R-Squared Energy

While my focus is primarily on energy, I am also interested in other sustainability issues. Some of those include food production, water issues (e.g. water desalination to increase availability of fresh water), and waste management. […]

I saw a humorous story a few days ago: Oil Should Be Around $10 a Barrel The price of a barrel of oil would be closer to $10 if the commodity wasn’t traded as an […]

Cracking Biomass Back when I worked in a refinery, I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how biomass would behave in certain refining processes. A fluidized catalytic cracker (FCC), for instance, takes […]

This week a study on peak oil by a German military think tank was leaked on the Internet. The document shows that the German government is closely studying the issue of peak oil, and is […]

The Saudi Arabia of Ethanol Iowa is to corn ethanol what Saudi Arabia is to oil. At present Iowa has the capacity to produce 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol per year, which is 26% of […]

I am no economist, but bear with me while I try to explain why I think we are in for a very long and difficult economic period. My thesis for The Long Recession goes something […]

I am working on yet another project, due at the end of this week. Therefore, I haven’t had a chance to work much on my next essay, which will be about the potential for E85 […]

There was a recent article in MIT Technology review called What’s Holding Biofuels Back? There is a relatively simple answer to the question that I will delve into below, but the short answer to “What’s […]

I began to hear rumors about a week ago that Range Fuels had started to produce some methanol from their plant in Soperton, Georgia. This week they announced that they have indeed begun to make […]

In my recent post Thoughts on an Ethanol Pipeline, I described what I feel would be a more rational approach to ethanol policy than some of the policies that have been pursued over the years. […]