“As petroleum came to the relief of the whale,” said an 1878 promotional pamphlet for the world’s first industrial plastic, “so has celluloid given the elephant, the tortoise, and the coral insect a respite in their native haunts, and it will no longer be necessary to ransack the earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.” Read more
This is a guest post by Dr Raphael Slade, research fellow at Imperial College’s Centre for Energy Policy and Technology.
To meet the 2020 renewable energy target the UK is going to need biomass, and lots of it. The Department for Energy and Climate Change is hoping for an additional 20-38TWh of biomass electricity. This will require around 12-23 million dry tonnes of biomass, most of which will be imported as pellets from North America and burnt in converted coal-fired power plants. Read more
