The process is challenging and complex. First a synthetic gas is made from pure oxygen and methane, the main component of natural gas, which is cleansed of sulfur, metals and other impurities, under intense pressure and heat. Then the synthetic gas is put in giant reactors that make a synthetic crude through the Fischer-Tropsch process. The process essentially forces heated synthetic gas to react with a catalyst, typically cobalt, to convert into a liquid hydrocarbon. Finally that liquid is refined into one fuel or another. The process is far more complex than that at a typical refinery, so the plant is much more expensive to build and operate. Alfred Luaces, a refining specialist at the consultancy IHS, said a conventional oil refinery could be built for $50,000 per barrel of capacity, less than half of what Sasol says it is willing to spend on the proposed Louisiana plant.
Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or urlSasol Betting Big on Gas-to-Liquid Plant in U.S. - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Sasol is building a gas-to-liquids plant in Uzbekistan with the Malaysian oil company Petronas. It is working with Chevron to build another plant in Nigeria.
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How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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How to Build a Perfect Refugee Camp
Tencent, Foxconn & China Harmony Unite to Build Smart Cars - Analyst Blog - NASDAQ.com - 0 views
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Tencent, Foxconn & China Harmony Unite to Build Smart Cars - Analyst Blog
Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Across Eastern Europe, Military Spending Lags
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After years in which a combination of fiscal pressures and a complacent trust in the alliance’s protection may have led them to drop their guard,
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many countries are building from a very limited ability and remain years away from fielding anything resembling a formidable force against a military as large as Russia’s.
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Deepening divide over Elbe dredging | Germany | DW.COM | 19.12.2016 - 0 views
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Deepening divide over Elbe dredging
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The Marco Polo, for example, carries 16,000 containers and has a draft (the vertical distance between waterline and ship's keel) of 16 meters. Given present river depths and tides, such ships can only enter Hamburg at certain times and when not fully loaded.
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Tidal range is a prime cause for erosion, which previous river dredging, as well as waves generated by passing ships, have exacerbated
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Why Is Zambia So Poor? And Will Things Ever Get Better? - 0 views
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Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day, 14 percent have HIV, 40 percent don’t have access to clean drinking water. Almost 90 percent of women in rural areas cannot read or write. Name a category—schools, health care, environment—and I’ll give you statistics that will depress the shit out of you.
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For more than 150 years, the only reason to come to Kitwe—to Zambia, really—was the copper.
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Most of the buildings in Kitwe, the roads, the health clinics, the schools, were built by the national mining company
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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement.
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Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
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Six years after that first meeting, Levin and Randolph are trying to put this conception of character into action in their schools. In the process, they have found themselves wrestling with questions that have long confounded not just educators but anyone trying to nurture a thriving child or simply live a good life. What is good character? Is it really something that can be taught in a formal way, in the classroom, or is it the responsibility of the family, something that is inculcated gradually over years of experience? Which qualities matter most for a child trying to negotiate his way to a successful and autonomous adulthood? And are the answers to those questions the same in Harlem and in Riverdale?
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The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 1 views
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Both Bowman and Calvaruso knew something about “lean” manufacturing techniques—the style of factory management invented by Toyota whereby everyone has a say in critiquing and improving the way work gets done, with a focus on eliminating waste. Lean management is not a new concept, but outside of car making, it hasn’t caught on widely in the United States. It requires an open, collegial, and relentlessly self-critical mind-set among workers and bosses alike—a mind-set that is hard to create and sustain.
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Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic.
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If the people who design dishwashers sit at their desks in one building, and the people who sell them to retailers and consumers sit at their desks in another building, and the people who make the dishwashers are in a different country and speak a different language—you never realize that the four screws should disappear, let alone come up with a way they can.
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The Insourcing Boom - Charles Fishman - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The Insourcing Boom
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But in 2011, Appliance Park employed not even a tenth of the people it did in its heyday.
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By 1955, Appliance Park employed 16,000 workers. By the 1960s, the sixth building had been built, the union workforce was turning out 60,000 appliances a week,
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Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Steel Industry Feeling Stress as Automakers Turn to Aluminum
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These are headed for Mexico, to Navistar’s stamping plant there.Continue reading the main story
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Now, they are trying to respond, making lighter, stronger steel in a bid to retain one of their most important customers, the automakers.
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Robert J. Shiller attributes Japan's incipient recovery - and weak growth elsewhere - to prevailing economic narratives. - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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The Global Economy’s Tale Risks
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Fluctuations in the world’s economies are largely due to the stories we hear and tell about them. These popular, emotionally relevant narratives sometimes inspire us to go out and spend, start businesses, build new factories and office buildings, and hire employees; at other times, they put fear in our hearts and impel us to sit tight, save our resources, curtail spending, and reduce risk. They either stimulate our “animal spirits” or muffle them.
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The output gap for the world’s major advanced economies, as calculated by the IMF, remains disappointing, at -3.2% in 2013, which is less than half-way back to normal from 2009, the worst year of the global financial crisis, when the gap was -5.3%.
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The iEconomy - Nissan's Move to U.S. Offers Lessons for Tech Industry - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Japanese and other foreign companies account for more than 40 percent of cars built in the United States, employing about 95,000 people directly and hundreds of thousands more among parts suppliers.
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The United States gained these jobs through a combination of public and Congressional pressure on Japan, “voluntary” quotas on car exports from Japan and incentives like tax breaks that encouraged Japanese automakers to build factories in America.
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The government could also encourage domestic production of technologies, including display manufacturing and advanced semiconductor fabrication, that would nurture new industries. “Instead, we let those jobs go to Asia, and then the supply chains follow, and then R&D follows, and soon it makes sense to build everything overseas,” he said. “If Apple or Congress wanted to make the valuable parts of the iPhone in America, it wouldn’t be hard.”
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Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Silicon Valley Tries to Remake the Idea Machine
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The federal government now spends $126 billion a year on R. and D., according to the National Science Foundation. (It’s pocket change compared with the $267 billion that the private sector spends.) Asian economies now account for 34 percent of global spending; America’s share is 30 percent.
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“It’s the unique ingredient of the U.S. business model — not just smart scientists in universities, but a critical mass of very smart scientists working in the neighborhood of commercial businesses,
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EU energy market: Pipe dream - FT.com - 0 views
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EU energy market: Pipe dream
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A more competitive market also means importing new sources of gas from Azerbaijan and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as building terminals for liquefied natural gas.
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France’s nuclear industry was also reticent about cheap renewable energy streaming into the French grid on an uncertain timetable.
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China's Economic Empire - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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China has also invested heavily in building infrastructure, undertaking huge hydroelectric projects like the Merowe Dam on the Nile in Sudan — the biggest Chinese engineering project in Africa — and Ecuador’s $2.3 billion Coca Codo Sinclair Dam. And China is currently involved in the building of more than 200 other dams across the planet, according to International Rivers, a nonprofit environmental organization.
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China has become the world’s leading exporter; it also surpassed the United States as the world’s biggest trading nation in 2012.
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annual investment from China to the European Union grew from less than $1 billion annually before 2008 to more than $10 billion in the past two years. And in the United States, investment surged from less than $1 billion in 2008 to a record high of $6.7 billion in 2012, according to the Rhodium Group, an economic research firm. Last year, Europe was the destination for 33 percent of China’s foreign direct investment.
Fear of Fracking by Jeffrey Frankel - Project Syndicate - 0 views
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CAMBRIDGE – Against all expectations, US emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, since peaking in 2007, have fallen by 12% as of 2012, back to 1995 levels. The primary reason, in a word, is “fracking.”
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Just ten years ago, the natural-gas industry was so sure that domestic production was reaching its limit that it made large investments in terminals to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Yet fracking has increased supply so rapidly that these facilities are now being converted to export LNG.
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Natural gas emits only half as much CO2 as coal, and occupies a rapidly increasing share of electricity generation – up 37% since 2007, while coal’s share has plummeted by 25%.
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Read, I, Pencil | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views
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Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.
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Not much meets the eye—there's some wood, lacquer, the printed labeling, graphite lead, a bit of metal, and an eraser.
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a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon
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" Articles EconLog EconTalk Books Encyclopedia Guides Search "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as told to Leonard E. Read" A selected essay reprint Home | Books | Read | Selected essay reprint Read, Leonard E. (1898-1983) BIO Display paragraphs in this essay containing: Search essay Editor/Trans. First Pub. Date Dec. 1958 Publisher/Edition Irvington-on-Hudson, NY: The Foundation for Economic Education, Inc. Pub. Date 1999 Comments Pamphlet PRINT EMAIL CITE COPYRIGHT Start PREVIOUS 4 of 5 NEXT End "