Antero Resources To Pipe Water To Fracking Wells

Antero Resources Inc., plans to spend more than half a billion dollars on an 80 mile pipeline that will carry water from the Ohio River to fracking sites in West Virginia and Ohio.  Fracking, an oil-field technique driving the nation's current energy boom, involves injecting vast quantities of water into the earth, along with other materials, to break up rock formations and unlock trapped oil and gas. Antero Resources wants to tap the Ohio...

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Duke Energy Cancels Plans For New Nuclear Plant

Duke Energy has dropped plans for a $24.7 billion nuclear reactor complex in Levy County, Florida, on which the company has already spent $1 billion, most of it collected from customers.  The company cited “regulatory uncertainty” after a change in Florida's rules that cast doubt on whether a utility can collect money from customers for construction work before a project is finished.  The project was started by Progress Energy in 2008, and was acquired by Duke when it merged with Progress Energy last year.  (NYT, 8/1/2013)      ...

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HyperLoop

Pods would be mounted on thin skis made out of inconel, a trusted alloy of SpaceX that can withstand high pressure and heat. Air gets pumped through little holes in the skis make an air cushion. The front of the pod would have a pair of air jet inlets—sort of like the Concorde. An electric turbo compressor would compress the air from the nose and route it to the skis and to the cabin. Magnets on the skis, plus an electromagnetic pulse, would...

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China To Become World’s Largest Oil Importer

EIA's August 2013 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecasts that China's net oil imports will exceed those of the United States by October 2013 on a monthly basis and by 2014 on an annual basis, making China the largest importer of oil in the world. The imminent emergence of China as the world's largest net oil importer has been driven by steady growth in Chinese demand, increased oil production in the United States, and a flat level of demand...

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San Jacinto Mountains Wildfire

The latest wildfire raging through a rugged Southern California San Jacinto Mountains range has already destroyed 26 homes and was threatening more than 500 other residences, forcing some 1,800 people to evacuate. More than 1,400 firefighters and nine helicopters battled the flames as they pushed eastward along the San Jacinto Mountains, a desert range 90 miles east of Los Angeles.  The blaze was heading toward the desert town of Cabazon and was...

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Wyoming Dominates Sales of Coal Produced from Federal and Indian Lands

Annual sales of coal produced from federal and Indian lands in the United States ranged between 458 million and 509 million short tons from fiscal year (FY) 2003 to FY2012. Over the same period, sales of coal produced from federal and Indian lands in Wyoming ranged from 356 million to 411 million short tons, 76% to 83% of the U.S. total. Most of the coal being mined in the Wyoming portion of the Powder River Basin (PRB) is being produced from...

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Federal Railroad Administration Tightens Oil Shipping Standards

The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) plans to start asking shipping companies to supply testing data they use to classify their crude-oil shipments, saying it is concerned that some shipments are being transported in tank cars that aren't safe enough.In a letter to American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard last week, the FRA said it is investigating whether some crude shipments contain chemicals—possibly from the hydraulic-fracturing process...

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