Building retrofitting, geothermal energy among growing sectors

President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan is intended to revive the economy, largely by putting people back to work. A hefty chunk of that money, $40 billion, is aimed directly at creating what the administration calls “green jobs.”

1. Advanced biofuels
2. Building retrofitting
3. Geothermal energy
4. Green chemistry
5. Green manufacturing
6. Smart grid
7. Solar energy
8. Sustainable agriculture
9. Sustainable green retailing
10. Wind energy

For More Detail listing go to: MSNBC

Exxon Mobil Corp. said Tuesday it will make its first major investment in greenhouse-gas reducing biofuels in a $600 million partnership with biotech company Synthetic Genomics Inc. to develop transportation fuels from algae.

Despite record-breaking profits in recent years, the oil and gas giant has been criticized by environmental groups, members of Congress and even shareholders for not spending enough to explore alternative energy options.

One of the company’s requirements was finding a biofuel source that could be produced on a large scale. It says photosynthetic algae appears to be a viable, long-term candidate. If the alliance is successful, pumping algae-based gasoline at Exxon service stations is still several years away and will mean additional, multibillion-dollar investments for mass production.

For More information: MSNBC

ETRM systems support business processes in different areas ranging from the front offi ce (deal capture, positions, market data, trader tools), middle office (risk management, risk reporting, modeling and quantitative analysis), back offi ce (settlement, accounting, invoicing, credit, AR/AP and GL), and operation management (scheduling, nomination, dispatch and load management). Users of ETRM systems include all types of market participants such as utilities, producers, investment
banks, hedge funds, merchants, marketers, and large end-users (commercials and industrials). Since their inception in the early 1990s, ETRM systems continued to evolve and adapt to emerging needs and requirements (such as the Sarbanes-
Oxley Act); for the most part, they provided a much-needed service and facilitated transactions management, a fundamental
and basic requirement for any market participant engaged in bilateral and/or ISO transactions. From this perspective,
2008 was another year in which ETRM systems fi lled a market need.

Events and developments during the last seven years highlighted the importance of the second need that ETRM
systems are supposed to meet – risk management. The 21st century, which started with a big bang that drove many players
into retrenchment and caused bankruptcies, shakeouts and restructurings, has highlighted the importance of this rather
fundamental function. Recent developments in software and Internet technologies led to a signifi cant increase in data
availability and processing needs, a situation that introduced new challenges to the corporate world, including enterprise
risk management and integration. Unfortunately, the slow evolution of legacy systems was not able to meet these revolutionary
changes in business needs – as a result, ETRMs started to fall short of expectations, a situation explained by
their continued high replacement rate of over 50 percent. The average market participant in the energy industry continues to use fi ve to 15 systems in the trading
and risk management function, including a number of homegrown spreadsheets developed to fulfi ll missing critical functionality
in commercially available ETRM systems.

Looking forward, ETRM systems will be increasingly challenged to address the emerging needs of the energy
industry. User requirements are becoming broader and more demanding; integrated enterprise risk management is quickly
moving to the forefront as more and more companies realize that poorly integrated systems are very costly to maintain
and inadequate to meet the challenges of the 21st century. The following is a list of functionalities that are quickly becoming
required capabilities (instead of “nice to have” features) in the energy transaction and risk management space:

ETRM/CTRM Products : OpenLink, Triple Point, Allegro, Sungard, etc

For more info: abacussolution

Sun-powered device converts CO2 into fuel

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1662…

Powered only by natural sunlight, an array of nanotubes is able to convert a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapour into natural gas at unprecedented rates.

Such devices offer a new way to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel or other chemicals to cut the effect of fossil fuel emissions on global climate, says Craig Grimes, from Pennsylvania State University, whose team came up with the device.

Although other research groups have developed methods for converting carbon dioxide into organic compounds like methane, often using titanium-dioxide nanoparticles as catalysts, they have needed ultraviolet light to power the reactions.

The researchers’ breakthrough has been to develop a method that works with the wider range of visible frequencies within sunlight.
Enhanced activity

The team found it could enhance the catalytic abilities of titanium dioxide by forming it into nanotubes each around 135 nanometres wide and 40 microns long to increase surface area. Coating the nanotubes with catalytic copper and platinum particles also boosted their activity.

The researchers housed a 2-centimetre-square section of material bristling with the tubes inside a metal chamber with a quartz window. They then pumped in a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapour and placed it in sunlight for three hours.

The energy provided by the sunlight transformed the carbon dioxide and water vapour into methane and related organic compounds, such as ethane and propane, at rates as high as 160 microlitres an hour per gram of nanotubes. This is 20 times higher than published results achieved using any previous method, but still too low to be immediately practical.

If the reaction is halted early the device produces a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen known as syngas, which can be converted into diesel.
Copper boost

“If you tried to build a commercial system using what we have accomplished to date, you’d go broke,” admits Grimes. But he is confident that commercially viable results are possible.

“We are now working on uniformly sensitising the entire nanotube array surface with copper nanoparticles, which should dramatically increase conversion rates,” says Grimes, by at least two orders of magnitude for a given area of tubes.

This work suggests a “potentially very exciting” application for titanium-dioxide nanotubes, says Milo Shaffer, a nanotube researcher at Imperial College, London. “The high surface area, small critical dimensions, and open structure [of these nanotubes] apparently provide a relatively high activity,” he says.

For more info: New Science