Data center development is booming across the country. But power and water supplies, fiber connectivity, and regulatory environments differ across states. Today’s RBN blog compares seven leading states for data centers on the key factors that help determine development outcomes.
The prospect of a massive buildout of data centers across the U.S. has utilities preparing for a surge in power demand. And while access to an uninterrupted power supply is a critical factor for companies deciding where to build a data center, it’s not the only variable — power prices and proximity to customers also play a major role. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at where data centers are deployed across the U.S., the major factors that determine where a facility gets built, and how the sudden expansion is playing out in the major U.S. technology hubs.
Progress in the carbon-capture industry can be slow, given the extended permitting process for sequestration wells, uncertain long-term outlook and skepticism about the real-world effectiveness in reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The past several weeks have been a better-than-usual period for advocates of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS), with significant milestones reached for a trio of important projects under development, but not all the news was positive. In today’s RBN blog, we’ll look at what’s happening with a handful of key CCS projects.
Carbon-capture projects have been slow to take root in the U.S., but that may be changing as a number of companies are now advancing plans to capture the carbon dioxide that results from ethanol production in the Midwest. Ethanol plants are an obvious choice, given that the CO2 resulting from ethanol fermentation is highly concentrated, which makes capturing it more efficient (and less expensive) compared to many other industrial processes. But while the relative ease and economy of capturing those emissions might seem like a no-brainer, convincing the public to go along with those plans has been more difficult. In today’s RBN blog, we look at what’s being planned.
Capacity utilization rates for small inland tank barges (10-30 MBbl) this year are sky high at 90-95 percent. Tank barges are being used to move crude oil shipped by rail from North Dakota and Canada to ports on the Mississippi River for transfer to Gulf Coast refineries. Low water levels caused by drought conditions in the Midwest have hampered Mississippi barges but that has not deterred companies from developing new terminal facilities to handle the traffic. Today we review inland waterway tank barge crude movements.
