Most developing nations are in a relatively early stage of economic growth, and will build more than half of their capital stock between 2008 and 2020.

read more

ConocoPhillips plans to break up into two separately traded companies, one for oil exploration and drilling and a second for petroleum refining and marketing. The move has taken "Wall Street by surprise," reports Fortune magazine, since until now the widespread perception has been that the bigger the oil company, the stronger the oil company.

read more

Heady prediction: “Oil and gas will continue to be pillars for global energy supply for decades to come,” says James Burkhard, a managing director of IHS CERA (Cambridge, Massachusetts), an energy consulting firm. “The competitiveness of oil and gas and the scale at which they are produced mean that there are no readily available substitutes in either one year or 20 years.”

read more

In its annual global energy report, the International Energy Agency (IEA; Paris) made many predictions about demand and supply of various fuels around the world, but it singled out China’s rapid industrial growth as the single biggest factor in spurring higher oil prices and carbon dioxide emissions over the next quarter-century. The Agency notes that:

read more

An engineering team from MIT and Korea's Sungkyunkwan University has discovered a previously unknown phenomenon that creates self-propagating "thermopower waves" — a moving pulse of heat traveling along a microscopic wire and driving electrons to creat an electrical current.

read more

Startup company Transonic Combustion (Camarillo, California) claims that it has invented a better internal combustion engine that boosts gas mileage by more than 50 percent: a test vehicle is getting 64 miles per gallon (27 km/l) on the highway.

The key is a new fuel-injection system that heats and pressurizes gasoline into a "supercritical" state before injecting it into the combustion chamber. The fuel is also treated with a catalyst that partially oxidizes it to improve combustion.

Once the fuel is injected into the piston, heat and pressure combust the fuel cleanly and quickly without a spark. The fuel is ignited just when the piston reaches its optimal point, further improving fuel efficiency. The engine also cuts throttling losses: At steady cruising speeds of 50 miles per hour, the engine runs on lean fuel-air mixtures, and can get 98 mpg.

read more

Scientists at The Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford (California) report that 23 percent of the global emissions of carbon dioxide — some 6.2 gigatonnes — went in making products that were exported from China and other emerging-market countries to consumers in rich countries.

read more

The US and UK, the World Bank's two largest members, have threatened not to support the Bank's funding of Eskom's 4,800-megawatt Medupi coal-fired plant in the northern Limpopo, a power plant that is critical to easing the chronic power shortages that choked South Africa's economy in 2008. The move highlights the global debate over who should pay for clean energy, and reveals the deep divisions between the world's industrial powers and developing countries over tackling climate change.

read more

"Is now the time to get frightened?" asks David Archer, a computational ocean chemist at the University of Chicago, in response to the flurry of recent studies reporting1

1. 1. Factclipper: Global methane levels are rising once again since 2007, raising fear

read more

The UK's Met Office Hadley Centre has reviewed1 more than 100 scientific studies that monitor changes in the Earth's climate system, and concludes that it is an "increasingly remote possibilit

1. 1. The Guardian: Met Office analysis reveals 'clear fingerprints' of man-made climate change

read more