Flint Hills Resources unveiled in-home water treatment systems as a longer-term way to provide clean water to North Pole residents at a community meeting Tuesday night.

The filtration system is comprised of standard parts assembled specially to remove sulfolane. They are being tested during the next few months at five volunteer homes in North Pole with sulfolane readings between 50 parts per billion and 250 parts per billion, the full range found in private wells. After about two months, the system has proven to reduce sulfolane to non-detectable levels, said Flint Hills spokesman Jeff Cook.

“We’re hopeful that will be the final option we can offer people,” Cook said.

Flint Hills is continuing to clean up contamination that was discovered last year but happened years before the company bought the refinery in 2004. Sulfolane, a chemical used in refining oil, reportedly seeped into groundwater and private wells from gasoline spills last decade. Some water contains levels above those recommended by federal standards but much too low to make laboratory animals sick. Most of the tainted wells are outside North Pole city limits.

The federal government is giving Alaska $700,000 to take steps to improve energy efficiency in the state by 2020.

The U.S. Department of Energy funding is intended to go toward efforts such as expanding current energy efficiency programs and outreach and creating necessary policy to lead to a 15-percent improvement in efficiency over the next decade.

The department says this is part of nearly $30 million going to 12 states and territories.

Public administrators and senators Monday steered what could be the start of much scrutiny of a major energy bill.

The bill, the proposed Alaska Sustainable Energy Act, addresses a broad slate of demand- and supply-side energy production and efficiency issues. It would, among other things, update outlines for a two-year-old public Renewable Energy Fund, force energy-efficiency improvements at state buildings and require an emphasis on energy efficiency when state government buys equipment and vehicles.

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President-elect Barack Obama’s pick for energy secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who’s on the record calling coal a “nightmare” and advocating raising U.S. gas taxes to European levels to promote conservation. 

Mr. Obama himself has so far dismissed the idea of raising gas taxes, and worked hard during his campaign to reassure the utility and coal industries that he didn’t plan radical steps to slash the use of coal in power generation.

This apparent difference of opinion between Mr. Obama and his likely nominee is just one of the many red flags waving as Washington gears up for the most ambitious effort to remake America’s energy policy since Jimmy Carter slipped on a cardigan.

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Recession and the change of U.S. administration make it unlikely the world will meet a 2009 deadline for agreeing a full new pact to fight global warming, delegates at U.N. climate talks say.

A year ago, 190 nations signed up for a two-year push to agree a comprehensive climate treaty at talks in Copenhagen in late 2009. But negotiators and analysts attending preparatory December 1-12 talks in Poznan say that looks out of reach.

The most that many now hope for is agreement next year on the principles of a pact, though a few say this is too pessimistic.

“A suitable aspiration and a great achievement (in Copenhagen) would be agreement on the principles for negotiation, not a text,” said Robert Stavins, professor of business and government at Harvard University.

Recession means that developed nations’ greenhouse gas emissions will fall by about 2 percent next year, making other action less urgent, he said.

The 2009 deadline is meant to ensure that new targets for cutting emissions are in place in good time to allow worldwide ratification before Kyoto Protocol goals expire in 2012.

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Chief Bill Erasmus of the Dene nation in northern Canada brought a stark warning about the climate crisis: The once abundant herds of caribou are dwindling, rivers are running lower and the ice is too thin to hunt on.

Erasmus raised his concerns in recent days on the sidelines of a U.N. climate conference, seeking to ensure that North America’s indigenous peoples are not left out in the cold when it comes to any global warming negotiations.

Erasmus, the 54-year-old elected leader of 30,000 native Americans in Canada, and representatives of other indigenous peoples met with the U.N.’s top climate official, Yvo de Boer, and have lobbied national delegations to recognize them as an “expert group” that can participate in the talks like other nongovernment organizations.

“We bring our traditional knowledge to the table that other people don’t have,” he said.

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The energy challenges our country faces are severe and have gone unaddressed for far too long. Our addiction to foreign oil doesn’t just undermine our national security and wreak havoc on our environment — it cripples our economy and strains the budgets of working families all across America. Barack Obama and Joe Biden have a comprehensive plan to invest in alternative and renewable energy, end our addiction to foreign oil, address the global climate crisis and create millions of new jobs.

Click here to read the whole page, and find links to other elements of the plan.

A solar-powered car on three wheels arrived in Fairbanks on Wednesday evening, creating a spectacle as the spaceship-like vehicle made its way down the Johansen Expressway to the Cold Climate Housing Research Center.

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From time to time, we get calls at the research center asking if it makes sense to shut down one’s oil-fired boiler during the summer, and provide hot water using an electric hot water heater instead. Of course, the answer is “It depends.” A straightforward calculation comparing the cost to heat water using electricity versus oil shows that it is more expensive to use electricity on a cost-per-BTU basis. A BTU (British Thermal Unit) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of water one degree Fahrenheit.

However, because the boiler is sized to be able to provide a lot of heat when it is really cold in the winter, it is not very efficient at heating a small quantity of water in the summer. Using my house as an example, the boiler burns about 140 gallons of fuel oil during the four months of summer. At $4.50 per gallon of fuel oil, that’s about $630 per summer—it seems there should be some savings possible. We are talking about a conventional Weil-McClain boiler that both heats the house using baseboard hot water and heats domestic hot water in a storage tank using a coil in the boiler. It uses a total of about 1200 gallons of fuel oil per year if we don’t burn any firewood in our woodstove.

The average household requires about 45 to 65 gallons of hot water per day, less in the summer. Assuming 40 gallons per day, 122 days of summer, a GVEA price of 22 cents per kilowatt-hour, and a 90% efficient hot water heater, it would cost about $235 to provide hot water for the summer. That would suggest a savings of $395 per summer, except that the boiler is also providing some heat on cooler days and nights even in the summer. To account for this, I assumed that one cord of wood, at a cost of about $250, would provide necessary summer heat; then the net savings would be about $145. A 50-gallon hot water heater would cost about $600 to install, so it would be paid back in about 4 years if the price of fuel oil remains the same.

Therefore, if you are using a conventional oil-fired boiler and use a modest amount of hot water, it may pay to install an electric hot water heater for summertime use, allowing the boiler to be shut down for four months. If you can use a smaller tank, install it yourself, and cut your own firewood, then this is a slam dunk. However, if you already have a very efficient boiler and use a fair amount of hot water, the advantages would be marginal. The circumstances of each household require careful and individual evaluation.

John Davies is Research Director at the Cold Climate Housing Research Center

We need to focus on the areas where we’ll get the best return of money,” Schmetzer said.

Cutting tiny costs here and there isn’t what the task force is looking for because the changes needed to update the city are expensive.

“We’re looking for the long term benefits of cutting costs today,” Sanders said.

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