lntwo

Burgeoning Bioplastics: Metabolix's Breakthrough

My understanding is that they clone in the genes required for PHA production. These genes utilize the plant's carbohydrate production to produce the plastics, giving MBLX an edge over other non-petroleum plastics. That is, the potential to be independent of food carb's as well as the ability to clone in these genes to potential biofuel producing plants.

Long MBLX


On Jun 07 02:49 PM frflyer wrote:

> solar jim is right.
>
> MBLX, with their PHA, is on the cutting edge of bioplastics. Their
> process has far fewer steps than those for producing PLA, which requires
> several fermentation steps and needs to be heated to about 150 F
> to be compostable. Metabolix uses genetically engineered bacteria
> to digest plant sugars and starch, producing PHA plastic that is
> simply harvested.
> They have another technology that infuses the bacteria into the germinal
> stage of switchgrass plants, which then grow with the plastic already
> in the leaves and stems.
> Their new plant in Iowa will use corn as the feedstock, but they
> expect to use swithgrass in the future.

Solar Stocks Down on Spanish Subsidy Concerns

correction: "since it is only...."

Solar Stocks Down on Spanish Subsidy Concerns

Oil and gasoline will have minimal short term effect (guessing 5yrs.) on alt energy since they are only used for grid supply. As oil increases drive us to alt cars then it will have an effect on alt energy.

I agree with wayfarer - long term (heck, even short term) will NG and coal get cheaper - my uninformed opinion thinks HAH! The enviro consequences alone make this a blip.
Long alt E and long Oil and NG.

Too Late to the Oil Party? Consider the Alternative

Not a statistician but dont the R^2 values on the long term scatter plots seem a bit low? Might it indicate a stronger correlation exists elsewhere? Also the sample size seems too small too. Again, not sure but if you know please enlighten.
Cheers all.

Long on Alt. Long on oil since 02 (Bush - Cheney one more time suckers) muhahahaha.

Gazprom Neft Aims to Become Russia’s Leading Oil Producer

oops entropic gain that is

Gazprom Neft Aims to Become Russia’s Leading Oil Producer

B.P. i'll keep this quick - take some physics or P-Chem. classes There is no second law violation - net entropic loss is from E supplied by sun - earth isn't a closed system. You dont know of which you speak.
Also read the PNAS article by the russians on geogenic oil - they make no claim to this being source on oil supplies and freely admit in the discussion section of the paper that no geogenic source of methane is hypothesized. Sheesh

Investing Into the End of the Hydrocarbon Age

quick 0.02 on nuclear - water (clean water) is the real pinch point in the developing world so nuc. implementation for about 2+ billion people is problematic - also building out of consequent grid backbone not a trivial proposition in India and China. Electrons do hold promise of de-localized distribution.

jcrash - still in w/ my FSESX - started buying like a surgeon's wife when Bush was given first term (fun to profit at others foolishness) cost basis is laughable, hanging on for one more year for grins.

Understanding Crude Oil Prices

hey thanks for the article - I gave the paper a quick read and will point out to others that starting on page 19 the author takes a step back(for a non-economist like me) and gives some interesting data/perspective. i got a chuckle out of the "price stabilization" comment on p29. Here's link to an explanation of scarcity rent en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Oil Bubble? Nope

So rdog are there any proof-of-concept ultra deep wells (not in the off-shore sense) being drilled to extract geogenic oil? Is there evidence of this sort of oil around the multitude of volcanic regions on our planet where there is a more or less direct connection to the crust mantle interface?
What is the hypothesized per barrel breakeven cost on these enterprises?
From your links it seems that the refilling is deemed rare, and while exploitable at some small scale doesn't offer a meaningful alternative. Are the early wells in Pennsylvania and California full, or refilling?
Also long term 20+yrs isn't CO2 is the dominant isssue?
thnks for any info you have on this.

Peak Oil Stocks for the Future

thanks for the article, and the follow-up responses. Good posts brahm and rockybullwinkle. Long time liberal-environmentali... but investing realist, started reallocating from oil to NG about 6 months ago. Thanks for some ideas and points of departure for further investments. I'll stay out of the political discussion and let my returns do the talkin'.

America's Energy Policy: Coming to Terms with Reality

Spot on article - not an expert on the oil industry, so I thank those who have some expertise/knowledge on this.
As for the left-right, good v. evil, vegetarian v. doritos thread -- i cant resist. I'm a bleeding heart liberal who learned a long time ago to vote my heart and invest with my brain. This country, people, politicians wanted the easy answers and voted accordingly - Carter was mocked when he drew the clear line in energy policy, morality and our trajectory as a nation. I own a Prius AND XOM, and when this current idiot was elected went 35% in with my retirement in FSESX - so please drill in ANWR, make the goooberment lower gas prices - i insist. While my Bush voting co-workers complain complain complain I'm raking it in with every increase - thanks suckers.

Alt. Energy: More Technology Than Energy?

John E. - while high oil increases awareness and development of alt energy, our cars will be ostensibly running on gas for the near future, so the link to oil price is less direct than one might think. Since wind and solar generate electricity the driving issue is coal use ( repeat after me: "would you like mercury with that") and CO2 production. I could go on about the need to limit CO2 and the revised forecasts on near term sea level rise and all the other cheerful consequences but I'm sure anyone reading this thread is familiar with these issues.

However a point that is frequently ignored with wind and solar is the benefit to developing countries; aside from the obvious there is the water conservation aspect - coal and nuclear power generation are very water intensive, and water availability is an increasing pinch point in the developing world. Not to mention that coal and nuclear are localized, infrastructure intensive technologies.

Long on PBW, GEX, and a variety of oil companies,

Cheers all.

Sprint Nextel's Internal Explosion

0.02: No lie just observation/opinion. As far as shorting the stock at this point hmmm... seems to be more momentum investing (2-3 years late) than analysis. WiMax/backhaul tech. from what I've read appears to be the wireless data game changer but rather than invest in S why not the backhaul tech, companies that supply the tech. Pseudo is 'L' n as in natural log. Out.

Sprint Nextel's Internal Explosion

The last paragraph nails it. A service industry that viewed itself as a sales industry. One might argue that these are inseparable, but Sprint chose a more sales driven model that alienated many customers.
I work in Sprint customer care and let me tell ya the cust. svc. integration with Nextel is far from over. We're using a new cust svc. software that is far from user friendly, and as the the third party provider that runs Sprint's cust. svc. continues to bottom line the service agent wages, there will continue to be employee churn, in turn driving service issues and cust. dissatisfaction. Observing the slow motion car wreck has been fascinating.