OriginOil Renames Product – Will It Help The Business?
by Debra Fiakas CFA Mid-March 2014, OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL: OTC/QB) relaunched its waste water treatment process for shale gas producers. The company’s CLEAN-FRAC and CLEAN-FRAC PRIME products are now called OriginClear Petro. OriginOil is expanding into the industrial and agricultural waste water treatment markets using the product name OriginClear Waste. The company has been toiling away since 2007 perfecting its “Electro Water Separation” process that uses electrical impulses in a series of steps to disinfect and separate organic contaminants in waste water. In June 2014, OriginOil management declared its development stage completed and start of full...
Praxair’s Long Road to Capturing Carbon
by Debra Fiakas CFA In 2007, industrial gas supplier Praxair (PX: NYSE) teamed up with power plant equipment dealer Foster Wheeler (FSLT: Nadaq) to work on demonstration projects for cleaning up coal-fired electric generating plants. At first the duo planned to pursue clean coal technologies and oxygenated coal combustion systems. The joint press release at the time indicated Praxair’s “oxy-coal’ technology would be applied to Foster Wheeler’s ‘circulating fluidized-bed steam generators.’ The oxycombustion process is one of several proposed methods to capture carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants. In a retrofit situation, pure oxygen would replace air...
Chinese and EU Clash Over Airline Emissions
Doug Young China’s increasingly contentious trade relations with Europe suffered another setback late last week, when the EU threatened to fine Chinese airlines that were refusing to comply with a new controversial program to reduce greenhouse gases. China responded with its own threat by saying it won’t accept the EU’s planned carbon tax, raising the prospect of a dangerous new trade war. This latest in a recent series of trade conflicts between China and both Europe and the US is developing into a troublesome pattern that could spin out of control, endangering the nascent global economic...
Boiler Maker in Need of a Shot
by Debra Fiakas, CFA
A reserve split is in the works to keep shares of Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises(B&W) listed under the symbol BW on the NYSE. The stock price of this storied environmental engineering had slipped below the Exchange’s minimum price requirements. Ten shares will be melded into one beginning July 23, 2019.
Reverse merger math alone will not solve B&W’s problems. One hundred and fifty two years in business, B&W has been providing environmental technologies and services for energy and industrial customers since the company’s first boiler was sold right after the American Civil War. The company boasts that Thomas Edison was one of...
The Worst Waste
Jim Lane Peter Brown of FFA Fuels, promotes his company these days with the pithy slogan, “Fuels from the Worst Waste Around.” Which of course raises the legitimate question, what is the worst waste, and can we find a use for it? Discussions of worst waste will usually focus on the obvious say, landfill or the odious say, medical or nuclear waste. Toxicity and longevity are typical concerns, and that’s one of the reasons why nuclear energy remains controversial to this day. No Waste in Nature As LanzaTech’s Jennifer Holmgren observed in a recent article by...
BioNitrogen: Valuable Technology, Management Questions
by Debra Fiakas CFA My last post outlined how Bion Environmental Technologies, Inc. (BNET: OTC/QB) is transforming livestock waste into organic fertilizer. Bion is not the only aspiring fertilizer producer. BioNitrogen Holdings Corp. (BION: OTC/PK) was recently patent protection for a process to produce urea from stranded natural gas. Instead of burning off the unwanted gases, oil and gas operators can turn it into an economically viable by-product. There is more than just cash flow at stake for oil and gas producers. Burning off stranded gas increases harmful emission that can lead to penalties in the...
Carbon Capture and Storage: By the Numbers
"We have over 200 years of coal reserves, and we have to/will use them." I have heard some variation of this line far too many times, and I have little patience for it. Here's why: We don't have over 200 years of reserves. The real number for economically accessible coal is less than half that. A square, 100 miles on a side in the Southwestern deserts of the US could meet the electricity needs of the entire nation, if solar energy were converted to electricity at 10% efficiency. There's a lot of desert in the Southwest, and we're...
List of Pollution Control Stocks
Pollution control stocks are publicly traded companies whose business involves technologies for removing or reducing the emissions of harmful pollutants, contaminants, and/or waste from human activity, or removing these pollutants from the environment or water.
This article was last updated on 6/25/2020.
Advanced Emissions Solutions, Inc. (ADES)
Advanced Disposal Services (ADSW)
Babcock & Wilcox Enterprises, Inc. (BW)
Bion Environmental Technologies (BNET)
Biorem Inc. (BRM.V, BIRMF)
Casella Waste Systems (CWST)
CECO Environmental Corp. (CECE)
CDTi Advanced Materials, Inc. (CDTI)
Clearsign Combustion Corp. (CLIR)
CO2 Solutions, Inc. (CST.V, COSLF)
Donaldson Company, Inc. (DCI)
Ecolab, Inc. (ECL)
EcoSphere Technologies, Inc. (ESPH)
Euro Tech Holdings (CLWT)
Fuel Tech (FTEK)
iPath Global Carbon ETN (GRN)
OriginClear (OCLN)
Pacific Green Technologies Inc. (PGTK)
Republic Services,...
Ten Insights into Carbon Policy and Its Implications
On November 27, I attended the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) Fifth Energy Analysis Forum, hosted by NREL's Strategic Energy Analysis & Applications Center. The forum focused on carbon policy design, the implications for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency. As a stock analyst focused on that sector, I am extremely lucky to have NREL as a local resource: the quality and the level of the experts at NREL and the ones they bring in is probably not matched anywhere in the country, and conferences like these provide priceless insights into what these Energy Analysts are thinking. Why should investors...
Bion: Waste To Dollars
Earlier this week Bion Environmental Technologies (BNET) received approval of a patent for its proprietary ammonia recovery process. Bion’s technology converts livestock wastes into ammonium bicarbonate. Patent protection in the U.S. paves the way for Bion to deliver an environmentally friendly chemical to the market at attractive profit margins.
Ammonium bicarbonate is used for a variety of purposes from leavening to crop additives. It is the fertilizer market that has caught Bion’s attention. The company intends to ‘close the loop’ for the agricultural sector by helping livestock producers economically dispose of waste and then delivering a fertilizer for food crops that qualifies as organic.
It is an attractive...
Capturing CO2 for Environmental Remediation
by Debra Fiakas CFA In 2009, the Department of Energy (DOE) awarded $17.4 million in funding to a gaggle of companies pursuing practical uses for carbon dioxide. The recipients were asked to kick in a total of $7.7 million. A year later in 2010, the DOE picked six projects to a second round of support totaling $82.6 million. Industrial giant Alcoa, Inc. (AA: NYSE) leads one of the winning groups, including partners U.S. Nels, CO2 Solutions (CST: V or COSLF: OTC/BB) and Strategic Solutions. The DOE gave the Alcoa team $13.5 million to complete a pilot...
Phycal Captures CO2 Funding for Biofuel
by Debra Fiakas CFA As part of its program to promote beneficial reuse of carbon dioxide, the Department of Energy awarded a total of $27.2 million ($3.0 million in the first phase and $24.2 million in a second phase) to a consortium led by alternative energy developer Phycal, Inc. (private). According to the DOE website, Phycal is to develop an integrated system to produce biofuel from microalgae cultivated with captured carbon dioxide (CO2). The biofuel is to be blended with other fuels for power generation or as drop-in diesel or jet fuel. It is a bit of...
FuelTech: Pushing on a String of New Orders
by Debra Fiakas CFA Earlier this month Fuel Tech, Inc. (FTEK: Nasdaq) announced the receipt of order for air pollution control systems totaling $2.0 million. The customers are strung out across the U.S., Europe and China, but they all have dirty combustion systems and need to reduce toxic nitrogen oxide (NOx) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions or risk running afoul of government clean air standards. These shipments are just the most recent in a string of orders Fuel Tech has won in recent months. In late August 2015, the company received similar air pollution contracts from...
Tetra Tech: Energy Engineer
by Debra Fiakas CFA In the coming years power generators will be under pressure to meet new standards for lower carbon emissions embedded in the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. Each state has to meet a set of standards set by the EPA based that state’s particular circumstances in electrical generation. The carbon pollution limits begin in 2022 and ramp to full effect by 2030. Power generators could meet standards by reducing harmful emissions from existing fossil fuel-fire plants. Unfortunately, that may prove too costly at some of the older plants. It is logical that power generators...
While Others Seek to Inject CO2, Airgas Sells It
by Debra Fiakas CFA Just one of the many suppliers of industrial and commercial carbon dioxide, Airgas, Inc. (ARG: NYSE) recently announced plans to build a new carbon dioxide plant in Houston. The press release hit news wires right along with announcements of carbon capture projects and other investments to reduce greenhouse effect from too much CO2 in the atmosphere. In one those strange twists that makes our world so interesting and vexing at the same time, is the fact that we use carbon dioxide all the while we invest wildly to reduce CO2...
China Everbright Greentech
by Debra Fiakas CFA Investors based in the U.S. need to look far and wide for new stock issues from renewable energy companies. Capital markets activity has slowed in the last couple of years, in part to due to their own success. In reaching new efficiency in energy production, renewable energy companies are generating their own internal capital and are not as dependent upon the capital markets. The Hong Kong market has come to the rescue of U.S. investors with a ‘green’ offering China Everbright Greentech Ltd. is now trading on the Hong Kong Exchange with the...
