most vocal critic when it comes to the environment. And yet today, as other Republicans bash Obama’s plan to expand offshore drilling for oil, here’s Inhofe offering up some tepid praise, in a press release just sent to reporters:

“I appreciate the President’s apparent willingness to consider offshore drilling as part of the Administration’s energy policy,” Senator Inhofe said. “Time will tell as to whether Obama is really ready to embrace offshore drilling or simply wanting to look like he is.

“As I have said, we can make great strides toward increasing North American energy independence by developing our own domestic resources. We can do this and support millions of American jobs, produce affordable energy for consumers, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

But of course he makes sure to get in a good jab:

“It also appears President Obama is caught in a contradiction: the President is, on the one hand, pushing forward with global warming policies to make fossil fuels more expensive, while on the other hand, he’s talking about drilling for more fossil fuels offshore. How does the President square these two policies?”

The short answer, as the president pointed out in his speech at Andrews Air Force Base this morning, is that American oil reserves are a drop in the bucket compared with our fuel needs. This move won’t bring down fuel prices at all in the short term, and it’ll barely make a dent in the long term.

So predictable.

President Barack Obama’s plan to allow expanded offshore oil and gas exploration won rebuke from the top House Republican on Wednesday.

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) dismissed the president’s plan as not going far enough in opening up U.S. waters for exploration.

Obama’s decision “continues to defy the will of the American people,” Boehner said in a statement, pointing to the president’s decision to open Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico waters, while leaving Pacific and many Alaskan waters largely closed to exploration.

Obama could propose cutting taxes to zero, deporting everyone who can’t speak English, renaming the country “Jesusland”…doesn’t matter.

The GOP answer will always be the same.

(h/t Benen)

Trying to see the path of oil prices over the course of several years is more complicated than you think. Currency fluctuations can hide patterns; so can inflation.

Gregor Macdonald, an oil analyst, suggests that what we need is a fundamental unit of valuation and he has a brilliant suggestion: Why not use Big Macs? If you assume that the trademark burger represents a diversified basket of agricultural goods, expressing oil prices in terms of Big Macs shows you how oil has fared in terms of the real prices of other key commodities.

Macdonald calculates that a barrel of oil was worth 10 to 12 Big Macs back in the 2000 to 2003 period. Since 2004, though, oil has soared. It reached a peak of nearly 28 Big Macs in 2008 and, even in the middle of a global recession stayed close to 20 Big Macs. It is now around 22 Big Macs.
 
Macdonald suggests that oil prices have reached a permanently high new plateau. We used to live in an era of 10 Big Macs oil; now we live in an era of 20 Big Macs oil.

Freelance business journalist Ian McGugan blogs for the Financial Post

Jeff Martin and Kam Sandhar have done the math on commodity prices relative to stock prices.  Despite constant chatter about soggy natural gas prices, the Peters & Co. Ltd. analysts think investors are giving gas companies too much credit. And oil outfits? Overlooked.

"Based on the forward strip [prices], the oil weighted entities will have a distinct advantage which will become more evident this summer, as they will continue to generate higher levels of free cash flow, while the natural gas weighted peers will likely become capitally constrained," they wrote in a report.

Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., Canadian Oil Sands Trust, and Imperial Oil Ltd. all trade at the largest discounts — "or smallest premiums" — to Peters' estimate of their net asset values, they said.  Devon Energy Corp. is the lone natural gas company under their surveillence which trades at a discount to its NAV, the analysts said. 

"The company boasts both significant balance sheet strength and hedges at robust prices, both of which will allow Devon to move forward on its onshore shale natural gas developments," they said. EOG Resources Canada Inc. also got the nod in the natural gas category.

Carrie Tait

Plugging in your electric car willy-nilly strains utility companies and costs you money. Ford’s new vehicles will use Microsoft’s Hohm, a cloud-based application for managing energy consumption, to make sure you’re being smart about charging your electric car. More »

President Obama, speaking at Andrews Air Force Base, just announced his decision to expand the country’s offshore drilling for oil. But his speech sounded mostly like an apology to environmentalists for the move.

The president began by touting his administration’s commitment to clean energy, through new investments and higher auto mileage standards. He announced a new plan to double the number of hybrid vehicles in the federal fleet.

“But we have to do more,” he continued. “We have to keep making investments in clean coal technology. … In the short term, as we transition to cleaner energy sources, we still have to make some tough decisions about opening up” coastal areas to offshore drilling.

“The bottom line is this,” he said, again apparently addressing environmental advocates. “Given our energy needs, in order to sustain econ growth and create jobs, … we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel.”

But he added, “We’ll employ new technologies that reduce the environmental impact of offshore exploration.”

“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision,” he continued. “What I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy” to move us to a reliance on “home-grown fuels,” including renewable energy sources.

He also addressed the criticism he’s already drawn from the right. “On the other side, there are going to be some who argue that we don’t go nearly far enough. … To those folks, I’m gonna say this: We have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves. We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil. What that means is that drilling alone can’t come close to meeting our energy needs.”

It’s a difficult balancing act Obama is attempting, and his announcement today showed his awareness of the ire he’s incurring from both sides of the aisle.

Wait… what? (image via geoffgresh)

The New York Times has the story:

The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.

The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.

Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.

The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.

Obama himself will make this announcement today, in just a couple hours.

This is puzzling on a number of levels.

• The LA Times refers to this as a bargaining chip in the climate bill debate, but I see it more like showing your cards before the end of the hand. Why would you let Republicans know about a pre-compromised offshore drilling regime, so that they can push for even more? This won’t garner one Republican vote any more than compromising the health care bill garnered any Republican votes. If this was the result of a negotiation, fine, but this comes BEFORE the negotiation.

• This comes right at a time when core supporters were starting to get energized about the midterm elections and about the President’s performance. There is nobody in the Democratic base who is particularly excited about “Drill Baby Drill.” It’s true that the President actually noted support for it on the campaign trail, at the height of the drilling conversation, but the timing couldn’t be worse for this action. It’s especially galling that students have the most to lose from this plan, a day after Obama signed a groundbreaking piece of legislation specifically aiding students.

• Nobody has been talking about this for close to two years. Conservatives had moved on to other topics, and now this will come rushing back. And instead of crediting the President for basically handing them one of their issues, they’ll criticize him for exempting the West Coast and the Northeast.

Either Obama thinks the climate bill is dead and he’s handing out a couple of the goodies he already promised, or his team has assessed that these tracts won’t be cost-effective enough for oil companies to actually do the drilling, so it’s a low-cost hedge toward moderation. We know that oil companies have thousands of reserve contracts for on-shore drilling sites in the US that they haven’t and probably will not ever explore. They end up on company profiles as “future reserve sites” to prove the stability of their operations to investors. In the end, this may end up being a big giveaway to oil company balance sheets, without the environmental hazards.

I’ll close with this statement from Jonathan Hiskes:

The substances at issue here—oil and natural gas—will eventually be burned, releasing heat-trapping pollutants that cause global warming. If that continues unchecked, it could be the most destructive and unjust phenomena of the coming century. There’s no mention of any of this in the stories from major news outlets. Just sayin’.

UPDATE: One other thing. The leaks I’ve heard about offshore drilling in the climate bill emphasized local control, as in “you can drill if your state wants it.” Maybe that’s a part of this announcement. We’ll have to see.

The Obama Administration is trying to get movement on a climate change bill and I guess at least they didn’t give this away before negotiating…so that’s progress right?

Well, maybe not.

President Barack Obama is to announce on Wednesday a plan to permit exploration for oil and natural gas off the coast of Virginia as a way to create jobs and reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

Obama, who wants Congress to move a stalled climate change bill, has sought to reach out to Republicans by signaling he is open to allowing offshore drilling, providing coastlines are protected.

Oh, that’ll work. What will the next bad policy decision based on a Republican idea that causes the GOP not to come along?

(pic from here)

Filed under: Friends & Family, Advice, Health, Fitness, Fit Family Guy

On the schoolyard field of battle known as gym class, I made the geeks look good.

I was such a spaz that when I tried to kick a soccer ball I ended up getting myself in the privates. If someone actually let me quarterback, I threw wobbling interceptions. Let’s not talk about me ever catching a football, or any other kind of ball. I think I might have sunk a basketball. Once.

I always came out of a dodge ball game with some sort of head trauma.

Those years left some scars. I always got picked last when teams were being selected by heartless captains, or any captains, and the Napoleonic gym teacher seemed to hold me personally responsible for the fact that it took him six years to finish a phys ed degree.

I’ve got a point to this article. I’ll get to it now.

A little while ago I wrote a post about just how much exercise you need to achieve and maintain serious weight loss and fitness goals. I’m sure some people looked at that four hours of intense exercise a week minimum and thought I was on crack.

Four hours seems like a lot; especially to those with busy schedules. Well, I don’t have any more free time than the typical family guy. In fact, I might have less because I actually cook and do housework, yet I still managed to transform from couch potato into a guy who gets a minimum of six hours a week of hard exercise.

Find out how to become a workout warrior after the jump.

Continue reading Want to Get in Shape? Become a Workout Warrior

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Erin Kutz wrote:

Since June we’ve been tracking monthly figures in bigger venture deals for our two other coverage areas, Seattle and Boston, thanks to data provided to us by our New York-based partner CB Insights, a private company intelligence platform. The company also supplies us monthly with a list of smaller deals under $1 million—what we dub as “under the radar”—in Southern California, the Northwest, and New England, which we like to examine for trends in startup investing.

This was the first month that enough San Diego-area companies made the list to merit a story, which could signal that pint-sized deals are picking up for the region’s startups. There were four San Diego deals, ranging from $201,132 to $689,500. Three were equity-based offerings, and a fourth was debt-related. While these four deals were all relatively small, they definitely signal bigger things to come, as three of the four transactions reflected pieces of larger planned offerings.

The startups that nabbed the funding cover the energy, medical devices, pharmaceutical, and agriculture spaces. That’s right, agriculture. Yes, it’s not typically an industry that we’d cover, but I kept the $201,132 in equity, options, and warrants for San Diego-based Cibus Global on the list because of the way the company has been innovating in the area of crop trait development.

Rather than using traditional genetic engineering technologies of introducing foreign traits to crops, Cibus works within plants’ own genomes to introduce genetic traits through the natural process of gene repair. I’m interested to see where they go, particular because their February deal was just a piece of a planned $2.6 million offering, according to the SEC filing.

The biggest deal on the list was $689,500 of a planned $1 million equity offering for Carlsbad, CA-based Catadon Systems. They’re engineering towers that raise wind turbines higher into the air without the need for cranes or concrete, according to the company’s website. The higher a turbine can be placed off the ground, the more wind energy it can capture, making wind investments pay off faster, the website explains.

The sole debt deal went to San Diego-based Aethlon Medical, in a $600,000 transaction that included options and warrants. Aethlon is developing a diagnostic and therapeutic device for infectious diseases. Their Hemopurifier is a cartridge that removes viral pathogens from the blood and can be used with portable pumps or dialysis machines.

If you ask me, these under-the-radar lists can be nicknamed the stealth lists, due to the fact that they almost always include at least one company that’s too stealthy to have a website. La Jolla’s Ampla Pharmaceuticals took on that role for the February list. The only information I could gather on them was from the website of their investor, Integra Ventures of Seattle. Integra’s website describes Ampla as a “stealth mode biotechnology company,” and says that Advent International and Crabtree Ventures also back the company. Ampla pulled in $295,271 of a planned $1.2 million equity-based offering.

I’m interested to see when these companies will complete their offerings, or roar out of stealth mode. In the meantime, check out the consolidated list below of February under-the-radar deals.

*includes some options and warrants

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The French National Assembly in Paris, 13 March 2000/Frédéric de La Mure

Efforts by French politicians to “ban the burqa” hit the wall of constitutional reality today when the Council of State, France’s top administrative court, said there was no legal way Paris could completely outlaw full Islamic veils in public. The issue has been at the centre of complex and sometimes heated debate in France in recent months, but it wasn’t clear until now how far French and European law would allow the state to go. We still don’t know exactly what the law will look like, but the back story to today’s report is a tale in itself.

Sarkozy launched the veil debate last year in a replay of an earlier campaign strategy to capture votes from the anti-foreigner National Front by veering to the right. Regional elections were coming up this March and his right-wing UMP party hoped to win control of more than the 2 regions it governed out of the 22 regions in metropolitan France.   In the end, they lost one of them in an embarrassing election wipeout that saw a strong showing for the National Front. So, shortly after that slap in the face, Sarkozy toughened up his stand a bit more. Among the measures he promised was a law banning the full Islamic facial veil.

President Nicolas Sarkozy at the Elysee Palace in Paris, 24 March 2010/Benoit Tessier

“The full veil is contrary to the dignity of women,” Sarkozy said. “The response is to ban it. The Government will put forward a draft law prohibiting it.” He gave no details, though, because he was waiting for the Council of State’s opinion. The Council has now warned the government that it cannot take some of the giant steps the politicians want, and spelled out some precisely defined measures that should be constitutional.

There’s an interesting wrinkle in this procedure that could be called the “Sarkozy shuffle”. The Council of State usually rules on the legal conformity of new laws after they have been passed. Asking its advice in advance is an unusual step, which the government took to avoid the embarrassment of passing a stern law amid protests from French Muslims and other groups and then seeing it rejected by the top administrative court. Some politicians have been so vocal in demanding that facial veils be fully outlawed that legislators could well have gone too far in formulating the ban.  So Sarkozy and his government promoted a sometimes raucous debate about national identity and banning Islamic veils, while consulting the Council of State in advance to make sure any law was kept within bounds.

The Council of State report (here in French, with a summary in French) makes some interesting points in the introduction to its summary:

Fully veiled woman outside city hall in Ronchin in northern France, 9 Aug 2009/Farid Alouache

–  “There appears to the Council of State to be no legally unchallengeable justification for carrying out such a ban.”

– “However, the Council of State believes that public security and the fight against fraud, reinforced by the requirements of some public services, would be likely to justify an obligation to keep one’s face uncovered either in certain places or in performing certain procedures.”

It noted that full facial veils were already banned for civil servants and in schools, both on the basis of France’s separation of church and state (laïcité), and that managers could ban them for employees if they were deemed an impediment to the “good functioning” of the business.

But there are procedures that would require an uncovered face, it said, such as identity controls, photographs for picture IDs and legal acts such as marriage, voting, university exams, medical treatment or the handing over of children to mothers at the end of the school day.  Access to certain places such as banks, jewellery shops, some sports events, consulates and airport departure lounges would also require an uncovered face, as does access to certain services such as buying drinks linked to a minimum age limit.

The Council of State does not seem to have noticed the irony of choosing the sale of alcohol as an example of a service to be denied to a Muslim woman who refuses to lift her veil.

The Council knocked down two of the most frequently used arguments by supporters of a full ban. It said that France’s trademark laïcité cannot be used as a legal basis to ban full veils in public, because it applies only to the relationship between public services and religions or followers of religions. It said the argument that full veils violate a woman’s dignity and the principle of equality between the sexes “could hardly apply in this case, even if they both have solid constitutional foundations and very strong jurisprudential applications”.

None of this was really surprising so far, since appeals to strict respect for laïcité, women’s dignity and sexual equality in this case but not across the board were not credible. But the Council then cut the legs out from under another argument that seemed to be the most solid basis for any “burqa ban” in public: “Public security cannot be a basis for a general ban on only the full veil, since no specific inconvenience is associated with it as such. A limited ban on the full veil would be fragile in terms of the principle of non-discrimination, and probably difficult to impose.”

Jean-François Copé, 3 Nov 2009/Jacky Naegelen

So the report concludes that a ban on full veils could be legal if it is limited to situations where certain official or commercial procedures would require an uncovered face.  Fines could be imposed for infractions and forcing a woman to wear a full veil.

The supporters of a full “burqa ban” are not taking this  Council recommendation lying down. Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader for Sarkozy’s UMP party, said the National Assembly didn’t have to follow the Council’s advice.  Another staunch supporter of a full ban, the UMP deputy Jacques Myard, said the “pusillanimous opinion of the Council of State … is and remains only an opinion.”

The “burqa ban” issue has stirred up a lot of debate on these pages. If you’ve been following this, let us know what you think of the Council of State’s advice.

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

On March 19th the EPA and DOE announced new steps to strengthen the Energy Star program. A few days later the GAO issued a report showing that the Energy Star Program certification process is (nicely put) “vulnerable to fraud and abuse.” The day after the GAO report was issued I sat down with Andrea Fabbri, COO of EcoAlign, the authors of a new EcoPinion report on consumer perceptions of the Energy Star brand, to talk about Energy Star, green consumers, eco-branding and what we need to do to reduce energy consumption.

JK: Hi Andrea. This new EcoPinion report about the Energy Star brand couldn’t have come at a more relevant time. Why all the focus on Energy Star?

AF: Given the stalemate of discussions around climate change, Energy Star is the only brand in US that has the power to help reduce energy consumption and, as a result GHG emissions. The problem is that the brand and its value have to evolve. We point that out clearly in our recent EcoPinion report and, once again, it’s about understanding and listening to customers. The EPA has announced changes to the Energy Star, but at EcoAlign we don’t believe the changes address the fundamental issues.

Energy Star is a “passive” brand, meaning that the economic advantages are not visible nor measurable to the consumer once a product begins its useful life, although consumers trust that there are benefits. Moreover, the Energy Star brand cannot control consumer behavior associated with the purchase of a new, efficient appliance. We live in an always-on world and it is intrinsic to human nature to use more – use the new TV more, keep the new light on, change the temperature setting, etc. If prices increase, Energy Star products will surely allow for more savings, but those savings will not visible to the consumer and all the consumer will see will be a greater expense, hence possibly making the Energy Star brand irrelevant and not useful in the eyes of people.

Energy Star is also suffering to some extent from its own success. The same light blue label today can be found on most home appliances and electronics. Given the fact that the Energy Star value stems off a comparison a consumer makes between an endorsed vs. not endorsed product, what will the value be in a world where everything is endorsed? If one adds the pervasiveness of the brand with the low, perceived economic value delivered to consumers, one can easily see that the Energy Star brand, with electricity bills increasing, will run the risk over time of losing its relevance – becoming part of the problem rather than the solution.

(more…)

Greenwire: BP PLC on Friday said it will close its solar-panel manufacturing plant in Frederick, Md., marking the final step in the company’s effort to move its solar business out of the United States to facilities in China, India and other countries.

Less than four years ago, BP rolled out a $70 million strategy to double output at the solar manufacturing facility and erected a building to house the production lines. But BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward said the company is now planning to move its solar operations to “where we can manufacture cheaply,” noting that the company remains “absolutely committed to solar.”

The cost-cutting move will lead to 320 workers being laid off, the company said, noting it will keep 100 people involved in research, sales and project development. By closing high-cost manufacturing locations, the company says it will curb its costs by more than 45 percent.

Hayward blames intense competition and high silicon prices on what has made the solar sector “a very challenging business.” BP Solar chief executive, Reyard Fezzani, said the U.S. market for solar was almost flat in 2009, with solar module prices dropping about 50 percent.

The company also had continued to produce 125 millimeter multi-crystalline solar cells in Frederick while the rest of the industry had moved to 156 millimeter cells, which have become standard. Changing the production lines would be too expensive, Fezzani said.

BP will continue to rely on a joint venture with Tata in Bangalore, India, and another joint venture in Xian, China, with a Chinese firm called SunOasis for its solar business. It has also applied to the Energy Department to help finance a proposed 32 megawatt solar-power generation plant on Long Island, N.Y., on land belonging to the Energy Department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory (Steven Mufson, Washington Post, March 27). – DFM

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Investors hoping for a stock catalyst from Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. in the form of a big multi-billion acquisition will likely be disappointed, a new note said.

That's the impression Greg Pardy, RBC Capital Markets analyst, got after meeting with company president Steve Laut recently.

"While our recent meeting … yielded no earth-shattering revelations, we believe it is unlikely that the independent has a multibillion acquisition sitting on the sidelines," he said in a note.

However, the company is assessing natural gas packages on the market and may elect for a smaller deal for something that overlaps its land positions in western Canada. There are also always international development opportunities, such as in the Middle East, he said.

Apparently Mr. Pardy is also constantly asked what the company's next stock catalyst will be.

"To be fair — with the exception of the precise timing at which its Horizon oil sands project will break the 100,000 barrel/day level on a sustained basis, Canadian Natural Resources's project roster has been pretty well defined with further expansion at Kirby and Horizon," he said.

For the first quarter, Canadian Natural Resources forecasts the Horizon project in Alberta to average 70,000 – 90,000 barrels a day in the first quarter of the year.

The project should give the company a boost to its free cash flow of about $2.8-billion ($5.22 a share) in 2010. It'd better be worth it, as the next phase of expansion for Horizon could be a pricey one: a 100,000 barrel/day synthetic oil expansion at the site could cost anywhere from $10-billion to $12.5-billion, Mr. Pardy noted.

Mr. Pardy maintains an Outperform rating and target price of $95 a share for Canadian Natural Resources.

Eric Lam

Jukka Perttu wrote:

Everyone knows that traditional incandescent lamps are inefficient and energy-wasting. But LEDs, one of the technologies vying to take their place, produce light that feels harsh and cold by comparison, leading many customers to shy away from them.

Watertown, MA-based QD Vision thinks it can use its “quantum dot” technology to solve both problems—energy waste and LEDs’ unpleasant color—and it’s about to get a chance to test that belief in the marketplace.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor material that emit light when excited by light or electricity. QD Vision, a six-year-old MIT spinoff, has come up with a way to apply thin films containing the quantum dots to the external faces of conventional LEDs. That converts the harsh LED light into something warmer and more pleasing, similar to the light produced by incandescent bulbs, without sacrificing the high energy efficiency typical of LEDs.

According to QD Vision, LEDs processed with quantum dots are roughly six times more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, and over three times more efficient than halogen lamps with comparable color quality. Converting all incandescent lighting in the U.S. to LED lighting could reduce the nation’s total electrical usage for lighting by a third, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

A sign that QD Vision’s technology is gaining traction appeared this month when Charlotte, NC-based LED manufacturer Nexxus Lighting (NASDAQ: NEXS) announced initial production and shipment of its new replacement light bulbs, which use QD Vision’s quantum dot films. Nexxus says its so-called Array Quantum LED bulb fits directly into 400 million lighting fixtures already in place in the U.S. It’s the first time QD Vision’s quantum dots have turned up in a commercial product.

“Our Quantum Light optic is the first product that lets manufacturers make warmer-colored, high-efficiency LED lamps,” QD Vision president and CEO Dan Button said in a statement. “These features are vital to their widespread adoption.”

Xconomy first profiled QD Vision in April 2008. While there are a number of companies around the globe developing quantum dot technology, the Watertown startup is the first to apply them commercially, according to Button.

The Nexxus Lighting deal dates back to December 2008, when …Next Page »

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Eco Factor: Process developed to harvest raw electricity from algae.

Harvesting biofuel from algae isn’t a new concept and that biofuel can also be used to generate electricity via a variety of systems. However, a team of researchers from Korea and California have for the first time developed a process that allows them to harvest raw electricity directly from algae.

(more…)

Erin Kutz wrote:

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick announced today that the state will provide up to $25 million to further construction of the Holyoke High Performance Computing Center, a project designed to advance green computing and boost business in western Massachusetts. Patrick also designated the Holyoke area as an innovation district, and said that the computing center, which will foster research in life sciences, energy, and green computing, will get another $40 million from a consortium of universities.

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