The OurEnergyLibrary aggregates and indexes publicly available fact sheets, journal articles, reports, studies, and other publications on U.S. energy topics. It is updated every week to include the most recent energy resources from academia, government, industry, non-profits, think tanks, and trade associations. Suggest a resource by emailing us at info@ourenergypolicy.org.
Resource Library
201 to 210 of 267 item(s) were returned.
This outlook from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the Methanol Institute identifies challenges, offers policy recommendations and explores ways to produce renewable methanol at a reasonable cost.
Methanol is essential for the chemical industry and represents an emerging fuel for a wide range of uses. Although largely produced from fossil fuels, it can also be made from sustainable, renewable-based energy sources.
The need to mitigate climate change and eliminate carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from all kinds of energy use has prompted rising global interest in renewable methanol. The shift to such types – derived from biomass or synthesized …
View Full ResourceThe energy transition will require a number of new technologies, none more critical than the broad commercial deployment of carbon capture, utilization and storage, or CCUS. The ability to decarbonize the existing energy value chains in the oil and gas, petrochemical and electric power industries is essential both to immediately impact emissions and to create a commercially sound pathway to a sustainable energy future. The International Energy Agency (IEA), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) have all recognized CCUS as critical if we are to achieve the necessary climate targets through reduced …
View Full ResourceThe LEP Framework paper provides a comprehensive overview of a suite of climate and labor policies, supported by the AFL-CIO and EFI, that will accelerate America’s transition to a low carbon economy while preserving and creating access to high quality jobs. The paper provides a summary of the importance of each initiative from a climate perspective and the jobs’ benefit it will provide American communities.
The framework identifies 10 key areas necessary for creating new jobs and advancing social equity in a deeply decarbonized economy:
-
1. A national action plan for the deployment of carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration technology;
Achieving deep decarbonization in the US will require days, and potentially weeks, of energy storage to be available – but today’s technologies only provide hours of capacity. Evolving technologies, like hydrogen, will be needed for long duration storage that can extend to weeks of capacity. While the needs of our future grid are still uncertain, policymakers can and should support the evolution of long-duration, clean energy storage by encouraging technology innovation and enabling financing and procurement models that align with long-duration storage.…
View Full ResourceStargazing. COVID lockdowns reduced global CO2 emissions to levels last seen over a decade ago. While this decline is temporary, there’s still a lesson to be learned: an unsustainable halt in economic activity and mobility was needed to make a material dent in global CO2 emissions. In our tenth annual Eye on the Market energy paper, we take a look at when and how renewable energy transitions might accomplish the same thing. A lot of ideas flicker in the distance, but few are capable of being scaled and substantially commercialized in the foreseeable future.
Topics in this year’s paper include …
View Full ResourceTo stabilize global temperatures at a sustainable level, global greenhouse gas emissions need to reach net zero by 2050. This reality must guide how we support technology development, craft governmental policy, and invest capital. Midcentury deep decarbonization is most achievable with a technology-inclusive climate strategy and will likely require maintaining the zero-carbon resources that are already in operation, accelerating deployment of existing zero-carbon technologies, and boosting innovation for new technologies such as zero-carbon hydrogen and direct air capture of carbon dioxide.
On February 24-26, the 2020 Winter Energy Roundtable convened a broad cross-section of leaders from industry, academia, government, the …
View Full ResourceClean tech has a major role to play in the upcoming economic recovery. Leveraging our Carbonomics cost curve, we estimate that clean tech has the potential to drive US$1-2 tn pa of green infrastructure investments and create 15-20 mn jobs worldwide, through public-private collaboration (e.g., “The Green Deal”). Renewable power will become the largest area of spending in the energy industry in 2021, on our estimates, surpassing upstream oil & gas for the first time in history, driven by bifurcating cost of capital (up to 20% for long-term oil projects, down to 3-5% for renewables). Rising capital markets engagement in …
View Full ResourceAverting the worst effects of climate change will require us to transition away from fossil fuels and replace them with renewable resources like wind and solar energy. Some argue that biogas (methane produced from organic sources such as food scraps or animal waste) and synthetic gas (methane or hydrogen created using electrical power) are also “renewable” alternatives that could someday replace fossil gas in America’s pipelines. While biogas and synthetic gas can be a part of the climate solution toolbox, they come with a host of limitations, such as resource availability, cost, and human health and environmental impacts. Most significantly, …
View Full ResourceNewly installed renewable power capacity increasingly costs less than the cheapest power generation options based on fossil fuels. The cost data presented in this comprehensive study from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) confirms how decisively the tables have turned.
More than half of the renewable capacity added in 2019 achieved lower electricity costs than new coal. New solar and wind projects are undercutting the cheapest of existing coal-fired plants, the report finds. Auction results show these favourable cost trends for renewables accelerating.
Solar and wind power costs have continued to fall, complementing the more mature bioenergy, geothermal and hydropower …
View Full ResourceThe new flagship Global CCS Institute thought leadership report analyzes the major benefits of the large-scale investment and deployment of CCS and discusses the existing evidence related to the value of CCS under two overarching themes.
CCS as an essential technology to economically meet long-term climate targets and for risk mitigation through:
Achieving deep decarbonisation in hard-to-abate industry;
Enabling the production of clean hydrogen at scale;
Providing low-carbon dispatchable power;
Delivering negative emissions.
CCS is a driver of economic growth and employment by:
Creating and sustaining jobs;
Supporting economic growth through new net-zero industries and innovation spillovers;
Facilitating a just …