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(Reuters) - The White House is "dusting off old plans" for a potential release of oil reserves to dampen rising gasoline prices and prevent high energy costs from undermining the success of Iran sanctions, a source with knowledge of the situation said on Thursday. U.S. officials will monitor market conditions over the coming weeks, watching whether gasoline prices fall after the September 3 Labor Day holiday, as they historically do, the source said. It was too early to say how big a drawdown would be from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve and, potentially, other international reserves if a decision to...

A U.S. Navy oiler slipped away from a fuel depot on the Puget Sound in Washington state one recent day, headed toward the central Pacific and into the storm over the Pentagon's controversial green fuels initiative. In its tanks, the USNS Henry J. Kaiser carried nearly 900,000 gallons of biofuel blended with petroleum to power the cruisers, destroyers and fighter jets of what the Navy has taken to calling the "Great Green Fleet," the first carrier strike group to be powered largely by alternative fuels. Conventionally powered ships and aircraft in the strike group will burn the blend in an...

The Navy is steaming ahead with an initiative to power ships with biofuel, despite criticism the so-called “green fuel” costs nearly seven times more than conventional fuel. This month marks the first time the Navy is using biofuel in an operational setting -- sending five ships to a multi-nation exercise off the coast of Hawaii. A Navy official told FoxNews.com on Monday that sailing the so-called “Great Green Fleet” this month on the 50-50 blend of alternative and conventional fuel is part of Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ plan to have half the Navy fleet on alternative fuel by 2020. The...

In a not-so-subtle rebuke of President Obama’s tendency to offer unsolicited recommendations on how Europeans should handle their debt crises on Sunday evening, Germany’s finance minister suggested that perhaps His Munificence should focus on his own problems before trying to fix everybody else’s. Wolfgang Schaeuble told public broadcaster ZDF in an interview late Sunday that “people are always very quick at giving others advice.”He says: “Mr. Obama should first of all take care of reducing the American deficit, which is higher than in the eurozone.” An unfortunate and embarrassing truth — the EU’s debt-to-GDP ratio is well over eighty percent,...

<p>The administration appears unwavering in its decision to block construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would bring oil from Canada, our closest trading partner, to American refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.</p> <p>The relative safety of pipelines vis-à-vis road and rail to transport oil and gas is a topic of preeminent importance. Data published by the U.S. Department of Transportation clearly show that pipelines have lower injury and fatality rates than road and rail, in addition to enjoying a substantial cost advantage.</p>

Ask Andrew Bocarsly about the innovation behind Liquid Light, a New Jersey startup company that turns carbon dioxide into fuels and industrial chemicals, and the Princeton University chemistry professor smiles ruefully. "The project goes back to the early '90s," he said. "But nobody cared about carbon dioxide at that time." Today, carbon dioxide (CO2) is a hot topic. Scientists around the globe are searching for ways to store, dispose of, or prevent the formation of the greenhouse gas, which is a major driver of global climate change. Liquid Light hopes to take this concept one step further and harness waste...

WASHINGTON, June 11 (UPI) -- Federal leases in the Gulf of Mexico, along with output from Texas and North Dakota, pushed U.S. oil production to its highest level in 14 years, the EIA said. The U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration reports that U.S. oil production during the first quarter of 2012 topped 6 million barrels per day for the first time since 1998. "The roughly 6 percent growth in U.S. oil production from October 2011 through March 2012 is largely the result of increases in oil output in North Dakota, Texas and the Gulf of Mexico," the agency said...

Alternative energy often means the better-known sources like solar, wind power, or biofuels. A new form of alternative fuels recovers energy from post-consumer or post-industrial plastic wastes that cannot be recycled efficiently. Technologies for creating these fuels attempt to solve two big problems: the overabundance of unrecycled plastic in landfills, and the creation of domestic energy sources. Several of these plastics-to-fuel (PTF) conversion processes are on the verge of commercialization in the US. The waste-to-energy (WTE) industry began by approaching polymer wastes as a problem to be eliminated, but failed to come up with financially feasible methods, Jay Schabel, CEO...

Hydrogen gas offers one of the most promising sustainable energy alternatives to limited fossil fuels. But traditional methods of producing pure hydrogen face significant challenges in unlocking its full potential, either by releasing harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or requiring rare and expensive chemical elements such as platinum. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a new electrocatalyst that addresses one of these problems by generating hydrogen gas from water cleanly and with much more affordable materials. The novel form of catalytic nickel-molybdenum-nitride – described in a paper published online May 8,...

University of Queensland researchers have planted five hectares of Pongamia trees at Hope Vale, north Queensland in a bid to create a commercially viable plantation for sustainable regional development and biofuel production in northern Australia. In conjunction with Cape York's traditional land owners and partners, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Legume Research (CILR) is aiming to plant a further 3000 hectares within the first three years of the partnership, which will ultimately yield an estimated 10 to 15 million litres of biofuel. The seeds from the oil-rich Pongamia pinnata (also called Millettia) tree provide a sustainable solution to...

The numbers are in, and Paying at the Pump, the one hour special hosted by Sarah Palin and Eric Bolling owned the 10pm [eastern] time slot. 1,840,000 tuned in to see the show, which was also re-run several times over the weekend. It was the second highest in cable news viewership Friday night, bettered only by Bill O’Reilly’s show, The O’Reilly Factor. At 10pm CNN’s Anderson Cooper brought in 526,000 viewers, MSNBC had 458,000 and HLN’s Nancy Grace had 262,000. It should be noted Cooper’s show was a re-run, though he only pulled 426,000 viewers at 8pm, giving him 952,000...

WASHINGTON – Under pressure to take action on rising gasoline prices, President Obama wants Congress to strengthen federal supervision of oil markets, increase penalties for market manipulation and empower regulators to increase the amount of money energy traders are required to put behind their transactions. The White House plan, which Obama was to unveil Tuesday, is more likely to draw sharp election-year distinctions with Republicans than have an immediate effect on prices at the pump. The measures seek to boost spending for Wall Street enforcement at a time when congressional Republicans are seeking to limit the reach of federal financial...

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The Obama administration, facing political heat over high gasoline prices, may delay new rules that would cut pollution from cars but also could bring higher prices at the pump, environmental and industry leaders said. The rules would require refiners to make cleaner-burning gasoline and auto makers to build cars that emit fewer smog-forming pollutants. The Environmental Protection Agency was scheduled to roll out the rules before April, but it hasn't yet submitted them for White House review. "We expect that timing will begin to slip, perhaps for political considerations" said American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard. The new standards are...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- The national average price for a gallon of gasoline rose for the eighth straight day on Saturday to $3.835. That is now only about 7% below the record high of $4.11 from July 2008. The average price rose by four-tenths of a penny, according to the survey of gas stations conducted for the motorist group AAA. Gas prices are now up more than 17% this year. The nationwide average was $3.52 a gallon a month ago and $3.76 a gallon on March 9 -- the day that prices started rising again after a few days of...

Scientists in Hong Kong have reported, in ArXiv, their experiments to make a graphene battery that they say generates an electrical current by drawing on the ambient thermal energy in the solution in which it is immersed. Researchers led by Zihan Xu of the Department of Applied Physics and Materials Research Centre at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, attached silver and gold electrodes to a graphene sheet, typically 7 mm x 7 mm in area, mounted on a silicon substrate. The assembly was then immersed in a saturated solution of copper chloride (CuCl2), and was found to produce an electrical...

A class of chemical compounds best known today for fragrance and flavor may one day provide the clean, green and renewable fuel with which truck and auto drivers fill their tanks. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to generate significant quantities of methyl ketone compounds from glucose. In subsequent tests, these methyl ketones yielded high cetane numbers – a diesel fuel rating comparable to the octane number for gasoline – making them strong candidates for the production of advanced biofuels. “Our findings add to the list of naturally...

WASHINGTON _ The Senate on Tuesday resoundingly rejected a sweeping measure to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected areas to oil drilling, as well as to approve construction of the Keystone pipeline project. Tuesday's vote was the first time in four years that the Senate has voted on a measure including ANWR drilling, and it failed miserably.

President Obama Suggests Romney Shoveling 'A Load of You-Know-What'By Jake Tapper | ABC News – 12 hrs ago As Michigan Republicans headed to the polls Tuesday morning, President Obama delivered an aggressive defense of the bailout of the auto industry and his presidency in general, harshly criticizing GOP frontrunner Mitt Romney - though he never mentioned him by name. "I've got to admit, it's been funny to watch some of these folks completely try to rewrite history now that you're back on your feet," the president said to a raucous crowd at the United Auto Workers Convention. "The same folks...

News report: President Obama declares that rather than drilling for new sources of oil, or building the pipeline, we should get fuel from algae. Algie saw the bear The bear saw Algie The bear was bulgy The bulge was Algie -- Red Skelton