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Exxon Mobil

Exxon Mobil Arctic Project Possibly at Risk Over Russia Sanctions

Exxon Mobil’s development of a Russian Arctic oil project valued at nearly $900 billion is at risk following recent U.S. sanctions on Russian officials as a result of Ukraine’s ongoing political crisis, Bloomberg News reports.

Exxon Mobil has partnered with the Russian state-controlled oil company OAO Rosneft to drill an oil-rich geological structure known as Universitetskaya, which contains an estimated 9 billion barrels of oil, valued at $900 billion at current market prices.

Rosneft’s CEO, Igor Sechin, a longtime member of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, was sanctioned by the U.S. this week, exposing the partnership with Exxon Mobil to additional scrutiny. Exxon Mobil and Rosneft are set to invest an estimated $600 million in drilling at the site in the Kara Sea, which would make the project Exxon’s most expensive to-date.

A U.S. Treasury official said yesterday that U.S. companies can still do business with Rosneft, but some analysts say Russian companies could become wary of working with Western corporations in the future. Exxon said last week that the project is on schedule.

04/30/2014 1 comment

Renewable Energy

What’s the Plan For Phasing Out Fossil Fuels?

written by Walter Wang

Germany has installed enough photovoltaics such that coal-fired power plants are beginning to become unprofitable. This is driven by a combination factors, e.g., that coal isn’t asked to provide power at the peak of the day, when both the sun and the price of electricity are at their zenith. Of course, most of us cheer when coal runs into trouble, but issues like this

04/30/2012 0 comment

Renewable Energy

American Wind Energy Association Refutes Anti-Wind Claims

written by Walter Wang

The American Wind Energy Association issued a press statement earlier this week to refute claims by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which AWEA says is funded by Exxon-Mobil (a quick look at their website reveals it is pro-fracking).

07/21/2011 0 comment

Renewable Energy

Offshore Spills Raise Wider Questions on Drilling

written by Walter Wang

The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico has been portrayed as a one-of-a-kind disaster, a perfect storm of bad equipment, bad planning and bad luck.

But it’s far from the only spill that’s taken place this year – or even the only spill occurring in the Gulf right now.

On June 7, the Mobile Press-Register reported that the Ocean Saratoga rig has been leaking into the Gulf since April 30. Interior Department spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff confirmed the next day that “small amounts of oil” were leaking from the wells beneath the rig, about 10 miles from Louisiana’s southeastern coast.

06/14/2010 0 comment

Clean Transportation Renewable Energy

Creation of ‘Synthetic Cell’ Holds Promise for New Types of Biofuels

written by Yale Environment 360

J. Craig Venter, the genome pioneer, has created a “synthetic cell” by synthesizing a complete bacterial genome and using it to take over a cell. Venter’s breakthrough, reported in the online edition of Science, represents a preliminary step toward the goal of creating microbes from scratch in the lab and using them to make biofuels, vaccines, and other products.

Venter’s achievement could one day lead to a technology where, though engineering the genome, individual cells could be turned into their own miniature refineries for harvesting carbon dioxide and generating hydrocarbons.

In 2005, Venter — one of the first people to sequence the human genome, doing it faster and cheaper than government scientists — set up a company, Synthetic Genomics, to create synthetic cells, and the advance reported in Science represents a milestone for the company and for so-called synthetic biology.

05/21/2010 0 comment

Renewable Energy

Algae Biofuel: Big Partnerships = Big Possibilities?

written by Ceylan Thomson

By Jonathan Williams

During this past summer, the world has seen multiple advances in the alternative energy field, particularly with algae biofuels. A week hasn’t gone by where I didn’t receive several press releases in my inbox highlighting the latest advances by one of the many algae companies out there.

However, while press releases look and sound good, nothing highlights the advances of a company, if not the entire field, than the announcement of a multi-million dollar partnership with a larger, well-known, and respected entity.

During this summer we saw just that, with multiple algae companies announcing their partnerships with larger corporations or entities.

To give you a brief overview on these partnerships, first came Algenol with their partnership with Dow Chemical researching algae as an ethanol fuel source. Next came Seambiotic with their announcement that they will be partnering with NASA to develop a jet fuel from algae. Most recently, and probably most importantly, was Exxon Mobil’s $600 million partnership with Synthetic Genomics to conduct extensive research on algae biofuels.

09/09/2009 3 comments