The NEI Afternoon Clip File

Here are some of the news clips we're reading at NEI this afternoon. South Carolina lawmakers are making a strong push to win federal hydrogen-fuel research dollars.

The goal, besides a cleaner environment and less volatile energy markets, is to grow companies around hydrogen-fuel technology, or at least get them to move [to South Carolina].

U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham said he is in a good position to get more hydrogen funding pumped into South Carolina. Graham co-chairs the Senate Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Caucus, a position that helped him tuck $3.5 billion of research money into the energy bill last week.

"What Detroit was to the automotive industry, South Carolina can be to hydrogen," Graham said.

In a July 31 editorial, the Mesabi Daily News hails the Energy Policy Act of 2005 as an important piece of legislation for the entire country, and for the Iron Range in particular:

As a nation we have for far too long been far too dependent on foreign oil. We believe the new energy bill will help the country to loosen that grip a bit. It will do so with more focus on conservation and renewable energy sources, along with merging modern technology to our own vast resources of coal in a much cleaner manner.

From both a national and parochial viewpoint, we are incredibly pleased to see that clean-coal was an important component of the energy bill. This is the country’s most plentiful mineral energy resource and we need to make use of it through modern technology.

We are fortunate on the Iron Range to have a coal gasification project in the works — a project that has now received national attention and is being duplicated in other states.

Come back tomorrow morning for more news from the NEI Clip File.

Technorati tags: Nuclear Energy, Environment, Energy, Politics, Technology, Economics

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