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...
Water Out Of Thin Air
It is an irony that surrounded by the flood waters of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, a drink of fresh, clean water may be hard to come by. Of course, the all three levels of government make plans for stockpiling and deploying emergency bottled water well ahead of natural disasters. Yet in the hours and days following the worst of both the recent storms, the media was filled with stories of people who lacked water.
What if water could be made manufactured? If such a technology existed, what a boon it might be to thirsty storm victims.
Ambient Water Corporation (AWGI: OTC/PK) has...
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...
Chinese and EU Clash Over Airline Emissions
Doug Young China’s increasingly contentious trade relations with Europe suffered another setback late last week, when the EU threatened to fine Chinese airlines that were refusing to comply with a new controversial program to reduce greenhouse gases. China responded with its own threat by saying it won’t accept the EU’s planned carbon tax, raising the prospect of a dangerous new trade war. This latest in a recent series of trade conflicts between China and both Europe and the US is developing into a troublesome pattern that could spin out of control, endangering the nascent global economic...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Plastics from Carbon Dioxide
by Debra Fiakas CFA In the last post, I promised to close out this series on carbon dioxide capture with a note on a third example of Department of Energy funding for innovations in turning carbon dioxide (CO2) into a valuable raw material. Besides changing the chemistry of inorganic compounds and feedstock for biofuel production, CO2 has some potential for plastics. In 2010, the DOE placed a bet of $18.4 million on Novomer, Inc., which is a self-described sustainable chemicals developer. The bet appears to be paying off as Novomer and its partners go into production...
The Worst Waste
Jim Lane Peter Brown of FFA Fuels, promotes his company these days with the pithy slogan, “Fuels from the Worst Waste Around.” Which of course raises the legitimate question, what is the worst waste, and can we find a use for it? Discussions of worst waste will usually focus on the obvious say, landfill or the odious say, medical or nuclear waste. Toxicity and longevity are typical concerns, and that’s one of the reasons why nuclear energy remains controversial to this day. No Waste in Nature As LanzaTech’s Jennifer Holmgren observed in a recent article by...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
