Extraction of natural gas from the deep soil in a region of the Netherlands has triggered an increase in minor earthquakes, similar to seismic effects that have raised concerns about drilling operations, including hydraulic fracturing, in other countries.
While the extraction of gas has occurred for decades
China’s five largest power utilities, which depend on water-intensive, coal-fired stations to generate electricity, are vulnerable to water supply disruptions because they are centered in the country’s water-scarce northern regions, a new report says.
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the five power generators — Huaneng, Datang, Huadian, Guodian, and China Power Investment — operate
A long-term genomic analysis of the common peach has revealed important insights into how scientists can improve the biofuel potential of other plant species, including the fast-growing poplar tree, a new study says.
Three years after a team of scientists first released a draft description of the annotated peach genome,
An ambitious plan to expand the western Chinese city of Lanzhou into a regional industrial hub is raising concerns over what critics call lax government oversight of the environmental and safety impacts, including worries that it will siphon huge amounts of water from an already parched region and devastate nearby mountains.
A U.S.-based company that will soon finish construction of one of the world’s largest solar thermal power plants in the Mojave Desert, is now looking to build an even larger plant in Southern California.
BrightSource Energy, which is expected to begin producing up to 370 megawatts of electricity per day
Bullet trains fuel real-estate booms, improve quality of life, reduce air pollution and traffic congestion, and provide a “safety valve” for crowded cities, especially in the developing world, according to a study by Chinese and U.S. economists.
The study was based on China’s rapidly expanding high-speed rail network, but the researchers said the
A team of researchers says it has demonstrated a method of underground carbon storage that reduces the risk of triggering earthquakes, a safety concern cited by some scientists about the emerging field of carbon capture and sequestration.
While often cited as a potentially key option in
China’s new premier, Li Keqiang, has vowed aggressive government action to curb the rampant pollution that has provoked growing public outrage, saying the country would phase out “backward production facilities” that have contributed to dangerous health conditions in numerous regions.
Making good on his promise to fight climate change more aggressively in his second term, President Obama is unveiling two major initiatives to reduce the U.S.’s reliance on fossil fuels, including a new $2 billion Energy Security Trust to fund the next generation of green vehicles, as well as new reviews of federal projects to assess their climate impacts.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) this week announced a new series of cost-sharing grants to promote the development of small-scale, factory-made nuclear reactors, an emerging energy source that Obama administration officials say could help replace the coal-fired plants expected to cease operations in the coming decades.
Lockheed Martin, one of the world’s largest military contractors, has developed a process that company officials say significantly reduces the amount of energy needed to desalinate water, an innovation that could help communities worldwide tackle the growing threat of water scarcity.
A new study concludes that it would be technically and economically feasible for New York State to meet all of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2030, but researchers say the transition would involve building wind, solar, and other alternative energy sources on a mass scale.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased by 2.67 parts per million in 2012, marking the second-biggest jump since levels were first recorded in 1959 and decreasing the chances that the planet will avoid a dangerous temperature increase of 3.6 degrees F (2 C) or higher, U.S. scientists say.
A team of international scientists has rejected the idea that the planet could face a sudden and irreversible ecological shift as a result of largely human-driven pressures, suggesting that such global transformations are more likely to occur over a long period of time.