New Delhi: Ethanol plants manufacturer Regreen-Excel <keyword id="23123526" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="epc-india-ltd" source="keywords">EPC India Ltd</keyword> has filed preliminary papers with capital markets regulator <keyword id="35210" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="SEBI" source="Orion">Sebi</keyword> to raise funds through an initial public offering (IPO). The company's initial share-sale comprises a fresh issue of equity shares worth Rs 350 crore and an offer-for-sale (<keyword id="19951016" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="ofs" source="keywords">OFS</keyword>) of 1.14 crore equity shares by promoters, according to the draft red herring prospectus (DRHP). The company proposes to utilize the net proceeds from fresh issue for payment of debt, funding margin money requirements for the purpose of availing bank guarantees; and for general corporate purposes. Regreen-Excel EPCR is a technology-driven EPC company, engaged in designing, manufacturing and supplying ethanol plants. Over the years, the company has built end-to-end capabilities in setting up ethanol plants, across feedstocks such as molasses/ sugarcane syrup, grains or a combination thereof, which it to provide concept to commissioning solutions to their customers. Since the company's inception to July 15, 2024, it has executed 113 projects across various feedstocks, which consist of 53 molasses-based projects, 57 grains-based projects and three <keyword id="23123527" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="multi-feedstock" source="keywords">Multi Feedstock</keyword> projects. As of July 15, 2024, the company had an order book of 64 ongoing projects worth Rs 3,452 crore, which aggregate to over 10,000 kilo litres per day (<keyword id="23123525" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="klpd" source="keywords">KLPD</keyword>) of ethanol capacity. IIFL Securities and ICICI Securities are the book-running lead managers to the issue.

Regreen-Excel files IPO papers with Sebi, aims to raise Rs 350 crore

The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Bill, 2022, which aims to tap the multi-billion dollar global carbon market, was approved by the <keyword id="6355187" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="lok-sabha" source="Orion">Lok Sabha</keyword> on Monday. The amendment focuses on speeding up the green transition by granting the government the authority to control energy consumption, mandate the use of non-fossil fuels by industries, and establish efficiency standards for vehicles, ships, and equipment as part of <keyword id="3658" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="india" source="Orion">India</keyword>'s climate change mitigation strategy. The bill amends the Energy Conservation Act of 2001. It gives the Centre the authority to specify a trading scheme for carbon credits, effectively paving the way for a fresh carbon market in the country. Carbon credits are tradable permits to emit a specific amount of carbon emissions. In simple terms, an industrial unit that emits much less carbon than its target values is eligible to receive carbon credits, and an industry that fails to meet the target can then purchase such credits and demonstrate compliance. Carbon markets, if managed efficiently, can redirect finances from emitter to carbon-neutral units and provide a financial incentive for companies to aim for net-zero emissions. Power minister <keyword id="93916" type="General" weightage="80" keywordseo="r-k-singh" source="Orion">R K Singh</keyword>, therefore, called it "the bill for the future". According to the proposed legislation, the Centre may order "designated consumers" to meet a minimum percentage of their energy needs from non-fossil sources. To entities registered under and compliant with the scheme, the Center or any authorised agency may issue carbon credit certificates for use in carbon trading. The legislature may help tap the $800-billion global carbon market and facilitate more foreign direct investment (FDI) in green technologies. However, the bill primarily aims to fast-track India’s clean energy transition and the power minister categorically declared that India would not permit the export of credits until it fulfilled the promises made at COP21 and COP26. This comes on the heels of the cabinet approving India’s updated Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to be communicated to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The updated NDC of India promises to reduce the Emissions Intensity of its GDP by 45% by 2030 from the 2005 levels and achieve about 50% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel-based energy resources by 2030. In addition to establishing carbon markets, the bill mandates the use of non-fossil fuels such as green hydrogen, green ammonia, biomass, and ethanol for energy and feedstock for many industrial applications. The bill also expands the scope of the <keyword id="1039578" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="energy-conservation-building-code" source="Orion">Energy Conservation Building Code</keyword>, amends penalty clauses, and gives the <keyword id="103659" type="General" weightage="50" keywordseo="state-electricity-regulatory-commissions" source="Orion">State Electricity Regulatory Commissions</keyword> more authority. In order to mitigate the cascading impacts of climate change, governments all over the world are increasing their commitments to climate action. Article 6 of the Paris Agreement — a binding global agreement on climate change — also provides a robust basis for the use of international carbon markets to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions while ensuring transparency and accountability. Experts also highlight the need to develop end-to-end, state-of-the-art digital infrastructure to support fair and transparent market transactions <div type="QUIZ" hostid="261" msid="93637741" title="Sustainability Insider Quiz" mstype="1" mssubtype="2"><payload><![CDATA[sustainability-quiz]]></payload></div>

Lok Sabha approves Energy Conservation Bill to accelerate climate action; opens multi-billion dollar carbon market

<keyword id="26362" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="government" source="Orion">Government</keyword> has given <keyword id="2327619" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="in-principle" source="Orion">in-principle</keyword> approval to nine more <keyword id="6533570" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="ethanol" source="Orion">ethanol</keyword> projects under its ethanol interest subvention scheme. These projects are expected to add to the additional capacity of about 35 crore litres. Out of these nine projects, five projects are grain-based and three projects are molasses-based and one project is based on dual feedstock. These projects have the potential to bring an investment of about Rs 1,034 crore and will create hundreds of <keyword id="6355127" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="employment" source="Orion">employment</keyword> opportunities in their respective locations, official sources said. Under the new window of the ethanol interest subvention scheme since April 22, 2022, 299 projects with an expected capacity of about 1,481 crore litres have been granted in-principle approvals. The government is extending financial assistance in the form of interest subvention at 6 per cent per annum or 50 per cent of the rate of interest charged by banks, whichever is lower, on the loans to be extended by banks for five years, including a one-year moratorium. SEE ALSO: <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/entertainment/news/m-night-shyamalan-announces-next-film-signs-multi-year-deal-with-warner-bros/articleshow/98003388.cms">M. Night Shyamalan announces next film, signs multi-year deal with Warner Bros</a> <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/air-india-will-require-more-than-6500-pilots-for-470-planes/articleshow/98005202.cms">Air India will require more than 6,500 pilots for 470 planes</a>

Govt gives in-principle approval to nine ethanol blending projects

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Even though oil prices have fallen back from their recent peaks, the world's biggest consumers aren't biting as much.</li><li>Experts told Insider that Asian demand for crude appears to be waning in part because of inflation. </li></ul>Asian oil refiners are getting choosier about where they get their crude from, as inflation picks up across the supply chain, experts told Insider. State-owned energy giant Saudi Aramco told at least four North Asian buyers that it will supply full contract volumes of oil in September, sources with knowledge of the matter <a href="https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/nasian-refiners-get-full-allocation-saudi-crude-sept-2022-08-10/">told Reuters</a>. When an exporter allocates the full volume of a contract, traders usually interpret that as supply being roughly in line with demand. A cut in the allocation would signal a drop in demand, while an increase would reflect an improvement.The oil price has fallen below $100 a barrel and is around 30% below the multi-year highs of early March, right after Russia invaded Ukraine.But this is the second month in a row that Aramco has allotted the full amount to its North Asian customers, which include China, suggesting any tightness in the market may be easing.Data last month showed Russia's oil exports to China and India were 30% below their wartime peak, as buyers in the two countries reeled in their purchases. "Crude demand is clearly weakening as widespread inflation leads to further declines in purchasing power for Asian buyers," Ed Moya, senior analyst at OANDA said in response to Saudi Aramco allocating the full amount of crude. Saudi Arabia <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/oil-prices-opec-saudi-arabia-asia-russia-sanctions-supply-2022-7">raised prices for Asian buyers</a> to near record highs for August deliveries, reflecting some of the squeeze on supply as producers everywhere rush to fill any gaps left by a dropoff in Russian exports after Western sanctions. As refiners face lower margins for products such as gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, they're getting choosier about where they get their crude. Reports this week showed <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/us-oil-asian-buyers-buying-cheap-crude-over-saudi-oil-2022-8">Asian buyers are snapping up cheap US crude</a> as traditional Middle Eastern blends are starting to look a little pricier by comparison.South Korea and Indian refiners purchased about 16 million barrels of US crude so far this month, roughly double what they bought the previous month. Asian oil demand ramped up after Russia invaded Ukraine with countries like China and India taking advantage of super-cheap Russian exports that had fallen out of favor with lifelong European customers. But this has in turn raised the value of Russia's oil and buyers are once again in search of a better deal elsewhere. In mid-July, <a href="https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/china-oil-imports-saudi-arabia-crude-exports-russia-trade-2020-2022-7">a surge in China's oil imports</a> put Saudi Arabia on track to reach its highest level of total exports since April 2020, as China's COVID-19 measures began to ease. But with strict restrictions back in play, with millions under lockdown, it is taking denting crude demand together with inflationary pressures. "A big driver for Asian crude demand is the outlook for China and that is complicated given President Xi is sticking to his COVID strategy," Moya said. China is the world's largest energy buyer and its imports can often make up 10% of total demand. But its cost-conscious refiners aren't so keen to get barrels off the global market and are relying instead on domestic supply, analysts said."China's intra crude flows have picked up since Q2, as Chinese refiners are drawing feedstock from other provinces, instead of purchasing fresh but expensive spot barrels from the international market," Emma Li, chief market analyst at Vortexa said in a recent report. Meanwhile, other factors could be in the mix, according to market analyst at City Index Fawad Razaqzada. "It could also be because Saudi Aramco has the capacity to supply more crude now and selling more at higher prices is profitable for them," he said.

Oil refiners in Asia's economic powerhouses aren't snapping up extra crude even with prices below $100 a barrel as inflation bites

<div class="image-container float_right"><div class="image"><img src="http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/51f67b9decad043b1c000016-1200-924/saudi-king-abdullah-salman-bin-abdel-aziz.jpg?maxX=480" border="0" alt="saudi king abdullah salman bin abdel aziz" width="480" />REUTERS/Saudi Press AgencySaudi King Abdullah (front R) talks with newly appointed Saudi Crown Prince Salman bin Abdel-Aziz in Taif, June 19, 2012.</div></div>Although plans are well advanced for constructing one of the world's biggest combined cycle petrochemicals plants in the kingdom, being built by the Sadara Chemical Company (a joint venture between the state oil company, Saudi Aramco, and Dow Chemical of the US), in reality the petrochemicals sector has mostly taken a back seat in the country's rapid industrialisation of recent years. This is primarily due to the shortage of ethane-rich associated gas and natural gas liquids (NGLs), which are both linked to crude oil production. However, this may well change if a new strategy planned by Saudi Aramco bears fruit.
In an indication of the new approach, Saudi Aramco and a joint-venture partner, France's Total, are planning to carry out a feasibility study in October to expand the 400,000 barrel/day heavy-oil refinery at Jubail in Eastern Province that was started up just last week. The expansion is strategic not just for both companies, but also for the kingdom at large, as it will serve as a litmus test for producing significantly higher volumes of naphtha either to partly offset or to replace in full the use of natural gas or natural gas liquids as feedstock for petrochemical products.
<h2>Naptha the key to new petrochemicals capacity</h2>
Undoubtedly, for the past few years the biggest stumbling block for building a downstream hydrocarbons industry has been the availability of feedstock gas. However, an expansion of the Jubail refinery could throw up options for Aramco to extract naphtha from that facility-which could in turn be supplied for new multi-feed crackers.
A multi-feed cracker is a facility that can operate using either ethane-rich gas or naphtha as feedstock. The first such facility in the Middle East is being built by the Sadara Chemical Company for its chemical plant at Jubail Industrial City. This will soon be followed a similar facility in Qatar, being built in a joint venture between Qatar <keyword id="84980" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="petroleum">Petroleum</keyword> and Royal Dutch Shell for their olefins project at Ras Laffan.
Besides emerging as a new feedstock source, the use of naphtha will result in yet another benefit that is more commercial in nature: compared with a natural gas/NGL cracker, a naphtha cracker can produce a much greater variety of chemicals, such as ethylene, propylene, butadiene, and a full slate of aromatics such as benzene, toluene and mixed xylene.
Aramco has labelled its new programme as "downstream refinery integration", and the expectation is that after Jubail, Aramco will start similar projects for the Yanbu, Jizan and Ras Tanura refineries. Reinforcing this expectation, Aramco and the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC) have already selected Yanbu, Ras Tanura and Jizan Economic City as the new locations where they will invest first in infrastructure to create a platform for both private Saudi and international players to invest in new facilities. The three sites are already home to crude oil refineries, providing easy access to feedstock.
<h2>Feasibility study should point the way</h2>
The Aramco-Total feasibility study should indicate the volumes of naphtha that can be "stripped out" of an expanded Jubail refinery, and, if the report is positive, Fluor of the US and Australia-based WorleyParsons have indicated that there may well be potential to build at least six new world-scale crackers, each with a capacity of some 2m tonnes/year. That figure could increase further, if Aramco's efforts to tap into the kingdom's shale gas resources are successful, and also if non-associated gas is discovered in the Red Sea and the Western region where an exploration and drilling programme is currently under way.
Aramco and Total are already in talks with the Dow Chemical Company to sell the naphtha it plans to produce from the expanded Jubail refinery, while the local Farabi Petrochemicals Company has already showed its willingness to invest at least US$10bn in several "ancillary" projects that could use naphtha to produce rubber, detergents and soaps, as well as other exotic chemicals. The enormous interest in the sector reflects optimism over likely healthy rates of return, reflecting expected high rates of demand growth for downstream products not just in Asia, but also in the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) region where the population is increasingly rapidly.
However, one obstacle remains to realising this potential: the need to raise the existing fixed gas price of 75 US cents/m Btu. According to Platts, naphtha prices averaged about US$621/tonne, the equivalent of about US$3.2/m Btu, in the first six months of 2013, and, as a result, if these new naptha conversion plants are to be economically viable, a gas price better reflecting the market rate will be required. However, if a higher price can be implemented, the resulting rise in petrochemicals output would help to mitigate, to a degree, the decline in demand for Saudi crude in North America, owing to rising shale oil output in North America. In addition, by moving towards a naphtha-based petrochemical industry, natural gas would be freed up for reinjection into <keyword id="50996" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Saudi-Arabia">Saudi Arabia</keyword>'s older oilfields, allowing them to maintain higher levels of output for longer.
Click <a href="http://www.store.eiu.com">here</a> to subscribe to <keyword id="425741" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="The-Economist">The Economist</keyword>
<img class="nc_pixel" src="http://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT1mNTljMTRiMjkzYzhjZTgzZDVmY2IzOTc2YzYyZTU2NiZvd25lcj1kM2Y2MjMzYjQ4YzhmNmE1ZWQ2NzhjMzU2NDBkZmQxNCZub25jZT03NDE5OGFiNS0zYzE0LTQzZTEtOTBmYy1hZDljYmU0ZTdjNjUmcHVibGlzaGVyPThjMDBmYmVlNjFkNWJjZjBjNjA5MmQ4YjkyZWJiY2Ex" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" />

Naptha Is The Key Ingredient For A Saudi Petrochemicals Boom

Mukesh Ambani AGM speech highlights —  Reliance Industries announces Jio Glass, Google partnership and plans to build a new smartphone

<div class="image-container float_right" style="width:400px"><div class="image"><img src="http://static3.businessinsider.com/image/4f4be324ecad044237000025-590-443/natural-gas-3.jpg?maxX=400" border="0" alt="natural gas, shale, fracking" width="400" /></div><a href="http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/engineers-on-the-drilling-platform-of-the-cuadrilla-shale-news-photo/136733647">Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images</a></div>The <keyword id="188620" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="Shale">shale</keyword> gas and <keyword id="6359072" type="CITY" weightage="60" keywordseo="oil">oil</keyword> bonanza is transforming America’s <keyword id="6357014" type="ENTERTAINMENT" weightage="60" keywordseo="energy">energy</keyword> outlook and boosting its economy
WHEN KEN ALEXANDER started working at the J&amp;L steel mill in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s, he was one of 17,000 workers. But the workforce quickly declined as the American steel industry withered in the face of cheaper foreign competition. In 1984 J&amp;L shut the mill. Four years ago another mill where Mr Alexander had found a job, across the Ohio river in Ambridge, also stopped work because of the recession. He was one of a skeleton staff of 20 kept on as watchmen.
Derelict mills pepper the region, loose sidings flapping in the frigid Appalachian wind. The once celebrated steel industry around Pittsburgh (whose football team is called the Steelers) survived a series of crises over the years, notes Mr Alexander, but was further diminished by each of them--until now. These days the Ambridge mill, bought by a Russian conglomerate six years ago, is humming away. Its 400 workers transform solid steel bars produced at another mill nearby into seamless pipes, in demand by oil drillers, among others. The management is taking advantage of a seasonal lull in demand to straighten out kinks in the line and thus increase its capacity.
Other firms are making much bigger bets on the local steel industry. Fifty miles to the north-west, in Youngstown, Ohio, a French firm, Vallourec, has spent $650m building an entirely new mill to make similar pipes. It began production in October, with a staff of 350. Thirty miles in the opposite direction, in Brackenridge, Pennsylvania, Allegheny Technologies is spending $1.1 billion on a new mill to produce stainless steel and other specialty metals. US Steel opened a new $100m mill in Ohio in 2011, also to supply the oil and gas industry. Timken, another steelmaker, is spending $200m on its mill in Canton, Ohio.
The main reason for this flurry of investment lies a few thousand feet below the ground: the Marcellus shale, a geological formation containing huge reserves of natural gas trapped in tiny pores in the rock. It is thought to be America’s biggest gas field, stretching 600 miles along the Appalachians, from New York to West Virginia., but has only recently begun to be tapped, thanks to fracking and directional drilling.
Last year the government of Pennsylvania alone issued permits for 2,484 such "unconventional" wells; 1,365 of them were actually drilled. Wells in the Pennsylvanian part of the Marcellus produced 895 billion cubic feet (bcf) of gas in the first half of 2012, up from 435bcf in the same period in 2011 and almost nothing as recently as 2008.
<h3><table class="image-container float_right" width="200"><tr><td><div class="image"><img src="http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/4f554a68eab8ea3a0b000055-400-300/marcellus-shale.jpg" border="0" alt="Marcellus Shale" /></div>Wikipedia</td></tr></table>Well lubricated</h3>
Driving through the south-western corner of the state, the benefits of this "shale gale" are easy to see. New roofs, fences, barns and tractors have sprouted on many local farms; plenty of shiny new pick-up trucks ply the roads. By one estimate, Pennsylvanians who allow drilling on their land earned some $1.2 billion in royalties last year. Suburban office parks are proliferating outside Pittsburgh, the biggest city in the area, with space being snapped up by oil firms, their suppliers and subcontractors, lawyers and environmental consultants. Even the most basic restaurants are overflowing at lunchtime, a local complains.
All told, the Marcellus already supports over 100,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, according to an analysis by IHS, a research firm. That figure is expected to rise to over 220,000 in 2020. Shale gas gave the local economy a $14 billion boost last year, IHS reckons, and will buoy it by almost $27 billion in 2020. All the extra economic activity generated nearly $3 billion in taxes, it calculates. A new "fee" (the Republican word for tax) on gas production adopted by the state legislature last year should help raise yet more in future.
Pennsylvania is just one of several states enjoying a shale-gas boom. Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas have all seen similar rushes. Shale-gas production in the United States as a whole rose more than fourfold between 2007 and 2010, says the Department of Energy. That has helped push up its gas output by 20% over the past five years, making the country the world’s biggest gas producer. BP, a big oil and gas firm, forecasts that North American shale-gas output, largely from the United States, will grow by an average of 5.3% a year until 2030.
America is already producing so much shale gas that local gas prices have plummeted, from over $13 per million British thermal units (mmBTU) in 2008 to $1-2 last year. They have since recovered slightly (see chart 3, previous page), but America still enjoys remarkably cheap gas by international standards. In 2011 it had the second-lowest gas prices for industry among rich countries, after Canada, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). American factories paid a third of the German gas price and a quarter of the South Korean one, the agency reckons--and prices have fallen further since.
Cheap gas is also translating into cheap electricity, since America’s marginal power supplies tend to come from gas-fired plants. In 2011, according to the IEA, American factories paid roughly half the going rate for electricity in Chile or Mexico and a quarter of the eye-watering Italian price. In New York last year prices were the lowest they have ever been since the state introduced a competitive wholesale market in 1999.
Investors, naturally enough, are keen to take advantage of such bargain prices. They have been pouring money not only into steelmaking but all manner of energy-intensive industries, from plastics to fertilisers. Just up the Ohio from Ambridge, Shell is contemplating building a multi-billion-dollar "cracker" to turn the ethane that emerges with much of the gas from the Marcellus into ethylene, a feedstock for plastics.
On the Gulf coast (another gas hub), Chevron Phillips, Dow Chemical, Formosa Plastics, Occidental Petroleum and Williams are all expanding existing chemical plants or building new ones. A chemical firm called Methanex is dismantling one of its factories in Chile and shipping it to Louisiana to take advantage of low gas prices. CF Industries is expanding its local fertiliser production. Nucor, a steel firm, is building a new mill. Sasol of South Africa hopes to build a refinery in Louisiana to turn gas into petrol. Several firms want to construct facilities in the region to liquefy gas and export it--a dramatic reversal from a few years ago, when the need was thought to be for import terminals.
America’s big pipeline network creates a relatively liquid and fungible national market for gas, so customers far from any shale beds are still able to take advantage of low gas and chemicals prices. Orascom, an Egyptian conglomerate, plans to build a $1.4 billion fertiliser factory in Iowa. Bridgestone, Continental and Michelin are all planning to make more tyres in South Carolina, reversing a long decline.
Better still, the steep drop in the price of natural gas has driven America’s drillers to hunt for oil instead. Rigs are migrating from gassy places like the Haynesville Shale, in Louisiana, to spots where oil is trapped in tiny rock pores, such as the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale in Texas, the Bakken formation of North Dakota and the Mississippian Lime, which sits astride the border between Oklahoma and Kansas. Applying the same techniques to such "tight oil" as to gas-laden shales, they have managed to increase America’s oil production by a third over the past four years, to 7m b/d. The government expects it to grow by more than 1m b/d over the next two years. The output of the Bakken Shale alone has risen from 100,000 b/d in 2008 to over 700,000 now. By the end of this year, BP predicts, America will overtake Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s biggest producer of liquid fuel, meaning oil and biofuels.
The newfound oil brings just as much of a bonanza to the places where it is extracted as the shale gas does. Flights to previously obscure airports in North Dakota--Dickinson, Minot and Williston--are full, as are all hotels within striking distance of the Bakken. Property prices have shot up. The oil industry now accounts for 15% of the local economy, according to IHS, and has brought 72,000 jobs to a state with fewer than 700,000 people.
Despite its huge local impact, America’s shale-oil boom has pushed up global oil production by just a percentage point or two, not enough to reduce the price much. However, it has resulted in a big drop in America’s import bill. IHS calculates that unconventional oil reduced the trade deficit in 2012 by $70 billion, or about 10%.
All told, says IHS, unconventional oil and gas accounted for $238 billion in economic activity, 1.7m jobs and $62 billion in taxes in 2012. That includes the exploration and extraction itself, the supply chains they rely on and the extra spending by all those newly employed oilmen. But it leaves out the second-order effects of cheaper gas, electricity and chemicals. Last year the American Chemistry Council, an industry group, forecast that over the next couple of years cheap gas would spur some $72 billion in new investments in eight gas-hungry industries alone. That, in turn, would lead to a further $342 billion in new economic activity in 2015-20, along with the creation of 1.2m new jobs. The different levels of government, for their part, would rake in an extra $26 billion a year in new taxes.
<h3>An outsized bonus</h3>
In principle, all American companies and consumers benefit from lower energy prices. The effect may not always be big enough to spur heavy new investment, but it might be sufficient to keep American factories with high labour costs going in the face of foreign competition.
Economists at Citigroup and UBS predict that the shale gale will lift America’s GDP growth by half a percentage point a year for the next few years. Indeed, cheap energy is cited as one factor by those who predict a manufacturing renaissance in America. Labour in China is getting more expensive, the argument runs, and so is shipping Chinese-made goods across the Pacific. At the same time ever shorter product cycles confer an advantage on factories located close to the people who consume their goods. Quality is easier to maintain and intellectual property easier to protect if the head office is not far away. Throw in lower bills for power or petrochemicals, and bringing work back home begins to look attractive.
For the moment America’s manufacturing output remains below its 2007 level, and its trade deficit with China is still growing. But some high-profile examples have caught the headlines. GE has moved the production of some white goods from China and Mexico to Kentucky, and Lenovo, the Chinese firm that bought IBM’s personal-computer business, plans to return some manufacturing to North Carolina. In the long run, however, America will not be able to lure and retain investors like these without a better-educated workforce
Click <a href="http://www.economist.com/products/subscribe/CUR22/noreg">here</a> to subscribe to The Economist
<img class="nc_pixel" src="http://pixel.newscred.com/px.gif?key=YXJ0aWNsZT04NmNjZTFkYTg1M2UxNDVjYTYwNjAzYTFlNTBjZjRlYyZvd25lcj1kM2Y2MjMzYjQ4YzhmNmE1ZWQ2NzhjMzU2NDBkZmQxNCZub25jZT1jZjMzY2E3MC03NzgwLTQxNGYtOGUyOC1kY2E0MjkzNDdmMzImcHVibGlzaGVyPThjMDBmYmVlNjFkNWJjZjBjNjA5MmQ4YjkyZWJiY2Ex" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" />

You Searched For "multi feedstock" and got 9 results

Regreen-Excel files IPO papers with Sebi, aims to raise Rs 350 crore

PTI

Lok Sabha approves Energy Conservation Bill to accelerate climate action; opens multi-billion dollar carbon market

Varnika Srivastava

Govt gives in-principle approval to nine ethanol blending projects

IANS

Oil refiners in Asia's economic powerhouses aren't snapping up extra crude even with prices below $100 a barrel as inflation bites

Zahra Tayeb

Naptha Is The Key Ingredient For A Saudi Petrochemicals Boom

The Economist

Mukesh Ambani AGM speech highlights — Reliance Industries announces Jio Glass, Google partnership and plans to build a new smartphone

Prabhjote Gill

America's Energy Bonanza Is Reshaping The Country And Saving The Economy

The Economist

The Federal Reserve says the economy is humming along

Akin Oyedele

America is telling the Fed that the economy keeps improving

Akin Oyedele