A Coal Stock…Almost
This morning, I read an article in this week's Economist that summarized well what I've been hearing over the past few weeks: coal is back in fashion with power utilities. As pointed out in the article, on a BTU basis, coal remains the cheapest fuel for thermal generation, an the prospect of high carbon prices is not deterring even European power generators from investing in coal-fired assets. A few months ago, Tom discussed his peak coal portfolio. The long-term perspective is of course critical to keep in mind, and that piece helps putting recent news around...
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...
A Concrete Proposal
The Economist recently had a story on how the cement industry is beginning to confront the fact that the industry produces 5% of the world's emissions of greenhouse gasses. Carbon dioxide is emitted not only by the fossil fuels used to create the heat used in the creation of cement, and by the chemical reaction in that process. Unfortunately for us, cement is a remarkably useful building material, not least as a structural material which can also serve as thermal mass in passive solar buildings. All the large cement firms: Lafarge, Holcim, and Cemex (NYSE:CX) have joined a voluntary...
Water Out Of Thin Air
It is an irony that surrounded by the flood waters of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, a drink of fresh, clean water may be hard to come by. Of course, the all three levels of government make plans for stockpiling and deploying emergency bottled water well ahead of natural disasters. Yet in the hours and days following the worst of both the recent storms, the media was filled with stories of people who lacked water.
What if water could be made manufactured? If such a technology existed, what a boon it might be to thirsty storm victims.
Ambient Water Corporation (AWGI: OTC/PK) has...
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...
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...
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...
OriginClear: Metals out of the Muck
After the worst of the wind and rain had died down from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, and people began making their way back home, it became apparent that citizens of Texas and Florida would have more worries. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency disclosed that at least thirteen toxic waste sites in Texas were flooded and damaged by Hurricane Harvey and another forty-one Superfund sites were negatively affected. Legacy contamination includes lead, arsenic, polychlorinated biphenyls, benzene and other carcinogenic compounds from historic industrial processes. After Hurricane Irma over six million gallons of wastewater reportedly flowed out to the coast and...
Plasma Arcs For Pig Waste
This week MagneGas (MNGA: NASDAQ) announced new work completed toward plans to enter the commercial pork sector with a proprietary manure processing and disposal solution. Management held a meeting with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to discuss MagneGas technology to treat agriculture waste and the state’s required environmental permit protocols. MagneGas aims to sell to pig farmers equipment based on its innovations.
The company wants to help pig farmers address environmental problems cause by manure accumulation with its proprietary waste sterilization process. Handling pig waste using conventional methods can be costly, but failure to...
The Low Cow-bon e-Cow-nomy
Jim Lane This month in Finland, a team of intrepid researchers herded one thousand European cows one-by-one into a glass “metabolic chamber” to measure their methane emissions, digestion, production characteristics, energy-efficiency, metabolism, and the microbial make-up of their rumens. The Project is known as RuminOmics, but if it had been titled The Truman Show II: When the Cows Come Home, we wouldn’t have been a bit surprised. The Cow Emission Crisis. No Kidding Around. The ultimate aim of the study was to find an optimal, low-emission, high-yield cow, and the team noted in its premise that of all greenhouse...
Plastics from Carbon Dioxide
by Debra Fiakas CFA In the last post, I promised to close out this series on carbon dioxide capture with a note on a third example of Department of Energy funding for innovations in turning carbon dioxide (CO2) into a valuable raw material. Besides changing the chemistry of inorganic compounds and feedstock for biofuel production, CO2 has some potential for plastics. In 2010, the DOE placed a bet of $18.4 million on Novomer, Inc., which is a self-described sustainable chemicals developer. The bet appears to be paying off as Novomer and its partners go into production...
The EPA’s Carbon Rule: Likely Stockmarket Winners
By Harris Roen Greenhouse gas emissions by economic sector A seismic shift in the power generation landscape is starting to sink in. It has been two weeks since the EPA announced its new proposed carbon rules, one of the flagship efforts of the Obama Administration to address climate change. This shift is meant to move the country in the direction of inevitable changes coming to the energy economy. It is important for investors to know which companies and sectors stand to benefit from the...
Tetra Tech’s Two-Penny Disappointment
by Debra Fiakas, CFA
Tetra Tech’s (TTEK: NASDAQ) quarter earnings report last week was met with high drama as traders reacted with surprisingly vehement disappointment over the recent financial performance of the engineering and technology business. The company’s stock price gapped down in the first day of trading following the announcement, falling through a significant line of price support. The shares continued to fall and finished the week at a price not seen since mid-April 2017 before the stock began its recent drive higher.
The drama unfolded after Tetra Tech reported net earnings of $0.52 per share on $498 million in total...
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...
OriginClear Gambles on Marketing Program
by Debra Fiakas, CFA
Last week waste water treatment developer OriginClear (OCLN: OTC/QB) announced pilot projects for rental of its commercial water systems for pool cleaning. The company has several patents to its credit, protecting its innovations. OriginClear has developed a proprietary catalytic process to clean up solids from waste water as well as an oxidation technology to eliminate microtoxins in water. Unfortunately, the company has struggled to extract value from its efforts. OriginClear has yet to report profits. Indeed in the most recently reported fiscal year ending December 2019, revenue of $3.588 million only barely covered cost of goods of $3.217 million, let alone operating expenses that...
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...
