I watched a coal unit train zip through the Belgrade-Bozeman, Montana, area yesterday. The Montana Rail Link unit train was 125 cars in length and presumably bound for Pacific Northwest seaports. The coal is sourced from the Powder River Basin, an approximately 20,000-acre part of Wyoming that supplies about 40 percent of U.S. coal. An…
Category: Energy
2 Degrees Celsius – An Inevitable Global Average Temperature Increase?
The Global Carbon Project’s recent analysis on current carbon dioxide emissions published in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change underscores the necessity for action in emission reduction. The commentary’s authors concluded that the rapid growth in fossil fuel emissions makes a global average temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) inevitable. It…
The Global Energy Map Is Changing
The 2012 edition of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook (WEO) was released on 11/12/2012. The changes in the global energy map will alter outlooks on how various countries, regions and fuels interact in the global energy system in the foreseeable future. According to the WEO, North America leads the change in the…
Home Heating With Volcanic Heat
Volcanic heat from Icelandic volcanoes may end up heating British homes. The UK government has signed a memorandum of understanding with Iceland to further study this option. The project would be technically challenging. Electricity produced from the geothermal energy would go to the UK via an underwater cable that would be at least 620 miles…