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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
What Shouldn’t Be in a Green Energy Portfolio
The London Accord took a look at what portfolio theory would suggest as the most effective ways to address Climate Change. Knowing which technologies don't make the cut is at least as useful as knowing which technologies do. Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA I recently looked at a paper from the London Accord which used portfolio theory to recommend the best mixes of technologies to deliver different levels of carbon abatement. The most useful technologies to achieve the needed levels of carbon abatement were Forestry, Hydropower, Biofuels, Wind, Efficiency, and Geothermal. I suggested stocks that investors might consider to invest in...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
