General Electric agreed Monday to buy a drilling equipment maker, Vetco Gray, for $1.9 billion as dwindling oil and gas reserves prompt energy companies to increase their investment in opening new fields.
GE will gain 5,000 employees in more than 30 countries by acquiring Vetco from 3i Group, JPMorgan Partners and Candover Investments. The acquisition will [...]

Paul Rolke, a 300-pound Robertson County man, was so outraged by plans to build a pulverized coal power plant within sight of his ranch that he went on a hunger strike last year, drinking little more than water for more than a week.
“This technology isn’t so last century,” said Rolke, who worries about pollution from [...]

Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries plans to work with US conglomerate General Electric on nuclear and wind power generation ventures, a newspaper has said.
Under the plan, the two firms will jointly bid for a 300-million-dollar project to boost capacity by 20 percent at the 1.36-million-kilowatt Laguna Verde nuclear plant in Mexico, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported.
If [...]

General Electric Co. said Wednesday its GE Energy unit agreed to sell its hydro business to privately held Pescarmona Group of Companies.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
The sale includes GE Energy’s worldwide hydro business, excluding hydro operations in Norway and Sweden. GE said it’s considering an offer from Pescarmona Group for those as well.

Bolstered by election results, Gov. Ted Kulongoski says he wants to make Oregon a leader in the development of alternative energy.
He has developed a three-pronged energy plan, which includes combinations of mandates and tax breaks. Bill writers are already drafting proposals for early introduction to the Legislature, which convenes in January The election sustained a [...]

Solar energy has emerged as the wave of the present for replacing dwindling fossil fuels as the primary source of the world’s energy needs, writes fund manager and former corporate buyout expert Travis Bradford.
That is happening, Bradford says in his new book, “Solar Revolution,” not so much because solar is the clean, renewable fountain of [...]

State-owned Qatar Petroleum and ExxonMobil Chemical Qatar, a subsidiary of ExxonMobil Corp., signed a deal Sunday to conduct a study to build a US$3 billion petrochemical complex. The proposed complex, which would be built in the Ras Laffan Industrial City, would produce 1.3 million tons of ethylene, 570,000 tons of low-density polyethylene and 420,000 tons [...]

Gov. Brian Schweitzer on Monday announced Montana will have one of the nation’s first coal-to-liquid fuel facilities, a $1.3 billion project that several companies have agreed to build in the state’s midsection.
DKRW Advanced Fuels, Arch Minerals and Bull Mountain Cos. plan to develop the project at the Bull Mountain mine 14 miles south of Roundup, [...]

US firm General Electric wants to build a gasified coal power station somewhere in Poland a report citing the company’s chairman in Washington said.
The Polish daily Rzeczpospolita said John Krenicki announced the project for a 900 megawatt plant on Friday as Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski visited the United States.
The power station would cost an [...]