LANSING ? Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm said on Thursday that she supports the national goal of increasing renewable fuel usage to 25 percent by the year 2025. The governor announced her support of the project, called "25 x 25," during a conference call in which she also outlined state-level efforts to lessen consumption of oil
ROCHESTER - Ethanol use has more than doubled in the United States, but renewable fuel and flex-fuel vehicle development still have a long way to go, a U.S. House Agriculture sub-committee learned during a public hearing Monday at Oakland University. U.S. Agriculture Department Under-Secretary Tom Dorr, several farm organization representatives and automakers testified before the
DETROIT - DTE Energy on Tuesday said it had shut down production at all nine synthetic fuel facilities it operates because of volatility in oil prices and the lack of federal legislation that would have provided the company with what it called certainty for production economics this year. DTE Energy holds a majority interest in
YPSILANTI ? With oil prices flirting with record highs, the environment for investing in alternative energy companies is the best it has been in a decade, a panel of experts at the University of Michigan Growth Capital Symposium agreed Tuesday. But they also agreed that an industry dominated by Fortune 10 global corporations is not
HOUSTON ? Dow won an award from the Industrial Energy Technology Conference for its leadership in energy management, one of two companies to receive the award. The award recognized Dow for its strong global focus on energy efficiency and recent results, including: Achieving aggressive EH&S 2005 goals related to energy efficiency - reducing our energy
ROCHESTER HILLS ? The losses continue to mount at Energy Conversion Devices, but only half as fast as a year ago. On Tuesday, the company announced a net loss of $5.6 million for the third quarter, compared with a loss of $11.2 million in the same quarter a year ago. ECD Ovonics also reported revenues
DETROIT - Market researchers at R.L. Polk & Co. reported that hybrid vehicle registrations in the United States more than doubled in 2005, rising 139 percent to just under 200,000 vehicles for the year. That number is still only about 1 percent of the annual U.S. vehicle sales total, but Polk notes that the market
DEARBORN - Ford announced Tuesday that sales of its two hybrid vehicles, Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner, driven by rising gas prices, more than doubled from March, and increased 68 percent compared to April 2005 sales. Escape Hybrid, an SUV, gets 36 miles per gallon in the city, an 80 percent improvement over an Escape
DETROIT - Michigan's NextEnergy wants to make Michigan the alternative energy epicenter of the United States, in part by investing in promising start-up companies that, say, will produce future fuels that don't come from petroleum products. In January, the alternative energy R&D incubator at Wayne State University in Detroit hired DTE Energy?s deal finder, Ryan
AUBURN HILLS - Chrysler Group CEO Tom LaSorda will announce Tuesday in Washington D.C. that the Chrysler Group is committed to selling 250,000 flexible fuel vehicles in 2007 and about a half-million in 2008, including both retail and fleet sales, which translates into committing about 25 percent of total Chrysler Group production to flex fuel