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...
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...
Kadant: Will Investors Clean Up With This Bargain Green Stock?
Everybody likes a bargain. Investors really like a good cheap buy. A review of our four alternative energy industries revealed three stocks trading below industry average multiples of forecasted earnings. This is the second article in the series, thee first looked at Ormat (ORA:NYSE). A couple of weeks ago shares of Kadant, Inc. (KAI: NYSE) registered an particularly bullish formation - at least from a technical standpoint. A ‘triple top breakout’ was formed in a point and figure chart, suggesting demand for the stock outpaces supply. Given the new momentum that has developed, the stock could reach...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
Mantra’s Promise of Innovation
by Debra Fiakas CFA How often do we see the crowd rooting for the underdog? You could hear the cheers for Mantra Energy (MVTG: OTC) last week at the Marcum Microcap Conference in New York City. Mantra is a developmental stage company pursuing technologies to harness carbon dioxide for energy. Of course, the company has no revenue and therefore no earnings. Indeed, its technologies are so unique and as yet at such an early stage some might find them almost fanciful. Yet for some investors, a fanciful underdog is even better than another. Mantra sees itself...
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...
Southern Company’s Carbon Capture Testing
by Debra Fiakas CFA Coal emissions photo via BigStock An electric utility of Southern Company’s size - $38.3 billion in market capitalization - is not among the typical company covered in the Small Cap Strategist weblog. Southern (SO: NYSE) owns and operates six dozen power plants in the southeastern U.S., generating 12,222 megawatts of power from a mix of fossil fuel, hydroelectric, nuclear and solar plant assets. The company earned $2.68 in earnings per share on $16.5 billion in total electric power sales. Sales dipped in 2012...
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...
Axion Power is Poised to Dominate Energy Storage for Stop-start Idle Elimination
John Petersen After eight years of rarely speaking above a whisper, Axion Power International (AXPW.OB) has found its voice, taken the scientific wraps off its PbC® battery technology and shown potential customers, competitors and investors that it's carrying a big stick and is poised to dominate energy storage for stop-start idle elimination – a cheap and sensible fuel efficiency and emissions reduction technology that's expected to grow at spectacular rates for the rest of the decade as shown in the following forecast of battery demand in vehicles equipped with stop-start systems. In a new white...
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...
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...
Air Products Goes Operational with Carbon Capture
by Debra Fiakas CFA In October 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy selected a dozen projects aimed at bringing relief to a planet suffocating in a cloud of toxic carbon dioxide emissions. The DOE called the program it’s Large-Scale Industrial Carbon Capture Storage Projects and wrote checks for $575 million out of American Recovery and Reconstruction (ARRA) funds. A little more than a year later the DOE weeded out all but three projects for the second phase of the program. Besides Leucadia Energy (subsidiary of Leucadia National, LUK: NYSE) and Archer Daniels Midland...
