News
July 29, 2013
Pilot projects bury carbon dioxide in basalt have started. Two experiments test viability of sequestering emissions in porous layers of hard rock. Basalt formations, such as these towers on the Columbia River in Washington state, could be used to trap carbon dioxide. By early August, scientists will have pumped 1,000 tonnes of pure carbon dioxide into porous rock far below the northwestern United States. The goal is to find a permanent home for the carbon dioxide generated by human activities.
July 26, 2013
The head of Russian Ministry of Natural Resources, Sergey Donskoy has sent an appeal to the Minister of the Interior, Vladimir Kolokoltsev with a request to take over the personal control of criminal investigations such as violent crimes and murders of environmental organizations members. "In May-July 2013, in the territory of the Russian Federation heinous crimes have been carried out. Environmentalists have fallen victims to those crimes.
July 24, 2013
An out-of-control natural gas well off the Louisiana coast caught fire late Tuesday, hours after 44 workers were safely evacuated from the drilling rig following a mid-morning blowout, a federal agency confirmed. No injuries were reported as a result of the fire, Eileen Angelico, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, told The Associated Press. She said it wasn't known what caused the gas to ignite. It also wasn't clear early Wednesday how and when crews would attempt to extinguish the blaze.
July 17, 2013
Talks on creating Antarctic Marine Sanctuary break down. A group of countries set up to regulate fishing in the Antarctic has failed to agree to implement proposals to create marine sanctuaries in the region. Other delegates blamed Russia for objecting to the plans. An extraordinary meeting of the Commission of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) in the northern German town of Bremerhaven wrapped up on Tuesday without an agreement. "The outcome is not what we expected or hoped for ... We did not reach a consensus," Terje Lobach, the Commission's chairperson, said.
July 15, 2013
French President Francois Hollande ruled out the possibility of shale gas recovery in the country for as long as he holds power. This is reported by The Financial Times.
July 14, 2013
Bremerhaven, Germany: The Antarctic Ocean Alliance (AOA) and its partners say the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) has a landmark opportunity to protect the Antarctic`s Southern Ocean this week. CCAMLR members will decide the fate of two key proposals for Antarctic marine protection, either of which would create the world’s largest marine protected rea (MPA) if designated.
July 13, 2013
NASA's plan to retrieve a tiny asteroid as a steppingstone for astronauts on the way to Mars in the 2030s could be just the exciting project that the space agency needs to garner public support in these severe budgetary times, speakers at a workshop held yesterday in Washington, D.C., said. But many of them warned that NASA's headlong plunge into the project could spell disaster, literal or budgetary.
July 12, 2013
For the first time Minister of Natural Resources and Environment of the Russian Federation Sergey Donskoy announced official oil and hydrocarbons reserves in the Russian Federation publicly. "At the beginning of July 2013 the Government of the Russian Federation approved the Regulation # 569, which excluded hydrocarbons from the list of strategic mineral resources, details of which had been classified before. Thus, today we can speak openly about resources held by the our country.
July 11, 2013
We tend to view earthquakes as unpredictable phenomena caused by naturally shifting stresses in Earth's crust. In reality, however, a range of human activity can also induce earthquakes. William L. Ellsworth of the U.S. Center for Earthquake Research and Information at the University of Memphis (CERI) has established a recent dramatic increase in seismicity in the midwestern United States may be related to increases in deep wastewater injection.
July 10, 2013
Russia has established a 25-year-old record for oil production. According to Federal State Unitary Enterprise “Central Dispatching Department of Fuel Energy Complex” (CDU TEK), an acknowledged leader in a field of informative forwarding of the Russian Federation fuel and energy complex activity, by the end of June, oil production in Russia amounted 10.53 million barrels per day, a record since 1988. Thus, Russia has overtaken the oil production capacity of Saudi Arabia, which extracts 9.47 million barrels per day. According to CDU TEK, thanks to two factors the record was available.