Category: News

September 14 2017

Irma Displaces World’s Best Quant. Now He’s on a Climate Mission

As the head of one of the world’s most successful hedge funds, you’d think David Vogel wouldn’t have much to be concerned about. But right now he’s really worried about his home. The 44-year-old last week took his family and firm and fled Jupiter, Florida, as Hurricane Irma bore down. For a week, he and […]

September 14 2017

Saudis Prepare for Possible Aramco IPO Delay to 2019

Saudi Arabia is preparing contingency plans for a possible delay to the initial public offering of its state-owned oil company by a few months into 2019, according to people familiar with the matter. While the government is still aiming for a Saudi Aramco IPO in the second half of next year, that timetable is increasingly […]

September 14 2017

Munich Re Says It May Miss Profit Target on Irma, Harvey

Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurer, said Hurricanes Harvey and Irma will probably wipe out third-quarter profit and threaten the company’s ability to meet its full-year earnings target. “These two events are expected to result in high insured losses, which the market and Munich Re are unable to quantify at the moment,” the Munich-based reinsurer […]

September 14 2017

Coal Seeks New Life as Carbon Fiber for Submarines

The 30-foot hull of an experimental mini-sub is helping to show how the U.S. may be able to redeploy the mountain of coal that power plants are no longer burning. Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee used carbon fibers to build the submersible for the U.S. Navy with a 3-D printer, demonstrating the […]

September 14 2017

Hurricane Irma’s Blackouts Are Second Only to Superstorm Sandy

As many as 7 million customers across the U.S. Southeast had lost power on Monday at the height of the blackouts brought on by Hurricane Irma. Only Sandy took out more service than that, plunging more than 8.5 million along the entire eastern seaboard into darkness. NextEra Energy Inc.’s Florida Power & Light utility has […]

September 13 2017

Ballard Surges on New Fuel Cell That Uses Less Platinum

Ballard Power Systems Inc., a supplier of fuel-cell power systems, surged to a three-year high after announcing a technology breakthrough that replaces most of the high-cost platinum used in earlier design. Ballard gained 24 percent to $4.59 at 3:08 p.m. in New York, the most intraday in more than a year and the highest since […]

September 13 2017

The Giant Gas Glut May Not Be So Giant After All

The looming glut of liquefied natural gas that’s stifling investment and weighing on prices may not be as big as feared, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Demand growing at the fastest pace since 2011 has shrunk a forecast oversupply of the fuel, Ashish Sethia and Maggie Kuang write in BNEF’s Global LNG Outlook released […]

September 13 2017

Cities Swimming in Raw Sewage as Hurricanes Overwhelm Systems

Hurricane Harvey took aim at one of the nation’s most industrial regions, releasing a stream of toxic pollutants from chemical plants, refineries and Superfund sites in Texas. But when its bigger sister Irma slammed into Florida, environmental alarms rang over a different kind of discharge: raw sewage.  Millions of gallons of poorly treated wastewater and raw […]

September 13 2017

Smart Car Delivers a Song-and-Dance About Self-Driving Challenges

In a musical fantasy for Daimler AG’s Smart brand, performers at the Frankfurt motor show this week literally sang out the virtues of an autonomous two-seater, with the spectacle suggesting there’s more fiction than fact in robo-cars. Smart’s cornball song-and-dance number highlighted how self-driving features were largely relegated to a sideshow in Frankfurt. Volkswagen AG’s Chief Executive […]

September 13 2017

IEA Sees Strongest Global Oil-Demand Growth in Two Years

Global oil demand will climb this year by the most since 2015, the International Energy Agency said, amid stronger-than-expected consumption in Europe and the U.S. The IEA, which advises most major economies on energy policy, increased its estimate for demand growth in 2017 by 100,000 barrels a day to 1.6 million a day, or 1.7 percent. […]