Ocean Power Technologies (OPT), a New Jersey-based company focusing on harnessing energy from oceans, announced a major step towards the approval of a license issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to build the first commercial wave park on the West Coast. OTC has signed a Settlement Agreement (SA) with 11 federal and state agencies along with three non-governmental …
Camelina for Biodiesel A Good Bet
Camelina continues to show promise as a second-generation feedstock for biodiesel. The feedstock has several advantages including a high oil content, grows on marginal land and needs little to no fertilizer or water. It contains a high amount of Omega-3s and its dried distillers grains have already been approved as cattle feed. Researchers at Penn State have been working with …
San Diego, A Hot Bed of Algal Activity
Good news for biofuels this week as the California Department of Labor awarded the San Diego Biofuels Initiative a $4 million grant to train workers to join the biofuels workforce. The award was given through the “Green Innovation Challenge,” a green jobs initiative that is overseen by the state’s Department of Labor. According to an article on SanDiego.com, the San …
Iowa Central Fuel Testing Lab Wins BQ-9000 Accreditation
There is a lot of talk today about creating “green jobs” and how best to train those people to enter the green sector. One of the early adopters of green education was Iowa Central Community College (ICCC). This week, the college announced that they have become the first laboratory to earn accreditation as a BQ-9000 laboratory. This accolade means that …
San Jose Becomes Top Solar Community in California
The California Public Utilities Commission has reported that San Jose is now the largest installer of solar power in the state of California. Today, the city’s newest and largest solar installation was unveiled that included more than 2,500 solar panels covering 44,448 square-foot parking lot. The building that is now solar powered is Power Integrations’ headquarters in the Edenvale Technology …
Murphy Oil Looks to Grow Biofuels Business
One of the country’s most touted, and failed, ethanol concepts may be sold. Last year, Hereford Biofuels, the first commercial scale plant in the country intended to operate using methane from cattle operations, went belly-up. Construction was halted when owner, Panda Energy, an energy firm based in Dallas, Texas, sold the plant to creditors earlier this year for a reported …
FAO: Japtropha Promising Rural Crop for Biodiesel
The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has recently released a new report that champions jatropha as a promising biodiesel crop especially for global rural farmers. The report, “Jatropha: A Smallholder Bioenergy Crop, the Potential for Pro-Poor Development,” set out to examine the potential for jatropha as a sustainable biodiesel crop and has been in development since …
First Blender Pump Opens in Ord, NE
Ord, Nebraska has a new blender pump. Country Partners Cooperative joined forces with Growth Energy to install the community’s first blender pump that now offers flex-fuel drivers E20 and E30. Driver’s can fill up with these higher ethanol blends at 424 North 14th Street, on the corner of Highway 70 and Highway 11. “We took advantage of Growth Energy’s funding …