Faced with ominous scientific warnings on global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, two energy giants —ExxonMobil and Shell—have sent diametrically opposing signals in recent weeks, Exxon, for its part, told its shareholders on 30 March that the company does not think that policies to address manmade global warming constitute a risk to the company’s profitability, because global policy makers are not going to enact strict emissions limits before 2040.
Instead, the company plans to exploit all of its remaining oil and gas reserves, as well as new discoveries, through 2040. Shell, on the other hand, decided to join more than 70 other companies, including Adidas and Unilever, by signing onto a non-binding document known as the Trillion Tonne Communique. The communique is a project sponsored by the Prince of Wales’s Corporate Leaders Group, which brings together business leaders to address climate change.
Stanford University scientists have found a new, highly efficient way to produce liquid ethanol from carbon monoxide gas. This promising discovery could provide an eco-friendly alternative to conventional ethanol production from corn and other crops, say the scientists.
The new technique developed by Matthew Kanan, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford and Stanford graduate student Christina Li requires no fermentation and, if scaled up, could help address many of the land- and water-use issues surrounding ethanol production today. They discovered the first metal catalyst that can produce appreciable amounts of ethanol from carbon monoxide at room temperature and pressure—a notoriously difficult electrochemical reaction.
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