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Stocks for New-Energy Investors

November 22, 2011
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Back before Memorial Day this year, gas prices appeared primed to churn ever higher and provide a hard hit to Americans’ wallets. At the start of May, the national average price of regular self-serve gasoline was $3.94 a gallon, according to AAA. But instead of climbing higher, gas prices eased to $3.60 a gallon in the height of summer–unexpected because normally that’s when we drive the most and a lot of refinery maintenance occurs, nudging up prices. Today the average per-gallon cost of gas is even lower, at $3.40 a gallon. It’s not cheap, but if you’re like me,...

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What Happened to Solar?

October 7, 2011
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You’ve probably heard something about three well-known solar firms that declared bankruptcy this year. Here in Massachusetts, where I live, Evergreen Solar declared bankruptcy in August after finding itself nearly half a billion dollars in debt, less than three years after its stock traded over 100 a share. In Oregon and New York, recent Intel spin-off SpectraWatt also went under and its assets were auctioned off last week. Most infamously, California’s Solyndra shut down two years after receiving $528 million in Department of Energy loans for its California manufacturing facilities. So what happened to solar? In short: China. In...

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CARBO Ceramics Benefits from Simple–and Profitable–Innovation

September 19, 2011
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CARBO Ceramics Benefits from Simple–and Profitable–Innovation

Make no mistake, becoming more ingenious is necessary to keep up with the world’s increasing energy consumption. Even in this difficult economic time, world energy usage is growing–the Energy Information Agency said in its September briefing that the slower than-expected energy growth will still require a drawdown of reserves to meet demand by year’s end. And a drawdown of reserves means more oil needs to be drilled to replace it. In the 1940s and 1950s, when the giant oil fields of the Middle East were being discovered, getting oil out of the ground was akin to making a hole...

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Will Congress Finally Kill Off Ethanol Subsidies?

August 25, 2011
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Will Congress Finally Kill Off Ethanol Subsidies?

Ethanol has been a fuel for automobiles from the start of the industry. In 1896, Henry Ford built his first car, the Quadricycle, to run on ethanol. His Model T, which revolutionized auto manufacturing when it rolled of the assembly line in 1908, was designed to run on ethanol or gasoline. Even as Ford continued to push for ethanol from corn as the logical fuel, lower priced gasoline won out. The oil shocks of the 1970s revived the idea of ethanol as an alternative fuel, and the corn-based version is now blended into 90% of the gas Americans use...

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Bringham Exploration is Outhustling Major U.S. Oil Stocks

July 20, 2011
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Today I want to discuss some wildly exciting–and controversial–divining underway about a huge domestic oil field prospect you may have heard of: the Bakken. The Bakken is a rock formation in the Williston Basin, which is a geological area that covers North and South Dakota, the eastern third of Montana and part of the abutting Canadian provinces. Geologists have known since the 1950s that the Bakken contains oil, but they believed there wasn’t much that could be recovered. It’s only been in the past few years that technological advances in the oil industry have made extracting crude oil from...

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