Shell Oil company representatives are pressing the White House for a one-year delay in implementing a controversial regulation that would expand America's biofuels mandate beginning in January.
---------- Right, a biodiesel manufacturing plant in Iowa. ----------
Two Shell employees met with administration officials earlier this month to express concerns with U.S. EPA's proposed renewable-fuels standard, according to White House meeting records. Five White House Office of Management and Budget officials and one EPA official attended.
In documents submitted at the meeting, Shell executives said the rule's implementation should be pushed back at least until January 2011 to give renewable-fuels companies and petroleum refiners, blenders and importers time to comply, since the rule has not yet been finished.
The EPA regulation dramatically enlarges the existing renewable-fuels program to 36 billion gallons by 2022 compared with 9 billion gallons in 2008. The 2007 energy law authorizing the regulation also created explicit mandates for emerging cellulosic ethanol and advanced biofuel technologies and specified greenhouse gas reduction criteria for fuels to qualify.
The continuing controversy over EPA's calculation of the greenhouse-gas emissions reductions may have slowed progress in completing the rule. Environmental groups and the biofuels industry are in a tug of war - with EPA in the middle - on the inclusion of indirect international emissions caused when U.S. farmers produce fuel instead of food.
There may be hope: Poet LLC, the world's largest producer of corn-based ethanol, says it has reduced the cost of making ethanol from corncobs instead of from the edible kernels to $2.35 a gallon and expects to get it to $2 by the time it opens a commercial plant in 2012.
The cost-cutting for cellulosic ethanol made from non-food waste material is critical in getting the stuff to market, and getting it to market is critical for meeting the federal renewable fuels standard and avoiding the many environmental and food-chain problems associated with corn and sugar-cane ethanols.
The new standard calls for the U.S. to be using 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels a year by 2020, much of it cellulosic ethanol - up from just 9 billion gallons a year now.
Poet CEO Jeff Broin (above), in an interview with the subscription-only E&E TV environmental news program, said his South Dakota-based company was logging a cost of $4.13 a gallon to make cellulosic ethanol just a few years ago.
At $2 a gallon, he said, cellulosic ethanol will be able to compete in the retail market with gasoline (although it still be will more expensive to produce than ethanol from food crops such as corn and sugar cane).
Broin didn't go there in his interview, but we expect his company is aiming at a cellulosic ethanol price that's a lot lower than $2 a gallon.
One of Poet's potential competitors, cellulosic start-up Coskata Inc., is targeting a $1 per gallon cost for its fuel, which it expects to begin producing in commercial quantities at the end of 2012.
The California agency that sets the American standard for automotive emissions today unveiled a much-improved Website that helps consumers choose the least polluting cars on the market.
---------- Click on art to enlarge. ----------
The California Air Resources Board Website, using information collected for vehicle certification in the golden state, offers a practical and easy to use system that ranks vehicles according to their emission characteristics and provides tools to compare models.
The site allows visitors to view models by technology/fuel type, smog score, global-warming score and engine family. And there's a very smart tool that, with a click of your mouse, allows you to view all the tax incentives available for a particular model.
Last year, the agency adopted a state regulation requiring automakers to affix the Environmental Performance Label to California showroom models that convey the vehicle's smog and greenhouse-gas emissions. The simply illustrated graphic has two rankings, from one to 10, that depict vehicle emissions. The higher the score, the less polluting it is.
Driveclean.ca.gov puts these same rankings in an online format, making them practical for web research. The Website also provides information about clean-car technology and guides users to consider the emissions of the models they are evaluating.
We salute CARB, once again, for taking another significant step to make the world we live in a healthier place.
A team of Tennessee researchers is trying to use algae to produce hydrogen that could be used as automotive fuel.
Despite its energy potential, hydrogen has not taken off as an alternative fuel source because of the expensive, high-energy and sometimes climate-changing processes required to produce it.
The Tennessee team - led by professor Barry Bruce of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville -- wants to use photosynthesis as a clean, efficient and sustainable source of hydrogen.
"We're looking for solutions that already exist in nature," Bruce said. "We're trying to peel back some of the barriers and make them work in the near future."
The team's research, published in last week's issue of Nature Nanotechnology, involves separating a tiny particle used by algae during photosynthesis and coupling it with a platinum catalyst to produce hydrogen when exposed to light.
"Compared to things like converting pharmaceuticals to drugs, this is pretty straightforward," Bruce said.
Bruce's team is not the first to use photosynthetic microorganisms as a hydrogen fuel source, but other researchers have not found a way to efficiently use the reaction at the high temperatures that would exist in a system designed to harness sunlight.
Folding Electric Bike, Steam Speed Racer Other Green Transportation Honorees for 2009
Frankly, my dears, we find year-ending annual lists of the top 10, or 20, or even 50 things quite contrived, subjective and a pain to research and write - but fun, fun, fun to read.
Especially when they include things we would have stuck on 'em.
So we peruse them and this weekend found Time magazine's selection of the top 50 inventions of 2009, a list that includes a quintet of green car items (well, a triplet of cars plus an electric bicycle from way down under and a green unicycle from Honda).
Topping the transport list, in 15th place, was the YikeBike, a lithium-powered, folding two-wheeler from New Zealand - slated for production in very small numbers initially (100 or so) by mid 2010. It looks like a modern two-wheeled adaptation of a kid's Big Wheel trike.
The top automotive ranking was Nissan's Leaf EV, a 5-seat hatchback that we've been writing about for quite some time. It has just begin a 22-city U.S. tour but won't hit the market until this time next year. The Leaf, unveiled in August, will be the first mass-market, affordable (under $35,000 we believe) EV from a major automaker. Time ranks it the 25th best invention of the year.
Honda's U3-X concept, an electric, gyroscopically balanced unicycle controlled by the rider's shifting weight, placed 27th. The automaker showed it last month at the Tokyo Auto Show, and we thought then that it would beat the heck out of Segue's personal transporter for convenience and usability if Honda decided to make and market it.
In 40th position is another green car we wrote about earlier this year, the WorldFirst F3 Formula Three race car developed by at team at the University of Warwick-affiliated Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre using as many biological and biodegradable parts as possible. Thus a steering wheel made of bioplastic reinforced with carrot fibers; brake pads lined with cashew shells, potato-starch based plastic body parts, biodiesel fuel made from chocolate waste and vegetable oils and road-racing speeds of up to 125 miles an hour.
Occupying 50th place on the list is another British "invention," the world's fastest steam car. Imaginatively named British Steam Car, it's a 25-foot-long, dry-lake racer powered by the steam from a dozen boilers piped through more than 2 mile of tubing and putting out sufficient power to goose the rocket-shaped speedster this past August to 151 miles an hour on a Mojave Desert test track at Edwards Air Force Base northeast of Los Angeles.
The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Energy today announced $24 million in research-and-development grants for biofuels, bioenergy and high-value biobased products.
Of the $24.4 million, the Energy Department plans to invest up to $4.9 million with the USDA contributing up to $19.5 million.
The grant recipients announced today will contribute a minimum of 20 percent of matching funds for R&D projects and 50 percent of matching funds for demonstration projects.
Awardees include:
Gevo, Inc. (Englewood, CO) up to $1,780,862: to develop a yeast fermentation organism that can cost-effectively convert cellulosic-derived sugars into isobutanol, a second generation biofuel/biobased product.
Exelus, Inc. (Livingston, NJ) up to $1,200,000: to develop a biomass-to-gasoline technology that represents a fundamental shift in process chemistry and overall approach to creating biofuels.
Purdue University (West Lafayette, IN) up to $933,883: to develop an analysis of the global impacts of second generation biofuels in the context of other energy technologies and alternative economic and climate change policy options.
University of Minnesota (St. Paul, MN) up to, $2,715,007: to assess the environmental sustainability and capacity of forest-based biofuel feedstocks within the Lake States region.
As we've previously reported, the U.S. military is buying advanced biofuels for testing in jet aircraft.
That's because while green electrons will increasingly replace gasoline as the fuel propelling automobiles, the conventional wisdom is that aviation has nowhere to go but biofuels.
Since our last report on biofuels for jet aircraft -- a subject that interests us because biofuel development for the aircraft industry will likely generate better biofuels for automobiles -- there have been some newsworthy events in the biomass and biograss arenas that may be of interest to you.
In California, Ceres recently announced that it plans to expand an advanced trait development project to increase biomass yields of several energy grasses by as much as 40 percent in coming years, while simultaneously decreasing the use of inputs such as nitrogen fertilizers.
Projections indicate that the Ceres traits alone could displace 1.3 billion barrels of oil and 58 million tons of coal over a 10-year period. And depending on cropping practices, 1.2 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer could be eliminated (about the amount of nitrogen needed for 24 million acres of cotton), among other benefits.
The three-year project is expected to begin next month. Ceres researchers will test its advanced traits in a variety of energy grasses such as switchgrass, sorghum and miscanthus.
Also in California, ViaSpace announced it has applied to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark "Giant King" as a unique brand of grass. The company claims the grass has unique characteristics that give it enormous potential as a leading source of low-carbon renewable energy.
Panelists Say Earth-Friendly Future Won't Come Easy For Private Transportation
Although predominately a business-oriented exploration of environmental practices and processes the Opportunity Green 2009 conference at UCLA this weekend promised transportation geeks a look at ideas of personal mobility in a green future.
We're not sure it followed through, as the program became in part a promotion of the Mini E electric vehicle program - thanks to the event's sponsorship by Mini USA - and in part an examination of the obstacles still in the way of truly green mobility.
---------- Passer-by eyes Mini E parked on UCLA campus during Opportunity Green conference. ----------
Thus the opening of the panel entitled "The Next Generation of Transportation," consisted of a somber warning from moderator Dan Neil, the L.A. Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic.
"I'm sorry," he opined, "but I fear that society cannot magically make the wide, sweeping changes needed in transportation without suffering" the same far-reaching government and corporate grab for control "that we see coming in health care."
Event sponsor Mini, of course, disagreed - the company was there to persuade eco-friendly professionals that parent BMW, a fossil fuel-burning company of global proportions, is finding its inner green machine and that the right answers to our transportation needs are on the way.
Spotlighting the Mini E and offering test drives to the participants of the event, Mini collected input from drivers about their experiences to add to the data its in-house green team will use as it plans the BMW's eco-friendly future.
Neil pointed out in the transportation session that the Mini E is a not-ready-for-prime-time electric car - not with that "beautifully upholstered lithium battery pack in the back seat," taking up room most drivers would want for passengers and cargo.
While waiting for final government approval of its sale of the ailing Hummer brand to China's Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Corp., GM is hoping to give it a sales boost with the introduction next month of a flex-fuel engine for the 2010 H3 and H3T models.
Adding E85 (ethanol) capability is part of the GM calls the brand's "evolution to offer responsible ... more efficient" models that don't sacrifice any of the big trucks' all-terrain capabilities.
The 5.3-liter, 300 horsepower flex fuel V8 is a new engine that, GM says, will be a standard offering across the entire 2010 Hummer Alpha series performance lineup.
GM no longer lists Hummer as one of its models - anticipating completion of the brand's sale early next year - but a slightly higher horsepower version of the same engine in the Chevrolet Tahoe is rated at 14 MPG in the city and 19 MPG on the highway - 16 MPG combined - using gasoline. You can figure a 25 percent drop in fuel economy - but lower CO2 emissions - when using E85.
The larger H2 Hummers got their flex-fuel engines with the '09 model launch and fuel economy for the 6.2-liter V8 got a combined city-highway rating of 14 MPG on gasoline, dropping to 10 MPG on E85.
We're not sure the new H3 powerplant will help that much - if Hummer's got a good market anywhere in this country it's Southern California, and there are only 10 ethanol stations in the entire region.
With sales down more than 60 percent this year after falling 50 percent last year and 20 percent the year before that, adding a biofuel-capable, high-performance engine to the Hummer H3 lineup is sort of like trying to patch the Titanic's hull with bandages from the infirmary.
Oh, wait - there also are three new exterior colors for 2010. That ought to help.
Recycling at work: Trash hauler Waste Management Inc. says it will be able to produce up to 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas daily to fuel 300 of its trash trucks using methane gas from decomposing garbage at one of its large Northern California landfill dumps.
The company, which has been involved in waste-to-energy programs for nearly 40 years, has installed a $15.5 million biogas collection and refining system at its Altamont Landfill near Livermore in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The German-made system removes impurities from the methane and chills it to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit to liquefy it so it can be pumped directly into the trash trucks' tanks.
We can't help but wonder how many gallons a weekly residential curbside garbage can would be good for and whether there's any future in, say, neighborhood waste-to-gas programs? Perhaps a monthly voucher good for your garbage's equivalent of LNG at the local dump pump?
In the biggest federal boost for green car development in decades, the 2010 energy budget bill just signed into law by President Obama includes $814 million in funding for various alternative fuel and vehicle programs.
One provision, $283 million for fuel cells and hydrogen fuel, restored more than $100 million that in funds for automotive-specific programs that Energy Secretary Steven Chu initially proposed cutting from the budget.
Chu said at the time he didn't see fuel-cell electric cars as commercially viable in the next 15-20 years.
Automakers and fuel cell developers quickly rallied to persuade Congress that Chu hadn't see the whole picture and promised to have commercial quality fuel cell cars - which use hydrogen for energy production - in the market by 2015.
Other green aspects of the bill include $311 million to help fund various vehicle electrification and advanced internal combustion engine projects and $220 million for advanced biofuel development.
As expected, the bill was cheered by trade groups representing the fuel cell, biofuels and electric drive industries.
Argonne National Laboratory researcher Thomas Wallner explains the R&D center's omnivore engine project.
The nice thing about flex-fuel engines is that if one type of fuel isn't available, the other probably will be.
The not-so-nice thing that automakers with flex-fuels in their lineups don't like to talk about is that they mostly are turned for gasoline, so performance diminishes when ethanol, natural gas or other fuels are used.
The answer maybe the so-called omnivorous engine, set up to burn all kinds of fuels and overseen by a smart engine control unit that changes valve and injection timing and other variables to minimize emissions and maximize performance, and fuel economy, from whatever is exploding down there in the cylinders.
From Gas to Electric, 3-Wheelers to Exotics, Contestants Vie to Build 100 MPG Vehicles
Students from West Philadelphia High School are youngest competitors, but no slouches when it comes to design or performance, as shown by their Alternative category entry, the biodiesel-electric EVX-GT hybrid sports car. The school also has a diesel-electric hybrid Ford Focus in the Conventional class.
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Judges for the Progressive Automotive X Prize contest have winnowed the field in the race for $10 million in prize money for building the best 100 MPG MPH car to the final 43 teams.
The teams will enter a total of 53 vehicles (there are different categories, so multiple entries are possible) in a competition pitting them against one another in a variety of road and safety tests.
All the finalists already have survived two design judging rounds that pared the number of entries from the original 111 teams with 135 vehicles.
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The Progressive Automotive X Prize was launched at last year's New York Auto Show.
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The contest, aimed at inspiring green-car development, was announced more than 18 months ago. It challenges contestants to design, build and operate a commercially viable vehicles that can deliver fuel economy of at least 100 miles per gallon - or the equivalent.
Part of the competition involves presenting a marketing plan to the judges, who will decide if the vehicle has real-world possibilities.
Among them, the final entrants use 14 different fuels including gasoline and electricity, with battery-electric and hybrid-electric the most popular types of powertrains.
In the hybrid-electric category, teams are entering vehicles whose internal combustion engines run on gasoline, diesel biodiesel, ethanol, butanol and compressed natural gas.
There are even three entries that use plain old gasoline as their sole fuel.
For every energy unit in fossil fuel it takes to produce biodiesel, more than four units are contained in the fuel, the National Biodiesel Board said this week, citing the report.
The board is promoting the biodiesel energy improvements study in hopes of influencing the Environmental Protection Agency as it prepares rules to implement the expanded federal renewable fuels standard.
The carbon impact of each fuel is weighed in setting the mix of fuels to be used in the country and the agency is using a four-year-old study to establish baseline numbers for petroleum and biodiesel and the numbers favor gasoline because biodiesel production was less energy-efficient then, the board says.
Lowe's Fernandez Acura driven by Adrian Fernandez and Luis Diaz took top green honors in the American Le Mans Series prototype class as winner of the annual Michelin Green X Challenge for finishing highest with the lowest environmental impact.
Gil de Ferran, Simon Pagenaud and their LMP Acura took the checkered flag in the prototype class at this past weekend's American Le Mans Series final at Laguna Seca, but the increasingly important 'green' flag was captured by another team of prototype Acura drivers.
Edmunds.com photo editor Kurt Niebhur was there to take in the race and filed this report for Green Car Advisor on the environmental aspect of the competition. ---------- Race for the Green
Racing and environmentalism might seem to run on different sides of the track, but the Michelin Green X Challenge just might have something to say about that.
Started in 2008, the Michelin Green X Challenge was formed by the tire maker in conjunction with a major racing series, the American Le Mans Series (ALMS), the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Society of Automotive Engineers International.
As a race within a race, the Green X Challenge awards points to cars - and drivers - based on four different criteria; releasing the least amount of CO2, displacing the least amount of petroleum, excelling in energy efficiency during a race weekend, and last, but by no means least, finishing position.
As testament to the fairness of the rules in both the ALMS and the Green X Challenge, the 2009 Season saw nine different cars from eight different teams representing five different manufacturers. All teams involved ran on E10 ethanol blended gasoline, E85R gasoline blended ethanol, GTL biodiesel or E10 with electric hybrid power.
For the 2009 season, the winners of the Michelin Green X Challenge were the #15 Lowe's Fernandez Acura, driven by Adrian Fernandez and Luis Diaz, in the Prototype category, and the #44 Flying Lizard Porsche, driven by Seth Neiman and Johannes Van Overbeek, in the GT category.
With the success of the Green X Challenge, as well as the focus these days on environmental responsibility, it came as no surprise that Michelin announced it would continue the challenge through the 2010 American Le Mans Series..
Poo power raises its banner again as a Massachusetts biofuels company and an Israeli water recycling firm announce a joint venture to turn biomass into cellulosic ethanol.
Applied CleanTech has developed a process for recycling "wastewater solids," the stuff we inelegantly call poop, into a low-moisture feedstock for ethanol production. Qteros has developed what it believes is a better bug -a proprietary microbe technology for turning biomass into ethanol.
By teaming up, the two figure to be able to market to "every municipality that has a waste water treatment plant," said Jeff Haustor, Qteros' co-founder and manager of the project. the plants can use their accumulated waste to produce fuel that could be used in city-owned vehicles,
"It also helps answer the question of what municipalities can do with their sewage sludge," added Israel Biran, ACT's chief executive (We found one a while ago that was turning it into hydrogen for fuel-cell electic cars!)
The companies say their process improved cellulosic ethanol plant efficiency by up to 20 percent because the reclaimed sludge is easier to convert than other, woody biomass feedstocks.
Bentlley says initial Continental Supersports to hit U.S. shores won't be able to use ethanol.
A quarter-million-dollar, 12-cylinder Bentley with 621 horsepower and top speed of 204 m.p.h. was always bound to be an unlikely champion for environmentally friendly driving. News that Bentley Motors will delay the much-touted flex-fuel compatibility for its new U.S.-bound Continental Supersports isn't likely to help.
The fastest and most powerful Bentley ever, the 2010 Supersports was also due to be the company's first model capable of running on bio-fuels like E85. But a variety of problems means the first Supersports to hit our shores will be limited to a diet of gasoline.
Green Living Advocates Ed Begley Jr., Daryl Hannah Converted Cars for Program
By Danny King, Contributor LOS ANGELES - "It's so easy, even an actor can do it," quipped Daryl Hannah as fellow thespian and environmental activist Ed Begley Jr. installed an alcohol-fuel conversion kit in his Toyota Prius.
---------- Ethanol proponent David Blume and actress Daryl Hannah look on as Actor Ed Begley Jr., adds a bi-fuel conversion kit to his 2001 Prius. ----------
The contraption, which costs $367 for a four-cylinder engine and is about the size of a Walkman (remember those?), essentially reprogrammed the computer in Begley's 2001 Prius so that the hybrid car could efficiently use ethanol - a form of alcohol - in addition to unleaded gasoline.
Installation time? Less than 10 minutes - if you don't have on older car, like Hannah's Trans Am, which required a whole new fuel injection system before it could be converted.
Blume, who wrote the first version of his book "Alcohol Can Be a Gas!" in 1983, has for decades been preaching the virtues of alcohol as a cheaper, more widely available, less-polluting alternative fuel to gasoline.
Congress should require U.S. EPA to consider more widely the environmental effects of biofuels production when deciding which fuels are eligible under the federal biofuels use mandate, according to congressional investigators.
The suggestion is one part of a wide-ranging Government Accountability Office report released today on increased biofuels production. A 2007 law requires the amount of biofuels in the nation's transportation fuels mix to reach 36 billion gallons by 2022.
"For the environment, many experts believe that increased biofuels production could impair water quality -- by increasing fertilizer runoff and soil erosion -- and also reduce water availability, degrade air and soil quality, and adversely affect wildlife habitat," the report states.
"However, the extent of these effects is uncertain and could be mitigated by such factors as improved crop yields, feedstock selection, use of conservation techniques, and improvements in biorefinery processing," it adds. Future increases in use of cellulosic feedstocks -- such as grasses and crop wastes -- can reduce harmful effects, GAO notes.
The 2007 law that boosted the renewable fuels standard requires biofuels to have lower lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions, by varying degrees, than fossil fuels.
But GAO says Congress should weigh amending that law by requiring EPA to more widely assess the environmental effects of increased production. And EPA should use this wider review to determine which fuels qualify under the standard.
Land Rover announced today that a production version of its Range Rover LRX Concept SUV (pictured) will be built, with sales to begin in 2011.
Designed and engineered at Land Rover's Gaydon facility, the new Range Rover will be the smallest, lightest and most fuel-efficient vehicle the company has ever produced.
The three-door SUV will be built in Halewood, near Liverpool, England, subject to quality and productivity agreements, and will be sold in more than 100 countries around the world, the company said in a statement.
In an interview with Edmunds.com's Michelle Krebs this morning, Jaguar Land Rover spokesman Stuart Schorr said the LRX will be the first of four new segment offerings from the company, with Jaguar and Land Rover to receive two each.
He stressed the four will be premium brands, meaning they won't come cheap. Schorr also said that Jaguar Land Rover is committed to hybrids and electrics, but he refused to provide further details.
The LRX Concept debuted at the Detroit Auto Show last year and featured a 2.0-liter diesel-hybrid powertrain, which when running on biodiesel achieved a claimed fuel economy of 60 miles per gallon.
Jaguar or Land Rover Plant to Close
In a related development, India's Tata Motors Ltd. said today it will close one of the three Jaguar Land Rover assembly plants in England by 2014 in a bid to move its money-losing British unit into profitability.
In an article published today, Biofuels Digest takes a look at the creative financing sources being used to fund biofuel research and development today.
---------- Right, mining for coal in Wyoming. ----------
It notes, for example, that many strategies have been mooted, but one perennial is still popular: Have the cheapest way to make a load of sugar. Simple sugars are the new gold, Biofuels Digest points out. If you can make it fast enough and cheap enough, "customers and their own financing backers will beat a path to your door."
Sometimes, though, you can just be the biggest, baddest sugar project in a local market, even if your technology is not quite ready for the 22nd century. The article goes on to describe a Philippine project that went down just such a road, obtaining $30 million in equity from the Japanese firm Itochu and others.
But nothing is getting funded in bioenergy this year quite as fast and furiously as algae-related ventures. These young companies, the "baby bloomers" as Biofuels Digest calls them, have been landing scads of venture capital and public funding, leaving their brethren in advanced bioenergy scratching their heads in wonder, disbelief, and occasionally a bit of spite.
The publication describes how a government-funded project in Arizona landed $70.5 million based on stimulating green jobs in a depressed region, and as a carbon strategy. Not to mention the promise of fuel, and biochar that can be converted into energy at a higher clip than simply burning biomass.
And then there's the funding source we all know only too well: public-private partnerships. They have been a hallmark of bioenergy projects for quite a while, but perhaps never more importantly than now, when local authorities despair over rising costs of landfills, and bioenergy developers are hard-pressed to raise the benjamins for their projects.
A Canadian partnership between the city of Edmonton, the province of Alberta (home province of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper) and Enerkem shows how it can get done, Biofuels Digest reports, not only for a waste-to-energy project, but an R&D center to boot.
The New England biofuels startup Mascoma Corp. said today that it has entered a feedstock deal with Chevron Corp.'s alternative technology arm.
Under terms of the agreement, Houston-based Chevron Technology Ventures will supply Mascoma with lignocellulosic feedstock, including wood chips, switchgrass and agricultural waste. Mascoma plans to use genetically modified bacteria to break down and ferment the hearty biomass into cellulosic ethanol at a demonstration plant in Rome, N.Y.
Chevron -- which already has a research and development alliance with the algal biodiesel maker Solazyme Inc. -- plans to use a thermal process to convert Mascoma's leftover lignin into a liquid petroleum replacement, such as biodiesel or jet fuel, explained Kate Casolaro, a Mascoma spokeswoman.
"People have asked, 'Aren't you using up all of the good stuff?'" Casolaro said. "Actually, lignin is still very energy-rich."
The companies declined to disclose financial details of the feedstock supply deal, which will span two years.
In the meantime, Mascoma plans to hire a new chief executive to begin work on a commercial-scale ethanol refinery in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Last month, former CEO Bruce Jamerson switched to the role of chairman of Lebanon, N.H.-based Mascoma and its Michigan subsidiary, Frontier Renewable Resources LLC. Jim Flatt, Mascoma's former executive vice president of research, development and operations, will serve as the company's acting president until a CEO is hired.
Montana-based Sustainable Oils reports that it has been awarded a defense contract for 40,000 gallons of camelina-based jet fuel for testing by the U.S. Navy.
Sustainable Oils said camelina was selected because it does not compete with food crops, has been proven to reduce carbon emissions by more than 80 percent compared to petroleum jet fuel, and has already been successfully demonstrated in a commercial airline test flight.
In addition, camelina has naturally high oil content, is drought tolerant and requires less fertilizer and herbicides than other biofuels. Studies have shown camelina is an excellent rotation crop with wheat, and it can also grow on marginal land.
Sustainable Oils says it has the largest camelina research program in the nation. It reportedly began in 2005 and has steadily expanded to include more than 140 trials across North America.
In January, Sustainable Oils sourced the camelina for Japan Airlines' historic biojet demonstration flight. That flight's biofuel blend was comprised primarily of camelina.
The upcoming Navy tests are part of a larger effort to test and certify promising biofuels in support of the Navy and Defense Department's strategy to enhance energy security and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
Perhaps one day soon biofuels such as these attracting the military's attention will replace petroleum-based car and truck fuels. One can only hope.
Solazyme Inc., a California company specializing in renewable oil production company, has been selected by the U.S. Department of Defense to research and develop commercial scale production of algae-derived biofuel for the Navy, the company reported today.
---------- A worker pours biofuel at Solazyme. ----------
The contract also calls for delivery of more than 20,000 gallons of Soladiesel F-76 Renewable Naval Distillate fuel to the Navy for compatibility testing over the next year.
F-76 Naval Distillate is similar to diesel fuel and is the primary shipboard fuel used by the Navy.
The contract is significant to green-car proponents in that it gives the alternative-fuel industry more reason to invest algae-derived fuels, which may one day account for much of the fuel powering cars and trucks.
Solazyme CEO Jonathan Wolfson said in a statement that the fuels made with his company's algal technology reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by more than 85 percent versus standard petroleum based fuels.
The company, which is headquartered in South San Francisco, said its Soladiesel F-76 fuel meets the Navy's F-76 specification.
"This program will lead to the eventual certification of Soladiesel F-76 Naval distillate for commercial sale to the U.S. Military," the company said.
Calls placed to Solazyme seeking the dollar amount of the contract and other details were not immediately returned.
The federal-private Clean Cities progam is responsible for promoting a lot of alternatively fueled vehicles over the years and this month added to the tally by handing out $300 million in federal grants that will help various government agencies and commercial fleet operators deploy and fuel 9,000 more - mainly commercial trucks and taxis using compressed andliquid natural gas, propane and E85.
The list is long -agencies in 22 states and muillti-state regions received funding, and a little disheartening - it provides for 542 new alt-fuel stations, but that includes only 1 hydrogen fueling station and 210 electric vehicle chargers -most of them in three locales, Chicago and North and South Carolina.
Only about100 of the 9,000-plus alt-fuel vehicles to be subsidized with the grants will be all-elelctric, including at east 56 neighborhood electrics, or NEVs. But more than 1,000 will be trucks and buses (and a few cars) using propane.
Gas-electric hybrids will account for at leat 738 of the vehicles (the totals aren't exact because the grant descriptions don't always specify how many of which type of vehicle will be purchased with the funds.
Still, the main purpose of the program is to clear up the diesel emissions and other exhaust fumes choking many cities, and that's a goal we applaud, long and loudly.
A rundown of grants, provided by the federal Energy Department, shows that more than 1,400 diesel trucks and buses and several hundred gasoline-burning taxis will be replaced by alt-fuel vehicles. Almost half - 651 - will be LNG trucks replacing diesel trucks in several Southern California locations.
Most will use natural gas, but150 gas and diesel trucks in Maryland and 190 diesel school buses in Kentucky will be replaced with hybrid-electric models.
Teh feds say the programs will help displace 38 million gallons of petrolleum annually.
The entire list of grants, and their descriptions,is available here.
The state of Massachusetts announced today that it intends to ban all biofuels not made using waste feedstocks from qualifying under the state's Clean Energy Biofuels Act of 2008.
The state said that the biofuels mandate will begin July 1 of next year and that mandated volumes would be waived in the first year but that "early action credits" will be provided for all gallons of qualified advanced biofuels, which will be applied to second-year mandate obligations.
And, the state said that its Department of Energy Resources, or DOER, will announce by the end of next year whether the second-year biofuels mandate will be set at the 2 percent or 3 percent level.
But in a surprise move, DOER said that it "will only accept applications for biofuels derived from waste feedstocks," and only then if they yield a 50 percent greenhouse-gas reduction threshold.
Under the proposed regulation, Massachusetts will ban the use of all non-waste feedstocks, which include algae, cyanobacteria, jatropha, miscanthus and switchgrass, or oils produced on a harvestable basis by microorganisms, such as employed by Joule Biotechnologies.
Curt Felix, chief executive of Wellfleet, Massachusetts-based biofuels company Plankton Power, said the DOER ruling guts the state's biofuels act and directly opposes the intention of the state's legislature and its governor.
"DOER has made impermissible all but waste restaurant oil as a biofuel feedstock in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for compliance with the law," he said. "The ruling means that algae fuels and other 'non-waste' feedstocks that clearly meet the legal requirements of the biofuels law will not be allowed to be sold as qualifying product."
That's the way we see it, too.
Moreover, DOER's ruling that the emissions from renewable fuels have to be 50 percent cleaner than petroleum's creates an enormously high threshold that would likely disqualify many good biofuels.
And the 50-percent ruling is completely unrealistic. As Felix put it, "Why not require that next year petroleum has to lower its carbon emissions by 50 percent?"
As the summer of algae continues, start-up Aquentium has announced a 475-acre project in New Mexico, Waxman-Markey climate bill co-sponsor Edward Markey has declared the legislation will generate $1 trillion in private-sector investment, and British Petroleum has plunked down $10 million in green-diesel R&D.
In New Mexico, Aquentium announced today that it has secured 475 acres in New Mexico for the development of an algae bio-fuel production facility. The company is developing green crude, and noted the potential of brackish or salt-water to host algae without disclosing the strains that it will focus on.
In Alameda, California, while touring the Aurora Biofuels laboratory, House Energy Independence and Global Warming Chairman Ed Markey described Aurora's technology as "very exciting," adding that "with a little bit of luck, we'll pass this legislation later this year and create a marketplace for technologies like this."
Unsatisfied with that remark, Markey also predicted: "Our legislation will unleash more than a trillion dollars' worth of private-sector investment." It's wishful thinking, to be sure, but wouldn't it be nice.
And in the United Kingdom, British Petroleum and Martek have agreed to use Martek's core algae technologies as a platform for the production of diesel from microbes.
According to reliable sources, BP will invest $10 million in the research and development of Martek's technologies and will own all intellectual property that results from the R&D. BP's interest in the research being strictly "green" diesel.
For its part, Martek will have an exclusive license to apply the technology in the fields of nutrition, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals.
Recent technological advances might put fuel from forest waste, cornstalks, algae and other biomass into commercial production within just a few years, a National Science Foundation program director said in a paper published today.
John Regalbuto, a chemical engineer at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and director of the NSF catalysis and biocatalysis program, wrote in Science (subscription required) that biomass-derived fuels are not far from being part of the energy mix as a replacement for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.
"If recent technological innovations result in competitive production costs, hydrocarbons rather than ethanol will likely be the dominant biofuel," Regalbuto wrote.
Hydrocarbon fuels can be directly produced from the sugars of woody biomass - forest waste, cornstalks or switchgrass - through microbial fermentation or liquid-phase catalysis, he wrote. They can be produced by pyrolysis or gasification directly from the woody biomass. And they can be produced by converting the lipids of nonfood crops and algae.
"The resulting hydrocarbon biofuels will be drop-in replacements for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel; will give much higher gas mileage than ethanol and will work in existing engines and distribution networks," Regalbuto wrote.
Ethanol, which is produced by breaking biomass into fermentable sugars, is used in the U.S. as an additive to improve combustion, but it does not provide as much energy as traditional gasoline.
"The drawback to using ethanol as a complete replacement for gasoline ... is not only the high cost of its production from cellulose but also its lower energy density," Regalbuto wrote. "Ethanol has two-thirds the energy density of gasoline, and cars running on E85 (85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline) get about 30 percent lower gas mileage."
But the ethanol industry is given heavy government incentives, including a renewable fuels mandate that calls for the use of 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol a year by 2022 and 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels.
But the 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels mandated by the 2007 energy law is not limited to cellulosic ethanol. It "can be met with green gasoline, diesel and jet fuel as well," he wrote.
Every spring, fertilizer runoff from the U.S. Mississippi River floods into the Gulf of Mexico, causing a massive algae bloom that leads to a giant oxygen-deprived "dead zone" (pictured) where fish cannot survive covering some 6,000-7,000 square miles.
Now, Silicon Valley startup LiveFuels Inc. wants to scoop up the algae - simple sea organisms that thrive on the farmland runoff - and use it to feed fish that could be processed for oil, according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal. The process is already used to produce fish-oil dietary supplements.
The article was published just a month after Exxon Mobil Corp. announced it would partner with Synthetic Genomics Inc. to spend up to $600 million working on developing algae to use in biofuels, while start-ups Sapphire Energy and Solazyme Inc. have raised more than $75 million for their own algae-conversion effort.
But unlike those efforts, LiveFuels doesn't envision harvesting the algae directly. Rather, it wants to go a step up the food chain, using algae to feed fish that could be processed for oil.
"It is too expensive for humans to grow algae, harvest it and get the water out and then convert it into a petroleum-like substitute," LiveFuels Chief Executive Lissa Morgenthaler-Jones told the Journal. It is easier and cheaper to harvest algae's oil the way Mother Nature does it - "which is to use fish," she said.
The fish would gobble up the algae and then be harvested, cooked and pressed to extract fish oil - a method already used to produce omega-3 fatty acid dietary supplements.
LiveFuels, of San Carlos, California, is testing out carp, tilapia and members of the sardine family at a fish farm in Rio Hondo, Texas, near the Mexican border. "We want the couch potato of fish, the kind that just eat and eat," Morgenthaler-Jones said.
Once it figures out a good fish mix, LiveFuels wants to release them in Louisiana bays - more than 11,340 kilograms of fish per acre - to feast on the algae blooms.
"This is the sea equivalent of traveling goats: you have algae, we'll bring the fish," she said, referring to companies that rent out goats to eat up grasses on California hillsides to reduce the danger from wildfires.
The company envisions building caged fish farms in parts of the algae blooms in Louisiana bayous and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. The algae would provide a free source of food to raise the fish, and natural tidal flows would churn the algae to keep fresh nutrient-rich water flowing through.
A Southern California algae research startup claims to have made a breakthrough in the effort to find an economical way to produce biofuels from the aquatic organisms.
Sustainable Green Technologies says its researchers have discovered a way to increase oil output in a same-sized area of algae to 50 percent from 15 percent without sacrificing plant growth in the process.
Previous attempts to boost oil content have slowed algae's rapid growth, a trade-off that negates the increase in the content of oil that can be processed into biodiesel and other fuels.
The ability to more than triple the oil output of an acre of algae without increasing the demand for land or nutrients would help bring down the cost of production.
J.B. Hunt Transport Services, the second-largest trucking company, in the country, has signed an agreement that could make it a substantial purchaser of biodiesel from SunEco Energy
, which specializes in making fuel from algae oil.
---------- A SunEco test truck using a 50 percent algae-oil blend. ----------
The companies executed the preliminary purchase pact after results of tests that mixed the algae oil with petroleum diesel. Trucks driven on mixtures of 20 percent and 50 percent algae oil were found to have reduced emissions by 82%, said closely held SunEco
, which is based in Chino, Calif.
J.B. Hunt has almost 3,200 big-rig tractors in use across the country, and weaning them from even 20 percent of their petro-diesel consumption would be a boon to air pollution cleanup efforts.
For Hunt it could also mean lower fuel bills.
SunEco, which entered the biofuels industry a few years, is one of a number of firms developing methods of extracting fuel-grade oil from algae - a rapidly growing acquatic plant material that is relatively rich in oil, doesn't take land away from food crops and isn't particularly water intensive as about 90 percent of the water used to grow the algae is recycled.
Energy Secretary Steven Chu (pictured) announced today that more than $327 million in new funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will go toward scientific research, including more than $41 million to biofuel, fusion and smart-grid research and development.
The biofuels research could directly influence America's dependence on oil by shifting motorists' need for a petroleum-based fuel to a fuel that doesn't produce greenhouse gases and contribute to climate change.
The smart-grid and fusion research could indirect benefit "green" cars by providing a clean source of electricity for electric and hybrid-electric vehicles (most electricity produced in America today is generated by burning coal).
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in Berkeley, California: $11 million for fusion energy research; $4 million for new instrumentation at the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute; and $875,000 for mathematical analysis related to the development of smart-grid technology.
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, in Princeton, New Jersey: $8.8 million for a variety of initiatives in fusion energy research and $5 million for infrastructure improvements at the laboratory.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee: $5.4 million for equipment at the DOE BioEnergy Science Center; and, $180,000 for fusion energy research.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, in Richland, Washington: $867,000 for mathematical analysis related to the development of a smart grid.
Argonne National Laboratory, in Argonne, Illinois: $5.6 million for improvements at the Advanced Photon Source.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California: $810,000 for fusion energy research.
Sandia National Laboratories, in Sandia, New Mexico, and Sandia, California: $688,000 for mathematical analysis related to the development of a smart grid; and $75,000 for fusion energy research.
In March, Chu announced $1.2 billion in DOE Office of Science Recovery Act projects. In July, he announced a new Office of Science Early Career Research Program to be funded with $85 million in Recovery Act funds.
With this third and final round of projects, the Obama administration has now approved projects covering the full $1.6 billion that the DOE Office of Science received from Congress under the Recovery Act.
Hard on the heels of a research project at the University of Delaware looking into carbonized chicken feathers as a hydrogen storage medium for fuel cells comes word of a new transportation-related use for chicken feathers.
Researchers at the University of Nevada say they've found that commercial "feather meal" made from ground-up chicken feathers (and sometimes blood and guts) can be an important feedstock for making biodiesel.
The stuff is used now for animal feed and for fertilizer, and is still good for that after the biodiesel's been wrung from it, the researchers said.
The amount of chicken consumed in the U.S. yields enough meal to produce 153 million gallons of biodiesel a year, the researchers say; extended globally, the potential is for close to 600 million gallons a year.
You can read the entire article in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry if a deep dive into the chemistry of it all interests you.
The short form is that chicken feathers contain fat, and fat can be rendered out and turned into biodiesel.
The process should wind up costing abut $1 per gallon of biodiesel, the researchers estimated.
Engineers have developed a method for creating high-performance membranes from crystal sieves that could increase the energy efficiency of chemical separations up to 50 times over conventional methods and enable higher production rates.
So say a team of researchers led by chemical engineer Michael Tsapatsis of the University of Minnesota, in an article that appeared in today's issue of Science.
The ability to separate and purify specific molecules in a chemical mixture is essential to chemical manufacturing. Many industrial separations rely on distillation, a process that is easy to design and implement but consumes a lot of energy.
Tsapatsis's team developed a rapid heating treatment to remove structural defects in zeolite membranes that limit their performance, a problem that has plagued the technology for decades.
Rosemarie Wesson of the National Science Foundation said that using membranes rather than energy-intensive processes could increase the energy efficiency of producing renewable biofuels such as ethanol and butanol.
Is Now the Time for A Gas Tax to Help Americans Revolt Against King Petroleum?
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Gasoline burners still rule, but interest in hybrids and diesels is climbing along with summer fuel prices, and an impressive number of shoppers are looking at flex-fuel trucks.
Those are the chief findings of just-completed research into the kinds of vehicles Edmunds.com users are researching these days, and it underscores the close tie between gasoline prices and the "green-ness" of the auto market.
As long as the prices of diesel and hybrid cars and trucks remain significantly higher than those of their conventional gasoline counterparts, the level of interest in the alternative models is likely to stay well below interest in gasoline vehicles.
Tipping Point
But as gas prices rise, the payback for hybrids and diesels drops and interest levels creep back up the charts.
Anything to take away some of that pain at the pump seems to be the mantra of many car shoppers..
That's what David Tompkins. Edmunds' executive director of business solutions, found when he and his team looked at the percentage of Edmunds.com users researching the various type of vehicles over the past 18 months.
Tompkins specified "researching" rather than "browsing" because people researching a vehicle are more likely to be buyers than the people who, in the real estate market, would be called "lookie-loos." It's a key difference that some analysts haven't caught onto yet.
Comparing levels of interest shown by shoppers in June of '09, Tompkins found more than twice as much research into hybrid models than into diesels, 9 percent versus 4 percent.
Electric cars and natural gas vehicles didn't register at all, given that the number for sale in the U.S. is so small, but the data suggests that if there were a number of vehicles available - cars and trucks that didn't need gasoline at all - interest in them would soar with fuel prices.
After all, when gas prices were above $4 a gallon last summer, interest in gas vehicles dropped to 84 percent while 26 percent of shoppers researched hybrids, the only significant alternative in the market at the time.
Hybrids began dropping out the picture as gasoline prices fell and by December accounted for only 4 percent of shopper research on Edmunds.com, while gas-burners were back up to 96 percent.
Now, as gas starts what most analysts believe will be a steady upward climb, research into hybrids is rising, hitting up to 9 percent in June.
Gasoline vehicles fell slightly to 93 percent last month, while 4 percent of research in June was directed at diesel vehicles. (The numbers exceed 100 percent because of overlapping research by shoppers who research more than one type of vehicle when trying to select a fuel or powertrain type).
Here's one for the "every cloud..." file, or perhaps the "caveat emptor
" file. Take your pick.
When the EPA recently issued a report anticipating 100 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol production in the U.S. by 2010, it was including 70 million gallons from an Alabama company called Cello Energy.
That's 70 percent of the total U.S. production from one relatively small company, per the EPA.
Bad Move
The government didn't factor in ethanol fraud.
Turns out the Cello was just found guilty in a federal court in Alabama of civil fraud for lying to a major investor about the state of its ability to make ethanol from grass and other woody, non-food materials.
The jury ordered Cello principals to pay $10.4 million in damages after witnesses testified that the "cellulosic" fuel the company was showing to investors was actually fuel derived entirely from petroleum.
From the files of inhabit.com
, the Website that claims "design will save the world," comes this little nugget:
The rice-farming community of Tabontabon, Philippines, has got two taxis consisting mostly of bamboo and run entirely on coconut biodiesel.
According to the community's mayor, who also happens to be the vehicles' owner, the taxis offer residents and visitors alike an alternative to the dangerous, people-piled-on motorcycles that dominate Philippine roads.
The larger of the two taxis seats 20 humans and can run on a gallon of biodiesel for eight hours.
The smaller taxi seats eight passengers, gets about the same fuel economy and has a stereo sound system (that's a big deal in Tabontabon, which has a population of just under 9,000 residents).
A third bamboo taxi is planned, but we cannot promise you that we'll stay on top of this story.
In case you were wondering, this is the same Tabontabon that was controlled by Japanese troops during WWII. A heroic account of U.S. forces taking the town in the face of heavy machine-gun fire makes for compelling bedtime reading.
There wasn't a lot of detail in General Motors Corp. CEO Fritz Henderson's press conference this morning, but he did vow that fuel economy and energy independence will be among the automaker's prime goals as it emerges from bankruptcy.
The company will make advanced battery technology - for hybrids and all-electric vehicles - a core competency, with several announcements about its battery work expected for later this summer, GM said in a statement issued after the press conference.
In his opening remarks in a conference devoted largely to structural changes, Henderson (right) reiterated the the Chevrolet Volt is still on schedule to launch late next year - it will be the first mass-produced "extended range electric vehicle," capable of up to 40 miles of all electric travel. A small gas engine will generate power for the electric drive system once the batteries, charged from the commercial power grid, are depleted.
GM also has promised to build a new small car in the U.S. - we're still speculating in the absence of an announcement by the company - that it will be based on the Spark subcompact initially designed for Latin America and Europe.
Henderson said green initiatives already underway, including the company's work on hydrogen fuel cells, hybrids, biofuels and cleaner and more effcient internal combustion engines, will continue.
And he put to rest,fr now a least, speculation tat the General, hankering for a new image, was planning to change the background color of ts corporate logo from blue to green.
The logo he said, "is not on my desk to change, and I don't have any plans to change it."
We hope though that the company, with the same old logo and much of the same management (although many managemet change annnouncemenmnts are exected in coming week), still will be a "new" GM with a new emphasis on greening its cars and trucks.
For more news and opinion about GM's management and product outlook, check the continuing coverage at our sister blogs, Auto Observer, Inslde Line news and Straightline.
Bill Was Passed by House, but Senate Okay Isn't Certain; Reid Sets December Deadline
We're still trying to get a solid understanding of how the proposed climate and energy bill will affect the cars we drive - now and in the future.
So we offer up a quiet "thank you" to Sen. Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee and just said she'll hold off hearings until after the August recess.
That gives us a little more time to digest the bill (and opponents and proponents more time to argue about it).
To Obama By December
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said today that he wants to place the measure on President Obama's desk before the big U.N. climate talks set for Copenhagen in December - a location sure to give the climate warming non-believers lots to shout about as they stand in the center of Denmark's capital city and throw snowballs).
There's some doubt as to whether the Senate can muster the 60 votes needed to pass the bill - Republicans are pretty much united in their opposition and more than a few Democrats in the Democrat-controlled upper chamber are iffy.
Most Congress watchers figure that if a bill does come out of the Senate, it will be considerably watered down from the House version, necessitating a potentially heated joint committee session to iron out differences and make compromises.
What We Know
Incentives
Right now, the House version has lots of goodies for green car boosters, including a doubling of the federal loan program to help car makers revamp old factories to build a new generation of advanced technology vehicles (plug-in hybrids, battery electric, natural gas and more).The House wants to make a total of $50 billion in loans available.
Nothing says "I really care about the planet" quite like a race car.
ByScott Doggett, Contributor
The American Le Mans Series, contributor of countless tons of greenhouse gases for sport, says it has formed "a relationship" with The Nature Conservancy, a nonprofit organization renowned for its wildlife conservation and environmental regeneration efforts.
"As the Global Leader in Green Racing, the Series believes it is as important to lead with off-track programs as much as it is to lead with on-track innovation that emphasizes energy conservation and sustainability within a highly relevant platform applicable to today's automobile and transportation industries," the race series' organizers said in a press release Thursday.
The relationship has several components: the racing organization, teams and fans can donate money to the conservancy's adopt-an-acre reforestation project in California (which, of course, they could do before the relationship), and they can purchase T-shirts that read "Growing a Greener Tomorrow ... Faster." The shirts will be at American Le Mans Series races and on its Website with a portion of the proceeds going to the conservancy.
As if that weren't innovative enough, the Series says it will soon announce a Green Park program - "a media-driven event" (that usually means that it is being done to attract media coverage) "for each of its race markets."
The program involves planting trees in areas affected by the ALM Series races, specifically a "city park, local children's hospital, track, etc., along with construction of environmentally sustainable playground equipment provided by Lowe's Home Improvement Stores and Michelin."
So in the great American spirit of paying someone else to clean up after you, the race series has taken a page from the playbook of hundreds of other businesses and decided to plant trees in the neighborhoods affected by the emissions it causes.
The series is also promoting use of cleaner fuels and this year is even letting a hybrid race car run.
In Old Town, Maine, on the former site of an ethanol project that went belly-up last November, a century-old mill continues to produce pulp and paper.
But along with its usual pulp-making business, the mill is doing something unprecedented: Developing technology to produce bio-butanol, a jet fuel, from parts of trees that would otherwise go to waste.
Although production is still two years away, Reuters reports that the reinvention of Maine's Old Town Fuel & Fiber mill is already drawing interest as a potential model for a new wave of biofuel companies that could slash dependence on oil, create jobs and reduce the emissions that lead to global warming.
Loggers, the news service reports, see the mill as a lifeline for their crippled industry. Environmentalists see it as a test of the Obama administration's push for a big expansion in biofuels.
And chemical and oil companies are waiting to see if the mill can do what none has done before by extracting sugars from wood chips into a biofuel that many regard as more efficient than corn-based ethanol as a possible substitute for gasoline.
"There has been a lot of interested parties in what we are doing here," Old Town's president, Dick Arnold, told Reuters. "There have been several oil companies that have been interested in our extract and production of biofuels. There has been a number of chemical companies that have expressed the same desire."
Behind the project is Lynn Tilton, a New York venture capitalist who owns one of the nation's largest helicopter makers. Tilton's Patriarch Partners bought the mill in November, invested about $40 million and shifted its focus to cellulosic bio-butanol.
According to Reuters, Tilton can use bio-butanol in her own helicopter and aircraft businesses but is eyeing a potentially huge market after Congress decreed that the United States must use 21 billion gallons of "advanced" biofuels such as cellulosic ethanols, bio-butanol and "green gasoline" a year by 2022.
The Reuters report is well worth the time it takes to read.
It's clear that President Obama, who hails from a corn-growing state, is a big ethanol supporter - he's said so in a number of speeches, beginning back when he was running for the job.
Now it appears that the ethanol lobby also has a lot of support in Congress.
The proposal, which would be added to the energy and climate bill now being marked up in the House, comes as Democrats seek to mollify farmers and biofuels producers who claim the so-called land use assessment policy would unfairly penalizes them because it isn't applied to other types of fuels. They also have argued that the methodologies for assessing the carbon impact of land use changes haven't yet been proven accurate.
Proponents of the so-called land use assessment procedure maintain that demand for corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel can result in land covered by forests and grasslands - land that soaks up carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases - being plowed under to make room for biofuel crops that need fertilizers and insecticides that help create more greenhouse gases.
Assigning carbon impact assessments to the various alternative fuels is part of the way the EPA judges whether a fuel is one of the renewable fuels whose use is mandated by the 2007 federal energy bill. If the carbon footprint is too high, a fuel is excluded from the renewables classification.
Seattle, one of the country's major municipal purchasers of biodiesel - used for the fire trucks, pickups and other diesel-burning vehicles in its city fleet - is thinking of switching from plant-based fuel to one made from waste grease.
----------
Biodiesel made from used cooking grease is being tested in Seattle's city fleet.
----------
The city, noted for green initiatives that include a world-class mass transit system and a determination to foster use of electric and hydrogen vehicles, is concerned that soy-based biodiesel isn't all that good for the environment, according to a recent report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Not all alternative fuel are the same, city fleet director Brenda Bauer told a reporter for the city's major newspaper. "We are trying to stay ahead of the curve in terms of finding fuels that are responsible fuels that will help us reduce our petroleum consumption."
Crop-based biofuels, including diesel made from soy oil, have been heavily criticized for the amounts of land, water and energy use in their production.
By using locally produced biodiesel made from used cooking oils and other waste grease - let's call it greasel fuel - the city could be further reducing its carbon footprint.
The city uses about 73,000 gallons of biodiesel a month and will temporarily stop using the soy-based stuff while its tests grease-based fuel to see if it will work as well.
Although it has less of an environmental impact, the fuel isn't without problems of its own, one being the increase in "grease rustling" that's been experienced in communities where "greasel" fuel use has made grease-collecting into a profitable business.
Another is that greasel tends to coagulate and not run through fuel lines very well when temperatures fall - and it can get fairly chilly in Seattle.
Molecular genetics wasn't our best subject in school, so we're not sure just exactly how important this might be, but if it can indeed help streamline production of cellulosic biofuels that use waste material such as wood chips as the raw material, then we cheer the Israeli scientists who announced last week preliminary research that shows bacteria can be programmed, much like Pavlov's dogs, to respond to certain signals in a predetermined fashion.
The researchers found that certain bacteria are genetically hard-wired to anticipate stages in a sequence of events and alter their "behavior" to respond to a new situation before it occurs.
While that appears to make bacteria smarter than many business and political figures, the real significance of this "adaptive anticipation," the researchers said in a paper published in the journal Nature (subscription required) last week, is that it could increase the efficiency of a variety of microorganisms including those used to ferment plant material in biofuels production.
The breakthrough came while researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science and Tel Aviv University were studying the behavior of e. coli in the digestive tract. The researchers found that one type of sugar the bacteria encounter - lactose - invariably is followed by a second type, maltose, and that when the bacteria encounter lactose, the event not only triggers the genes that enable it to digest that sugar, it puts the gene for digesting maltose into a sort of stand-by mode.
But if the maltose is encountered first, the bacteria don't activate the lactose genes - implying that the bacteria have "learned" to get ready for maltose when encountering lactose.
The researchers began removing maltose from the process, and, after scores of trials, the bacteria "learned" that maltose didn't always come after lactose. The bacteria then eliminated the anticipatory activation of the maltose digestive gene, turning it on again only in those instances when maltose actually was introduced into the process.
Catalytic Process Uses Almost No External Energy, Developer Says
A Wisconsin company's energy-efficient process for making biofuels has won a 2009 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge award, the Environmental Protection Agency announced this morning.
The award for work by a small business was won by Virent Energy Systems, of Madison, Wisc.
The company's catalytic process for making gasoline, diesel or jet fuel from plant sugars or cellulose requires little energy other than that generated internally by the fermentation of the plant biomass.
Virent said that its process can be modified to generate different fuels based on current market conditions and can compete economically with current prices for conventionally produced petroleum-based fuels.
The annual awards are administered by the federal Environmental Protection Agency and entries are judged, by the chemical society and its ACS Green Chemistry Institute, on the basis of their potential for reducing pollution or reducing environmental impact.
The 2009 awards are to be presented in a ceremony tonight at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Wash
Like every other alternative fuel, hydrogen has its fans and foes, its pluses and minuses, its ups and, recently, its downs.
After being the favored ground transportation fuel of the future for most of the last eight years as the Bush administration pushed development of hydrogen fuel cells for automotive use, nature's most abundant - albeit hard to isolate - element has been cast aside by the Obama administration.
The new president's Nobel-winning energy secretary, Steven Chu, has proposed in his 2010 departmental budget to eliminate funding for automotive hydrogen programs - that's $100 million - and instead to focus hydrogen research on fuel cells to generate power for homes, businesses and other stationary power users.
For transportation, his choice of fuel research programs to back is no surprise, he's long been a supporter of biofuels and electric cars.
----------- Honda says its FCX Clarity (below, right) is production-ready, lacking only a fueling infrastructure and lower-priced components that can only come with increased production of such cars. ----------
That's got the hydrogen car crowd - and we confess to a great fondness for fuel cell vehicles ourselves - up in arms and questioning the validity of Chu's apparent decision to "pick winners" by concentrating DOE research finding on biofuels and battery-electric, or plug-in, cars while announcing that his team doesn't see any short-term chance for hydrogen to emerge as a widely available and used fuel.
But Chu, powerful as he is sitting atop the nation's official energy policy agency and operating with the endorsement and backing of the president, isn't all-powerful. He has to answer to Congress, and Congress is subject to lobbying.
So the pressure politics have begun.
Short-Sighted?
With DOE budget hearings about to start, the chairman of the Senate's energy and Water Appropriations Committee - the committee that sits in judgment over the energy Department budget - has come out swinging.
A fan of hydrogen, Sen. Byron Dorgan recently called the DOE's budget recommendation to eliminate automotive hydrogen research funding "a very short-sighted recommendation." Hydrogen and fuel cells "are part of this country's future," said the North Dakota Democrat.
Backing Dorgan in support of restoring at lest some hydrogen programs funding for automotive research are automakers with huge investments in the technology.
They include Toyota and Honda, no slouches when it comes to making informed choices about technologies, as well as Daimler and our own General Motors Corp.
(We say "our own" because as part of the taxpaying public, we now share ownership of the faltering car company with the rest of America.)
Unlikely Allies
GM, in case you've been living in a cave or up in space for the past few weeks, is in bankruptcy now and the government, as its majority owner, has a rather big stake in the company's survival and future success.
Granted, GM hasn't been all that great at picking the proper trends and technologies as it looked to the future.
But this time the General is on the same team as Toyota and Honda rather than turning up its nose and sniffing that the Japanese car companies don't know what they are talking about.
Ferrari has disclosed plans for a hybrid concept car, the British magazine Autocar
reported Tuesday, with the unveiling likely to occur before the end of this year.
Ferrari CEO Amedeo Felisa was quoted as saying the vehicle won't debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show, but probably at an American show "soon thereafter."
The Frankfurt show will be held Sept. 17-27 this year. The first major American auto show to be held thereafter will take place in Los Angeles Dec. 4-13 (Dec. 2-13 if you count the press days).
Earlier this month Autocar revealed patent drawings for a hybrid, all-wheel-drive concept car and a turbocharged engine.
Felisa reportedly told Autocar that, in order to meet stringent 2014 European emissions regulations, Ferrari is looking at three solutions. They are: turbocharging, biofuel cars and hybrids.
Ferrari has already produced a car that can run on biofuel. It is the ethanol-gulping F430 pictured here, which debuted at the Detroit Auto Show in January of last year.
As for a Ferrari hybrid, Felisa first spoke of one more than a year ago during an interview with the Germany's Auto Motor und Sport. But soon after the automaker's PR people said Felisa misspoke.
Fill'er Up With That Wheat Straw Gas, Please, While I Sip My Wheat Grass Smoothie
Drivers at a single Shell gas station in Ottawa, Canada, can fill their cars and trucks for the next month with what the fuel company claims is the world's first retail blend of gasoline and 10 percent cellulosic ethanol.
The ultra-low CO2 cellulosic ethanol, made from wheat straw, comes from a pilot plant in Ottowa operated by Iogen Energy Corp. in partnership with Shell.
A Shell spokeswoman said the station will only be pumping the "CE10" biofuel blend for the next 30 days because the plant can only produce 40,000-liters a month (this is Canada remember - metric system), equal to 10,567 gallons, and that's not enough to spread the supply around.
In a statement issued this morning, Dr.Graeme Sweeney, Shell's executive vice president for future fuels, said that "while it will be some time before general customers can buy this...we are working with governments to make large-scale production economic."
Shell and Iogen, said the spokeswoman, "felt a month was sufficient to highlight the opportunity."
The Shell station is selling the regular grade of CE10 blend for 92.8-Canadian cents per liter, the U.S. equivalent of $3.16 per gallon and on par with brand-name conventional gas in the area.
Downsizing Won't Kill Automaker's Initiatives, but Demand for Quick Profits Could
As General Motors Corp. begins reshaping itself in a complex, government-assisted bankruptcy process that leaves taxpayers as its major investor, one thing remains clear -- the automaker's future depends on its ability to develop cars that are both fuel-efficient and desirable.
To do so in an era of economic uncertainty marked by sluggish car sales, wildly fluctuating fuel prices and consumer confusion about the best car-buying strategies as we wait for the new generation of advanced technology vehicles to appear is going to require a degree of discipline that so far has been woefully lacking at GM and other domestic auto companies.
So it was heartening to see this morning that GM accompanied its filing for a pre-planned Chapter 11 reorganization
with the promise that even as it pares expenses to the bone it would "continue and increase its investment and leadership in fuel economy and advanced propulsion technologies."
---------- Chevy Volt "extended range EV' is one of the cars on which GM is betting its future. ----------
The "leadership" claim is a bit much -- marketing never stops.
But the rest of that vow, contained as it was in a statement undoubtedly edited and approved by the Obama administration, shows that GM so far is on the right path, and is pursuing it with government backing.
The Chevrolet Volt, GM's gamble on a potentially game-changing fuel-efficiency technology, will continue on schedule for launch in late 2010, according to this morning's statement.
Additionally, GM said it will continue development of conventional gas-electric hybrid technology, with 14 models due in the market by 2012, and will continue outfitting cars and trucks with flex-fuel systems so that by 2014 a full 65 percent of its vehicles will be capable of using ethanol or other alternative fuels, such as biodiesel.
We know GM also has been working on battery-electric and fuel-cell electric drivetrains and expect that R&D effort to continue as well.
Go Long
There will be many stumbling blocks to be overcome in the GM bankruptcy, but with the purse-string controlling government so far signing off on the automaker's intent to make fuel-efficiency and the development of petroleum-free powertrains a centerpiece of its recovery effort, things are getting off to a good start.
If the Feds succumb, though, to the cult of immediacy that has hamstrung so much of American industry for so long -- the demand by investors and market analysts for ever-increasing growth and profitability at the expense of solid long-term planning -- then all bets are off.
For decades, the big oil companies and the farm lobby have been fighting about ethanol, with the farmers pushing to produce more of it and the refiners arguing it was a boondoggle that would do little to solve the country's energy problems.
--------- Right, an ethanol plant in South Dakota. ---------
So why are technicians for British Petroleum, the giant oil company, now working at an experimental ethanol plant in the old Louisiana oil town of Jennings, helping to make it more efficient?
The erstwhile enemies, it turns out, are gradually learning to get along, as refiners increasingly see a need to get involved in ethanol production, according to a report in Wednesday's New York Times. Ethanol, made chiefly from corn, now represents about 9 percent of the country's market for liquid fuels.
And the percentage is growing year after year because of federal mandates. With the nation's thirst for gasoline, and the ethanol that is blended into it, expected to revive when the economy does, the oil companies want to be in a position to take full advantage.
The interest expressed by big oil companies is coming in the nick of time for small companies that desperately need capital and cannot find it these days in the private markets.
Space will be the final frontier for tourists if Sir Richard Branson has his way.
Getting there won't be easy on the wallet - but it won't be so hard on the planet, either, contends the British adventurer and Virgin Group founder, who touched down at Washington's National Press Club recently.
"Very environmentally friendly," Branson said, according to a Greenwire report (subscription required). "The [carbon] cost of us putting someone into space will be less than flying to London and back on a commercial plane."
Five years and $150 million into his Virgin Galactic venture, Branson has a bona fide spaceship to show for it.
Over the past few months, pilots have conducted several test flights of the space-launch vehicle Eve, a model of which is pictured here with Branson. The mother ship is designed to ferry SpaceShipTwo and its two pilots and six astronauts more than 50,000 feet above the Earth's surface.
From the stratosphere, SpaceShipTwo would blast to a sub-orbital altitude of about 360,000 feet using hybrid rockets.
A "whole new era of space travel" may be nigh, boasted Branson, who plans to go boldly where just a few tourists have gone before. SpaceShipTwo is slated for completion by the end of the year, he said, followed by about 18 months of testing. A ticket to ride is $200,000.
Eve's jet engines will run on kerosene initially but are also capable of running on butanol, a biofuel that can be made from algae. SpaceShipTwo's rockets will burn nitrous oxide - but only briefly - as the spaceship would require no fuel for takeoff, re-entry and landing.
Carbon-dioxide emissions per passenger on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight would be about 60 percent of a passenger's carbon footprint on a round-trip flight between New York and London. About 70 percent of a spaceflight's CO2 emissions would come from mother ship Eve, which must carry SpaceShipTwo into the stratosphere.
Most Americans likely expect the price of gasoline to one day reach the record highs we saw last summer. The question is not so much will the price soar again, but rather when will it.
According to the Energy Information Administration's 2009 outlook report released today, oil prices will return to $110 per barrel in 2015 and could go up to $200 per barrel in 2030, depending on supply
You'll recall that the nationwide price for a gallon of regular unleaded topped $4 when the barrel price of oil reached $147. But with taxes on gasoline expected to rise, the per-gallon price of gasoline will likely be significantly higher than $4 when the barrel price of oil revisits $147.
World energy consumption - the driving force behind higher gasoline prices - is forecast to increase by 44 percent from 2006 to 2030, the report says, with almost two-thirds of that coming from developing countries and fossil fuels that continue to dominate energy supply.
Developing countries are projected to increase demand by 73 percent by 2030 in the outlook's base reference case - EIA's analysis under current laws and policies - whereas developed countries will grow by 15 percent, the report says.
Liquids, including biofuels, will reportedly continue to be the primary energy source in the world's transportation sector unless there are "significant technological advances" and despite several policy changes.
Unconventional resources such as oil sands and biofuels will become increasingly competitive, accounting for about 13 percent of the world's liquid supply by 2030, according to the report.
The U.S. in particular will see an increase in biofuels, mostly in advanced cellulosic rather than corn-based ethanol, acting Administrator Howard Gruenspecht said at the report's release event in Washington.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the 2009 Hydrogen Road Tour today at Stop 6 of a 9-day, 28-stop, 1,700-mile road trip, telling a group of reporters at the site of the state's first integrated (H2 and gasoline) station that California remains committed to a future where hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles replace gassy rides regardless of what Washington does.
Speaking at a Shell station in West Los Angeles, Schwarzenegger reminded reporters that the California Air Resources Board, which sets vehicle-emissions standards for the state, recently passed a low-carbon fuel standard - the world's first such standard.
It will, he said, ensure that the cleanest fuels, including hydrogen, will always have a strong market in California.
"And the reason why this is so important is that on the federal level, they [politicians] make decisions based on where the oil price is. That means that sometimes the federal government, when the oil price goes up, they go in the direction of renewable energy and alternate fuels. And when the oil price goes down, they abandon those policies," the "Governator" said, his back to a row of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles made by Daimler, Honda, Toyota, KIA, Volkswagen and Nissan.
"Well we don't do that here in California. We only march in one direction and that is forward. And we're not going to slow down. In 2010, we will have seven new hydrogen refueling stations in California and we will invest another $40 million over the next two years in hydrogen stations."
The governor reminded the automotive press that 20 percent of the new vehicles sold in the United States are sold in California, which is home to 25 million cars and trucks. (Those vehicles, not incidentally, consume 50 million gallons of gasoline and diesel a day and produce 40 percent of the state's greenhouse gases.)
As a result of California's vehicle market share, and that fact that Washington often follows the state's lead regarding tailpipe-emissions regulations, automakers can count on there being a large market for hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles and companies considering investments in an H2-refueling infrastructure can rest assured there will be vehicles requiring the fuel, he said.
There's nothing like $2.4 billion in federal grants to attract lots of applicants.
In one of the U.S. government's biggest efforts at shaping industrial policy, the Energy Department has been soliciting applications since mid-March for $2.4 billion in funding aimed at turning America into a battery-manufacturing powerhouse.
At the deadline last week, the department had received 165 applications. Companies vying for the money include General Motors Corp., Dow Chemical Co. and Johnson Controls Inc. Michigan, Kentucky and Massachusetts are among the states weighing in with applications.
When the winners are decided - as soon as the end of July - the Energy Department may anoint Livonia, Mich., or Indianapolis or Glendale, Kentucky, as the future U.S. hub of car batteries.
Given the availability of these funds, and Energy Secretary Stephen Chu's May 7 proposal that more than $100 million be cut from his department's hydrogen program in the 2010 budget the administration is submitting to Congress, you might think the National Hydrogen Association would wonder if funds needed for fuel-cell development are being diverted to electric vehicles.
"That's not the case," Debbi Smith, the trade group's executive vice president told us today. "The recent actions by Secretary Chu are actions that he had to make in a tough fiscal climate, but it is not the opinion of the automakers at all and it's not the opinion of our members here at the National Hydrogen Association or of the U.S. Fuel Cell Council."
Smith noted that there have been statements by various automotive executives that it is "not as though one technology is ready more than the other right now. Batteries are also not ready for prime time."
It's going to take biofuels, batteries and fuel cells - "all three of them, if we're serious about reducing our nation's dependence on oil and if we're serious about reducing greenhouse gases," she said. "It's going to take just about everything we can throw at these huge problems."
The Detroit 3 and eight other major automakers adamantly oppose a bill in Congress that would force them to produce more flex-fuel vehicles, and their opposition has merit.
At a time when lawmakers and the White House are pressuring America's carmakers to produce vehicles that are fuel efficient and competitively priced, Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman of California has introduced legislation that would create an "open fuel standard" requiring automakers to produce more cars and trucks capable of running on high blends of alternative fuels, assuming the fuels and infrastructure supporting them are available.
Democratic Representative Eliot Engel of New York says that's not enough. He's said that he might introduce legislation that would require half of new U.S. cars and trucks to be flex-fuel capable starting in 2012, with the mandate jumping to 80 percent by 2015 - regardless of fuel availability.
To count as flex-fuel capable, internal combustion engines would need to be able to run on blends of E85 (a fuel mixture containing 85 percent ethanol by volume) or M85 (a methanol fuel mixture), and diesel vehicles would need to be able to operate on biodiesel.
The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group representing the automakers, contends that adding flex-fuel technology will increase the price of each vehicle by at least $100 to $300.
A high-volume engine such as the one pictured here can be converted to flex-fuel capability for $300 or less, the alliance says. But Alliance President Dave McCurdy noted in a letter to members of Congress last week that a mandate would increase costs dramatically because the technology cannot be applied easily to some powerplants.
All politics is local, which explains why Republican and Democratic legislators in corn states are joining forces to oppose some parts of a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposal to measure the "life-cycle emissions" created by the production of a fuel's feedstock (say, corn).
It stands to reason that the EPA must get a better handle on the overall environmental impact of the complex string of related but hard-to-measure events that come into play as more crops are grown for fuel feedstocks. That means studying such things as the increased acreage needed to grow feedstock crops, associated well drilling, mining, transporting and refining the biofuel and how it performs when burned to power vehicles.
It also is reasonable for regulators to get a better understanding of "indirect land use change" (ILUC) that can occur as corn, soy and other crops are cultivated for use as biofuel feedstocks rather than being directed into the traditional food chain.
Environmentalists say the increased use of traditional food crops as biofuels feedstocks can prompt other farmers to plant replacement crops. Too often, environmentalists contend, that new acreage is carved out of native forests and grasslands that now help soak up carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said that the National Renewable Fuel Standards proposed earlier this month - including the ILUC proposal - are still subject to peer review and change.
But ethanol industry representatives don't want to wait for the EPA rules. On Thursday, several ethanol industry told members of the House Agriculture Committee that Congress should restrict what the EPA can do when it comes to the ILUC rule.
Brian Jennings, executive vice president of the American Coalition for Ethanol told committee members that the proposed ILUC rule was based on "a controversial and untested theory," and that "ideology is getting ahead of science" as the EPA and the California Air Resources Board craft their low-carbon fuels initiatives.
The Website AgricultureOnline is reporting that House Ag Committee Chair Collin Peterson is angry that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed a framework for assessing the greenhouse-gas footprint of ethanol.
The Minnesota Democrat (left) has vowed to use his clout to crush the historic Waxman-Markey climate-change bill - unless Congress passes a bill that would revoke the EPA's proposed rules.
Last Thursday, the committee introduced a bill that prevents the EPA from holding U.S. ethanol and biodiesel responsible for deforestation of tropical jungles. The EPA has thrown so-called indirect land use into its first estimates of the carbon footprint of fuels.
That would make corn ethanol from new plants and much of the nation's soy-based biodiesel no longer eligible for federal mandates that require oil companies to use biofuels. The mandates, called the Renewable Fuel Standard in the 2007 Energy Bill, require the nation to use 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022.
The next day, Peterson told AgricultureOnline that he will work to defeat any climate-change legislation on the floor of the House of Representatives until his "Renewable Fuel Standard Improvement Act" becomes law. And he has let the House leadership know how he feels.
"I've told them I want this passed. I want it signed by the president before I'll support anything else," he told the Website Friday.
The Democrat has threatened to aid Republicans in shooting down Waxman-Markey, and said he thinks he might have enough votes to defeat the bill when the full House votes on it.
Today we'll fill you in on a proposed plant in Rialto, California, that would turn urban woody green waste and processed sewage sludge into low-carbon synthetic fuels. And, while burning that waste, the plant would generate 35 megawatts of renewable electricity for sale to local electric utility companies.
The plant proposed by Los Angeles-based Rentech Inc. would produce about 600 barrels per day of pure renewable synthetic fuels that would be compatible with existing fuel pipelines and engines.
Rentech executives describe the process as turning low-value biomass into high-value energy and power. Rentech has been operating a demonstration plant in Commerce City, Colorado, that produces 420 gallons a day of synthetic jet and diesel fuel.
Toyota reported its first financial loss in decades and is forecasting another hefty loss for this year, but the still world's largest automaker is protecting product development and R&D that pertains to small cars and advanced technologies, particularly those related to the environment and energy.
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Toyota says it won't abandon advanced vehicles such as this electric car concept.
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"We will maintain a high level of R&D in areas we consider indispensable to our future -- advanced, cutting-edge technologies in environment, energy and safety," Takahiko Ijichi, Toyota Motor Corp. senior managing director, said in a conference call Friday morning with analysts and media.
Ijichi said Toyota will continue work to cut costs in its development and production of compact vehicles and hybrids. The next-generation Toyota Corolla will be a model for such cost-cutting, he said. And lessons learned on the Corolla, which initially launches in Japan followed by the U.S. and Europe, will be transferred to all other Toyota and Lexus models.
He said Toyota is continuing cost reduction of its hybrid systems. He noted that size and weight reductions of the new third-generation Toyota Prius reduced costs by 30 percent compared with the second-generation model. Toyota has said it plans to introduce as many as 10 new hybrid models by 2010 and a battery-electric city car by 2012.
Not only will Toyota keep spending on green initiatives, it intends to accelerate development next-generation technologies in environment, energy and safety, with environmental goals topping its priorities list, Ijichi said.
Its goals include the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, mass-production of small battery-electric electric vehicles and the development of next-generation alternative fuel vehicles including fuel-cell electric cars and vehicles use biofuels.
Engineered Bacteria, Yeasts Can Slash Costs, Hasten Commercial Development
Cellulosic ethanol developer Mascoma Corp.
says it has achieved a breakthrough in enzyme development that moves the industry "years, or even decades" closer to low-cost, high-volume processing of biofuels from non-food feedstocks.
The New Hampshire-based company, in which General Motors Corp. is a key investor, is working on what is called consolidated bioprocessing, or CBP, which uses laboratory-engineered microorganisims to produce the otherwise expensive commercial enzymes needed to break down cellulose into a substance that is then processed into ethanol and other biofuels.
Mascoma said in an announcement today that its "major research advances" will permit the production of both the so-called cellulase enzymes and the resulting ethanol in a single step.
Get set for another round of debate on the impact biofuels have on the environment.
The EPA releases proposed rules today to implement the national mandate to increase the use of biofuels but has found that key biofuels made from crops won't hit the CO2 reduction targets set by the 2007 law.
All have fewer "lifecycle" emissions than do petroleum-based gasoline and diesel fuel, but the EPA is considering indirect land-use impacts - the impact of cultivating land for biofuel feedstocks - in measuring the total greenhouse gas emissions from production of fuels such as corn-based ethanol and soy-based biodiesel.
While the '07 law requires ethanol to produce 20 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions than gasoline, the EPA proposal finds the most common type of corn-based ethanol is 16 percent better but could be made to meet the 20 percent goal.
It's been four years since David Ramey fueled up his unmodified 1992 Buick Park Avenue with butanol derived from biomass and made a 10,000-mile road trip that took him from Blacklick, Ohio to San Diego and back.
The trip, which included stops along the way to court members of the media and environmental agency personnel, was conceived as a way to prove that "biobutanol" had inherent environmental and fuel-economy benefits over its better-known cousin in the green fuels family, ethanol.
Flash forward to 2009 and biobutanol still isn't getting the respect that Ramey and other proponents say the fuel deserves. Ramey, for example, continues to make demonstration drives - he'll fuel up a vehicle with biobutanol for the Fourth off July parade in nearby Gahanna, Ohio.
"There has been very little funding for biobutanol research over the past 30 years and we are simply in the infancy of this new technology," Ramey wrote in a recent email to Green Car Advisor. "Many are talking about biobutanol but few are producing it."
That situation is about to change, according to biobutanol backers who describe the fuel as a worthy challenger to ethanol. When properly formulated, they say, butanol burns cleaner than ethanol, has a higher energy density, can be transported in existing petroleum-product pipelines and won't hurt seals, gaskets or other parts of internal combustion engines.
Algae cultures that could lead to green oil products are being grown in a UC San Diego laboratory.
They call it "green gold," and its proponents are betting that the light, sweet crude oil that can be extracted from farm-cultivated algae will help the world to cut its dependence upon dirty and increasingly expensive gasoline and diesel fuels that are extracted from fossil fuels.
And, on Tuesday, San Diego -- which envisions itself as the green equivalent of the traditional oil industry's Houston -- unveiled a "broad-scale research effort" to turn that dream into a reality.
Though no dollar figures for financial support were discussed during Tuesday's press event on the UC San Diego campus, the research effort will build upon the creation earlier this year of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology. The center was created to facilitate green fuels research being conducted by 272 scientists at UC San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute and other San Diego universities, research organizations and for-profit companies.
SD-CAB estimates that algal research in San Diego County already generates $16.5 million in payroll and $33 million in overall economic activity. Tuesday's announcement of an even broader research and development effort was made by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox.
"By sharing and facilitating the interactions of these multiple researchers through this center, we hope to make sustainable algae-based fuel production and carbon-dioxide abatement a reality within the next five to 10 years," Fox said. "This consortium will strengthen our ability to obtain grants and attract resources to the area. Algal biofuels will allow us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and other economies, and will provide opportunities for a new economy and workforce."
It is a tall order, but San Diego claims to have the R&D nucleus needed to move toward that goal.
The Xconomy blog counts at least nine algal research efforts under way -- including work being done by defense contractors SAIC Corp. and General Atomics (which is better known as the creator of the unmanned Predator aircraft in service in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan).
Rule is Part of State's Controversial Greenhouse Gas Regulation Plan
By John O'Dell, Senior Editor
Despite an intense lobbying campaign from biofuel manufacturers, particularly in the ethanol industry, California's top air quality regulator approved the nation's first low-carbon fuel regulations Thursday, launching a plan that will require the carbon content of fuels used in the state to be reduced by10 percent by 2020.
The California Air Resources Board voted 9-1 to approve the new rule, which is likely to take months - or more - to fully implement and could well be subject to lengthy litigation by opponents who see it as biased against ethanol.
It is part of the state's effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions originating in California by 25 percent and is designed to encourage use of low- and no-carbon fuels such as natural gas, hydrogen and electricity and to slash use of gasoline for transportation in the state during the coming decade.
The measure also contains controversial (particularly to the ethanol industry) language that requires biofuels to be assessed not only on the carbon content of the fuel but the impact transporting the fuel and cultivating land for growing the fuels' feedstock - even in foreign countries - might have on total carbon output associated with the fuel.
Neither petroleum nor any of the other alternative fuels is subject to the same land-use analysis.
Other States To Follow
As with the state's more controversial bid to regulate automotive tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases - typically done by increasing fuel economy to reduce the amount of carbon-based fuel burned per mile traveled - the measure is now likely to be adopted by as many as16 other states that have opted, under federal law, to follow California's emissions regulations rather than the more-lenient federal standards.
The auto and fuel industries believe that allowing some states to impose one set of rules while others follow a different set will impose incredible financial and logistic hardships on them at a time the economy is already severely depressed.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday took to Twitter
to drum up support for a cohesive national automotive industry policy that would lead to the design, manufacturing and sale of fuel-efficient vehicles.
When he wasn't sending Tweets, Schwarzenegger was addressing the Society of Automotive Engineers' 2009 World Congress in Detroit.
"With billions of people around the globe entering the car market for the first time and seeking energy-efficient but high-performance and stylish cars and trucks, America has an opportunity that exceeds even what the auto industry saw at its initial expansion in the 20th century," Schwarzenegger told SAE members. "This is an opportunity we must not waste, and as the world leader in innovation, design, marketing and technology, California is here to be the auto industry's partner for this new beginning."
Associated Press reported that the governor "has had conversations with federal officials and wants California to lead the country when it comes to setting low emission standards."
ORLANDO, Fla - A pair of heavy hitters with big plans for alternative fuels kicked off the annnual Alternative Fuels and Vehicles conference here Monday, energy investor and former oilman T. Boone Pickens continuing his campaign to make natural gas the nation's fuel of choice and former Army general and 2004 Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark pushing for greater use of ethanol in gasoline blending.
Pickens' post-breakfast appearance was a repeat of his frequent calls for a much-needed federal energy policy
and for inclusion of natural gas, of which the U.S. has a fairly plentiful supply,as a preferred replacement for gasoline and diesel fuels.
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T. Boone Pickens delivered his dual plea for a national energy policy and increased use of natural gas to kick off annual Alternative Fuels and Vehicles conference.
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He's updated his message, however, with a call to quickly convert many of the nation's heavy duty over-the-road cargo trucks - 18-wheelers - to natural gas as a rapid way to shave billions of dollars from the amounts we're sending overseas to buy imported oil.
According to Pickens - who also is predicting that oil will rise to at east $75 a barrel by year's end I(which would likely result in gas prices hitting $3 - $3.25 a gallon) - says that each big rig burning compressed or liquid natural gas would have the same positive environmental impact as converting 325 passenger cars to the clean-burning fuel.
In a press conference before his talk, Pickens - who is heavily invested in natural gas - told reporters that he sees the fuel as the best bridge between the present petroleum-based tranpostation system and one 20 years from now that will be based on electric vehicles - either plug-in battery or hydrogen fuel-cell.
To hear Ford Motor Co. Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. tell it, developing the green vehicles that will be needed to break this country's dependence upon foreign oil will be the easy part.
The really tough stuff will involve gaining consensus on such touchy subjects as instituting a new federal gasoline tax and determining which technologies will get the nod as new electric-generating plants are designed, permitted and brought online.
"I actually think that the least disruptive piece will be the car piece," Ford said during a half-hour Q&A during a Fortune magazine green ideas conference on Monday at the Ritz Carlton in Laguna Niguel, Calif. "We can get there relatively easy, but a lot of these other pieces are going to be big issues that we're going to have to solve as a nation."
"One thing that I'm encouraged about is that the [Obama] administration really wants to lead that discussion on a national basis," Ford said. "I am optimistic ... we can't go on with fossil fuel burning the way we are ... it's just not a path that this country wants to go down."
Auto racing, demanding of performance and downright disdainful for most of the past century of concepts such as curbing tailpipe emissions, is getting greener.
Formula One's governing body, the FIA, for instance, has a website promoting green initiatives, and there's a conference in Southern California today, in advance of this weekend's Long Beach Grand Prix, that focuses on opportunities in the racing world for environmentally friendly products.
Yokohama Rubber, for example, has just come out with a "green" racing tire that replaces 10 percent the compound's petroleum-based oil content with orange oil. That cuts down the amount of oil used in production and makes the tire easier - thus less energy-intensive - to recycle.
Most of the talk and development work, though, has been centered on increasing race cars' fuel efficiency and reducing racing's carbon footprint - engine and fuel stuff.
Bio-Racer
That hasn't been enough, though, for researchers at the University of Warwick in England.
Concerned about racing's environmental impact and its financial future given the high cost of building and maintaining cars and the wobbly economy that's put a big dent in sponsorship money, a team at the university-affiliated Warwick Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre set out to see if it were possible to build a competitive race car from environmentally sustainable products.
The short answer: Yes, although not every component can be earth-friendly.
The research team has designed and built a "proof-of-concept" Formula 3 race car that might best be described as a bio-racer.
It uses carrots, potatoes, flax fiber, soybean oil and other natural products in its various parts, makes extensive use of recycled carbon fiber and composite body panels, runs on biodiesel that can be made from vegetable oil or even waste from chocolate candy factories, and has radiators that clean the air that passes through them.
All that and it goes around corners at 125 miles an hour - or at least that's what it's designed to do: the researchers just fitted the engine last week and haven't completed on-track testing yet.
To stop, it uses non-carbon brake discs and the research team is working on - believe it or not - brake pads made from cashew nut shells!
World's First
The builders call themselves WorldFirst Racing and the car, which they say is the first to be made largely from sustainable and renewable materials, the WorldFirstF3 racer.
James Meridith, WorldFirst project manager and a university researcher, told Green Car Advisor that the car will make its first public appearance May 7 at Circuit Zolder raceway in Belgium at the kickoff for next year's Clean Week 2020 event.
It's rare to find an industry trade group and an environmental organization in agreement on much of anything when it comes to how greenhouse gas emissions should be regulated.
In a letter to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag, the two organizations asked that the most controversial sections of the EPA's proposed rulemaking be quickly subjected to public review.
The part of the proposed rule that will pit environmentalists against industry interests will be the requirement that the EPA consider greenhouse gas emissions generated by indirect land-use changes that would occur as biofuel crops are planted and other acreage is cleared to make up for land lost to food production.
"We all recognize that there is a range of opinions on the methodology that should be applied to this calculation," the joint letter states. "For example, there is no consensus on any proposed time horizons, discount rates or global imaging for biofuels, which means initial numbers derived from EPA's proposed calculations will likely be modified in the final regulation."
Although it contains less energy than gasoline and thus cuts into fuel economy for vehicles that use it, ethanol helps replace gas and that makes it a valuable tool in the national effort to wean ourselves from petroleum-based fuels.
We don't believe it is particularly green, either, but none of this has kept ethanol from being the favored alt fuel of a whole lot of people.
In the latest pro-ethanol move we're aware of, a bipartisan group of congress members has just introduced a bill that would require by 2015 that 80 percent of all new autos and light trucks sold or manufacturers in the U.S. be capable of running on either E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, or M85, a methanol-gasoline blend in the same proportions.
(Methanol, a close cousin of ethanol, is widely used as a racing fuel, primarily for safety reasons - it is less flammable than gasoline. But is has even less energy content than ethanol.)
The measure, H.R. 1476, would require half of the new cars and light trucks sold or built here in 2012 to be E85 or M85 flex-fuel capable, ratcheting up to 80 percent three years later.
Algae, which grows like crazy with little need for fertilizers, for taking valuable food crops off the table or for clear-cutting forests and plowing under grasslands, is a promising feedstock for a new generation of biofuels.
One project hopes to turn the slimy stuff into a profitable crop for the Mississippi Delta region's beleaguered catfish farmers, battered by rising feed and fuel costs.
A recent report from the Associated Press tells how former catfish farmers Hall Barrett III and his sister, Liz Jordan, are leasing their old catfish ponds to PetroSun Biofuels Inc., which intends to use them to grow algae for use in biodiesel and bioethanol production.
It's ironic because algae - although not the type that is commercially valuable - was once the bane of the catfish farmers, fouling their ponds and imparting an odd, musty flavor to the fish that fed on it.
But while algae grows rapidly, don't expect mass-produced biodiesel and bioethanol to begin flowing from slime refineries anytime soon.
It ill be a decade or more before that happens, says biofuels consultant William Thurmond, who looks at algae's prospects in an upcoming report, "Algae 2020," that's scheduled to be published next month.
Federal support of the technology does give biofuels-from-algae big market potential, though, Thurmond said in a recent online seminar covered by subscription-only E&E News.
Retired general and one-time presidential candidate Wesley Clark waved the flag Friday while urging the Environmental Protection Agency to push the present 10 percent limit on ethanol in gasoline blends to as high as 15 percent.
Ethanol is "made in America, it's American ingenuity, it's American jobs," Clark proclaimed during a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
The co-chairman of the pro-ethanol group Growth Energy also praised farmers who grow the crops, mainly corn, that ethanol comes from: "I think there's no better environmentalists, no better workers, no better entrepreneurs, really, than America's farmers ... They're the original free market people in America."
Clark's "no better environmentalists"comment likely was included as a response to criticism of corn-based ethanol as environmenmtally harmful because of the large amounts of energy required to produce it and the potential, if demand is increased substantially,that forests and grasslands that now absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be plowed under and converted to acreage for ethanol feedstocks.
111 University and Industry Scientists Sign Letter Claiming Proposal Penalizes Biofuels
Does a wide-reaching California effort to lessen global warming unwittingly give petroleum-based energy an unfair advantage over the emerging biofuel sector?
It does according to a group of 111 scientists who sent a four-page letter (with 12 pages of signatures) opposing a portion of the plan Monday to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The scientists, many from prestigious institutions such as Sandia National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, UCLA and MIT, warn that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) risks penalizing the emerging biofuels industry if it adopts a proposed carbon scoring system as part of its Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS).
The letter echoes concerns voiced by the New Fuels Alliance, which represents the interests of producers of corn-based ethanol, soy-based biodiesel and developers of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels made from feedstocks such as switchgrass, miscanthus and woodchips.
"These regulations will stifle advanced biofuels investment and derail the industry," Brooke Coleman, head of the New Fuels Alliance, said in a statement issued Monday.
"California is moving the opposite direction of President Obama, who stated in a recent speech it is critical to support advanced biofuels."
The scientists support California's legislative mandate that, by 2020, oil companies engineer a 10 percent reduction in carbon levels in fuels sold in the Golden State. That goal is outlined in Assembly Bill 32, which Schwarzenegger signed into law early in 2007.
They also agree with CARB on the need to better understand the direct and indirect impacts of producing fuel.
But they maintain that the low carbon fuel standards CARB will review in Sacramento at an April 23-24 meeting unfairly subject biofuels to an indirect land-use measure that isn't required of, say, petroleum-based fuel extracted from Canadian tar sands.
Saddling biofuel companies with that added requirement, the objecting scientists caution, "is the equivalent of picking winners and losers, which is in direct conflict with the ambition of the LCFS."
The dispute turns on a CARB proposal to incorporate the indirect effects of producing alternative fuels -- think deforestation and other potential land conversion issues that could occur as a result of increased demand for agricultural production.
The scientists acknowledge that land-use practices must be carefully studied to "ensure that future fuels dramatically reduce GHG emissions without unintended consequences."
They cautioned Schwarzenegger that singling out biofuels for hard-to-quantify indirect land-use effects would give petroleum products "a better carbon score and a competitive advantage. For drivers in California, it means they will be buying more dirty petroleum products and less of the cleaner renewable fuels."
Illustration of Lotus Engineering's omnivore engine doesn't disclose much about its inner workings.
It's not a particularly lovely beast, but Lotus Engineering says its prototype "omnivore" engine will thrive on all kinds of fuels and that's likely to make it a winner in the world to come -- when petroleum is fading away and biofuels from a variety of sources and in a variety of chemistries are developing to fill the void.
Lotus says the blocky internal combustion engine has the "potential to significantly increase fuel-efficiency" for sustainable alcohol-based fuels (ethanol, methanol. propanol and butanol ) and can also run on gasoline.
The prototype one-cylinder engine will be displayed at the Lotus Cars stand at the Geneva Motor Show next week (media days begin Tuesday and the show opens to the public Thursday for an 11-day run).
Lotus Engineering -- the research and consulting arm of Lotus Cars -- says the engine is a two-stroke, single-cylinder monoblock (the cylinder head and block are one piece) that uses a unique variable compression system and direct fuel injection.
The design can utilize high octane, alcohol-based biofuels better than the four-stroke (intake-combustion-power-exhaust) engines now used in cars and trucks, the company said.
We'll let our engineering gurus explain the precise working of the system in a later posting, but the short version is that Lotus claims the engine design and mechanics permit asymmetric exhaust timing, a continuously variable exhaust opening point and a compression ratio that changes to meet load demands.
It is collaborating on development of the Omnivore engine with Queen's University of Belfast, in Northern Ireland, and Orbital Corp. Ltd. of Australia, and said the program is being sponsored by Britain's Renewables Materials Link program, which helps fund collaborative industry and scientific segment research into uses of renewable materials for sustainable development.
The Omnivore program is one piece of Lotus' research into the processes involved in operating an engine on mixtures of alcohol-based biofuels and gasoline.
A previously displayed effort was the Lotus Exige 270E Tri-fuel concept (gasoline, ethanol, methanol or any combination of the three) shown a last year's Geneva Motor Show.
Cellulosic ethanol pioneer Mascoma Corp.
said Wednesday it has begun producing the alcohol-based fuel from wood chips at its demonstration refinery in New York,
The company, which has benefited from investments by General Motors Corp. and a number of heavyweight venture capital firms specializing in green energy, uses a genetically modified bacteria to break down the usually hard-to-digest cellulose in wood chips and other biomass.
The fermented biomass is used to produce so-called cellulosic ethanol (because it comes from cellulose).
Mascoma' $30 million demonstration refinery in Rome, N.Y., has the capacity to produce up to 200,000 gallons of ethanol a year, and the biofuel is to be used by General Motors in its test car fleet.
Mascoma says it wants to use the same technology in a commercial plant it is planning for Northern Michigan, where chips from nearby lumber mills would provide the necessary biomass.
But the company says its process also can be used to break down the cellulose in other materials, including portions of sugarcane and corn stalks, that are not part of the human food chain.
Mascoma says the 40-million-gallon Michigan plant would cost at least $200 million to build and that it still is attempting to raise the necessary funds.
The nitrogen-rich agricultural runoff than can choke the life out of lakes and ponds with thick green algae "blooms" might someday help fuel our cars and trucks.
That's the hope of a California company, QuantumSphere, that has received a $100,000 research grant from the California Energy Commission's Energy Innovations small grant program for a year-long project to develop an algae biogasification process that can turn the aquatic vegetation and other biomass material into methane, hydrogen or other synthetic gases.
Because algae grows so rapidly, is so rich in carbohydrates and needs so little care, it is considered a prime feedstock for biofuels - if a cost-efficient method of breaking it down can be developed.
QuantumSphere, which will use engineered nano-metals as catalysts for turning algae into gases, says the slimy green stuff (it comes in other colors, too) can produce as much as 60 percent of its biomass in the form of oils or carbohydrates.
The oil can be turned into biodiesel and the carbohydrates into alcohols - for ethanol production - or into synthetic gases for fuel or industrial use.
"Our vision for this project was to use this process to take wet algae produced in a place like the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley of California and convert it into renewable fuels," said Subra Iyer, QuantumSphere's principal technologist.
"The Salton Sea is a place for large amounts of agricultural runoff which sometimes creates large algae blooms. If successful, we envision a large plant" on the shore of the inland sea that could convert large amounts of algae into renewable fuels, he said.
Iyer said the process QuantumSphere plans to use is designed to convert any biomass, including leaves, algae, vegetable waste and corn stalks, into fuel.
The company's plan calls for it to build a small-scale demonstration plant to show the feasibility of its conversion process.
Opel Ampera plug-in hybrid is among the green stars of the upcoming Geneva auto show.
By Nick Kurczewski, Contributor
When the Geneva auto show opens its doors to the media March 3, the exhibition halls will be jammed with a wider range of smaller, smarter and more fuel-efficient cars than ever before.
Green vehicles were once a sideshow, with headline-grabbing debuts of outrageous supercars and luxury sedans in the main ring at Geneva. But like easy credit and cheap gasoline, those days are gone.
Intelligently designed, fuel-efficient, low-emission vehicles are now the key to survival for the world's car manufacturers.
Even high-end manufacturers like Bentley Motors are getting in on the act. Rather than its usual lineup of sport-tuned touring cars that gulp gasoline the way a band of rugby fans down lager at a pre-game fest, the English luxury brand will unveil a bio-fueled concept -- albeit one with more than 600 horsepower.
Other stars of the show will include the Opel Ampera, the European version of the Chevrolet Volt; Mitsubishi's i-MiEV Sport Air, an electric sports car concept; and the shape-shifting Rinspeed iChange electric vehicle.
Green Car Advisor offers an advance look at these and other soon-to-be-unveiled eco-stars of the Geneva show.
Opel Ampera
As General Motor's European subsidiary, it makes sense that Opel would get a version of Chevrolet's much-hyped Volt hybrid.
Luckily for Opel, the Ampera also seems to have gotten the good looks in the GM family tree. While the Volt has been criticized for a somewhat bland exterior, the Ampera has a more aggressive and modern design that better lives up to the promise of the state-of-the-art drivetrain.
Like the Chevrolet Volt, the Ampera will be capable of running up to 40 miles on electric power alone, before switching to a small internal combustion engine that recharges the battery pack.
Opel says that the Ampera's lithium-ion battery pack can be charged from a standard European 230-volt outlet.
The Volt slated to arrive in U.S. showrooms near the end of next year, so expect the Ampera to make its European debut in 2011.
Mitsubishi i-MiEVs
Mitsubishi will debut a European version of the i-MiEV electric car it expects to launch in Japan later this year. Both are based on the Japanese company's tiny "i" city car.
The i-MiEV uses a 47-kilowatt (62-horsepower) electric motor that draws power from a 330-volt lithium ion battery pack. Range is estimated at 100 miles.
The European model will be slightly wider than the Japanese model, and perhaps a bit more powerful -- to cope with European safety standards and higher speed limits.
A U.S. version of the i-MiEV, if we get one -- and we think we will -- is likely to be based on the Euro model.
A sport version of the i-MiEV will also break cover in Geneva.
Very little is known about the concept, called the Sport Air, though we expect it likely will be a closer-to-production version of the huggable-cute i-MiEV Sport concept seen at the Tokyo auto show in 2007.
Chevrolet Spark
Not every important green car in Geneva will have an electric motor or hybrid power plant under its hood.
At first glance, the Chevrolet Spark looks like another sharply styled little Euro-hatch.
That's the point.
Frugal and attractive small cars like the Spark are key to the survival of General Motors -- and to weaning many American car buyers from opting for the super-size option in their dealers' showrooms.
The five-door Spark hatchback first appeared as the Beat concept car during the New York auto show in 2007.
The production version looks almost identical to that concept. When it goes on sale in Europe in early 2010, the Spark will feature a choice of economical 1.0- and 1.2-liter 16-valve engines.
U.S. sales are to follow in 2011.
Tata E-Nano?
A spokesman for India's Tata Motors told us to expect a surprise in Geneva.
Known for basic and cheap economy cars, Tata -- India's largest auto manufacturer -- is unlikely to pull a dust cover off some supercar.
Our guess: the top-secret news is the unveiling of an electric-powered version of the company's subcompact Indica hatchback, or the Nano city car (left).
Tata Motors has been working hard on developing electric versions of its current lineup for the European market. The company last year bought a majority stake in Miljo Grenland Innovasjon, a Norwegian company specializing in electric car technology.
The collapse of the global auto industry has hit Tata Motors hard, especially now that it owns struggling British luxury brands Jaguar and Land Rover, but we're not counting it out of the electric car sweepstakes.
The four-door Nano hatchback will be the cheapest car in the world, priced at roughly $2,000 when it goes on sale in India later this year.
A low-speed battery-electric version suitable for urban centers or gated communities could be just what Tata needs to get its toe into the European or U.S. markets.
Rinspeed iChange
Rinspeed's annual dream machines in Geneva have been capable of hovering above land and water, tilting, running on bio-waste, and adapting the cabin environment to match a driver's state of mind.
The wacky Swiss company is now ready to debut its latest crazy creation, a shape-changing electric car called the iChange. Power comes from a 130-kilowatt electric motor.
This concept car's most intriguing feature is the adaptable seating arrangement. The iChange has what Rinspeed refers to as "1, 2, 3 seating," courtesy of an "electronic trick tail."
The exterior body-panels of the iChange can be reconfigured depending on how many passengers are on board.
Rinspeed says the result is not only a zero-emission car, but one whose ultra-low aerodynamic drag helps reduce power consumption from the electric motor to give it more range. Details to come at the show, we hope.
Bentley BioFuel Car
Bentley couldn't simply unleash a bio-fuel car onto the world. It had to make it the fastest Bentley ever.
We can live with that, considering the speed and grace of this strangely alluring yet contradictory concept. Sneak preview photos provided by Bentley show a car very much resembling its current gas-powered Continental GT.
Larger lower intakes and outlets in the hood now feed extra air to the W12 engine, reconfigured to run on a mix of gasoline and ethanol.
Oomph is estimated to be well in excess of 600 horsepower.
Ethanol helps raise the octane level of the fuel, which boosts power and gives this bruiser Bentley the performance credentials needed to keep its blue-blood clientele happy.
If the ethanol comes from biowaste instead of valuable food crops, those Bentley bluebloods may even be able to claim they are turning blue-green.
EDAG Light Car Open Source Concept
German engineering firm EDAG will display a high-tech car that is completely recyclable, electric powered and featuring state-of-the-art LED technology.
From the sneak peeks of the car we've seen, the finished product looks great. Too bad EDAG slapped a painfully awkward name onto this otherwise very promising concept car.
The body of the Light Car is constructed of lightweight basalt fiber. As strong as pricey carbon fiber commonly used in race-car construction, the basalt-fiber platform is cheaper to produce, provides high levels of occupant safety, and is entirely recyclable.
Power for the Light Car is provided by small electric motors located in each wheel.
The car's headlight and taillight housings aren't real hardware but instead are projected onto the exterior using LEDs. According to EDAG, owners can customize the shape and size of the lights (though there was no word as to the legalities of this clever option).Here's a company video animation that explains how it would work.
LEDs in the tail provide vehicles that are following the Light Car with information that could include driving tips like the Rinspeed's braking force (back off, I'm hitting the brakes HARD) and public service info like real-time traffic updates.
Peugeot 3008 Hybrid
French automaker Peugeot will show its new 3008 MPV, a small crossover that employs a 2.0-liter diesel-electric hybrid powertrain and four-wheel drive. The system should be available in European models of the 3008 by 2011.
Sized to compete with small sport-utes like the Nissan Rogue, the 3008 hybrid will combine 36-hp electric motor with the diesel engine. The electric motor will provide power to the rear while the engine drives the front wheels.
Peugeot has no sales presence in the States, but we wouldn't be shocked if the 3008's hybrid system shows up here in another automaker's cars someday.
Keep in mind, the standard gas-powered version of the 3008 (above, left) uses the same 1.6-liter motor as the BMW Mini Cooper. A hybrid/all-wheel-drive version of the Mini Crossover Concept (a Mini-based sport-ute shown at last year's Paris auto show) sure makes sense to us.
Diesel-powered cars and trucks are gaining popularity in the U.S., and that's got many people in America's biodiesel industry all excited.
With more diesel vehicles on American roads and concern about global warming at an all-time high, sales of biodiesel in the land of the free ought to be brisk. But they aren't.
The problem, as the producers, brokers, distributors and retailers of biodiesel will tell you, is that automakers are being total party-poopers when it comes to warranty issues.
Never mind the fact that Rudolph Diesel, the inventor of the engine that bears his name, experimented with fuels ranging from powdered coal to peanut oil.
If you use a blend that contains more than 5 percent biodiesel (or less than 95 percent petro-diesel), you can kiss your vehicle warranty good-bye.
Doesn't matter if the higher blend -- say 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent petro-diesel -- was certified to stringent standards. Most automakers will nullify a warranty the moment they learn that a blend higher than B5 has gone into the fuel tank.
The biodiesel industry says it's not right. They say 20 percent biodiesel (B20) or even 100 percent biodiesel (B100) are wonderful fuels that don't do an engine any harm.
And now two of the industry's trade groups are trying to force this issue, pointing to the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, a 1975 federal statute governing car warranties that prohibits any automaker from voiding a car's warranty based on the type of fuel used in that car.
Three days before Christmas, we joyously reported
that Idaho was looking to convert mountains of manure into natural gas for vehicles and homes.
Today, we're delighted to report that Hilarides Dairy of Lindsay, California, has gone a step farther: It's converted two of its diesel 18-wheelers to run on clean-burning biomethane made from the dairy's formidable stockpiles of cow crap.
In addition to curbing the amount of greenhouse gases that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere as the manure decomposed, by producing biomethane from cow waste the dairy is reducing the nation's dependence on foreign fossil fuels.
And the production will "give us some protection from volatile energy prices," said owner Ron Hilarides (pictured). Who'd have thunk so much good could come from cow patties.
The bio-gas making process begins with flushing manure from stalls housing 10,000 cows into a covered lagoon, where bacteria breaks it down. The resulting methane gas is then pumped to a refinery that removes carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and other impurities.
The purified methane is pressurized - made into compressed natural gas - before being pumped into the 18-wheelers, which are fitted with Cummins engines that have been converted from compression-ignited diesels to spark-ignited methane-burners.
The dairy generates 226,000 cubic feet of bio-gas per day - enough to slash the dairy's diesel consumption by 650 gallons a day, Hilarides said, adding that he intends to convert five pick-up trucks to run on biomethane.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Toronto stock broker George Georgiou with manipulating the market in four stocks, including Hydrogen Hybrid Technologies Inc., "the only commercially viable application of hydrogen in the consumer marketplace today", according to the company's Web site, and Northern Ethanol Inc., which "intends to develop three ethanol plants," according to its Web site.
The other companies were Avicena Group Inc., which offers "cellular regenerative therapies" to people who can't handle aging gracefully; and, Neutron Enterprises Inc., "the leading global provider of Web-based stock market simulations."
The SEC alleges that, from 2004 through September 2008, Georgiou, who controlled the publicly traded stock of each company, manipulated the market to artificially inflate each company's stock price or to create the false appearance of an active and liquid market. Ultimately, he allegedly realized at least $20.9 million in ill-gotten gains from his manipulation schemes. Further proof that a sucker is born every minute.
The complaint alleges that Georgiou's manipulation of Hydrogen Hybrid Technologies relied on "a pump and dump scheme" in which he arranged for the publication of a promotional mailer sent to 7 million addresses across the U.S. Georgiou allegedly coordinated manipulative trading with the publication of the mailer, and ultimately received more than $3.8 million when he dumped his shares into the artificially inflated market.
The complaint also alleges that part of Georgiou's manipulation of Northern Ethanol stock involved the payment of an illegal kickback to a person Georgiou believed was a corrupt registered representative, but who was in reality an undercover FBI agent. Nice!
We couldn't locate a photo of Georgiou, so we went with the SEC logo. We did locate photos of one George Georgiou, a staff photographer for Playboy, but we gather he's not the same GG the SEC snared. Would be interesting if he was. Most SEC complaints are dull as dirt; this complaint is a compelling read.
On a much sadder note, two portraits of slavery conditions and gangland-style field management in Brazil's sugarcane industry have emerged in recent days. We're reporting it because sugarcane is the basis for much of the country's ethanol production.
Germany's Der Spiegel describes in riveting detail the brutal powers of the country's feitor, or field foreman, over hiring, firing, payment and conditions affecting the hundreds of thousands of Brazilians who work the nation's cane plantations. Meanwhile, the Americas Program of the Center for International Policy is reporting on slavelike conditions in its explosive report "Migration and Mechanization in Brazil's Biofuel Cane Fields."
Comedian Jon Stewart (and yes, he is a comedian, even if you do get all your news from his program) had green car advocate Daniel Sperling on his Daily Show to discuss government support of alternative fuels and plug-in hybrids.
Sperling -- a member of the California Air Resources Board and head of the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis -- said he believes the day will come when "the vast majority" of the cars on the road will use batteries, fuel-cells and advanced biofuels for power and suggested that it would only take "tens of billions" of dollars to get the ball rolling.
We think it might take a bit more than that, but we just collectively threw $350 billion at Wall Street and have spent nearly $600 billion on the War in Iraq so far (according to the National Priorities Project), so it appears we've got the bucks to throw at problems if we really believe they are problems.
Stewart, of course, lightens things up in his interview, but there's still plenty of food for thought in his 6.5-minute exchange with Sperling.
You can watch it by clicking on the video screen above.
It's seemed for the longest time that if a clean, economical form of ethanol was ever going to be developed, the cost and effort would be left largely up to researchers in the U.S. and Europe.
The companies want to develop a low-cost method of producing cellulosic ethanol - the kind that comes from the cellulose in wood chips, prairie grasses and waste biomass instead of that in food crops such as corn and sugar cane.
The Japanese cellulosic ethanol research isn't aimed at a particularly quick fix, though.
Reuters says the group's goal is to be producing about 1.6 million barrels a year by early 2014 and to get the cost down to the equivalent of $70 a barrel by 2015.
Among the companies joining Nippon Oil and Toyota in the consortium are Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Sapporo engineering - a subsidiary of Sapporo Breweries, which churns out a lot of biomass waste from beer-making.
John O'Dell, Senior Editor
---------- Graphic courtesy U.S. Department of Energy
Wal-Mart Stores says it soon will begin testing two new hybrid systems and three alternative fuels in some of its heavy-duty Class 8 trucks - the ones that haul those big Wal-Mart cargo trailers down the highway.
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Trucks like this one with a Peterbilt-Eaton hybrid drive are part of wal-Mart test fleet.
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The company said it will test a diesel-electric hybrid system in the Detroit area. The system, developed by ArvinMeritor, uses the electric motor mostly in low-speed, high-demand situations, such as accelerating from a dead stop while pulling a full trailer.
The diesel engine begins taking over with the electric motor's contribution to propulsion power diminishing as the truck accelerates until it is operating as a conventional diesel truck at highway speeds.
A Peterbilt-Eaton "hybrid assist" system will be used on five trucks in trials Southern California, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston and the Washington-Baltimore area.
Unlike the ArvnMeritor system, it will provide an electric power boost for the internal combustion engine in high-demand situations such as acceleration and hill climbing.
It also will serve as the trucks' auxiliary power unit to keep heating and cooling systems and other electrical components operating when the truck is stopped - eliminating the need to keep the diesel engine running to generate auxiliary power.
The company is hoping the hybrid systems will result in improved fuel economy and reduced fuel costs and emissions.
Finally, Wal-Mart said it will test biodiesel and reclaimed grease fuel (made from cooking grease used in food outlets in Wal Mart stores) in a fleet of 15 trucks at its Buckeye, Az., distribution center; and liquid natural gas in five trucks in the Southern California high-desert area east of Los Angeles County.
For a variety of reasons we're not big Wal-Mart fans, but we've got to applaud the company's efforts to look at alternative fuels and powerplants in its relentless hunt for ways to slash operating costs.
Bentley Motors will debut a biofuel-powered coupe or sedan in early March at the 2009 Geneva Auto Show and the vehicle will enter production later this year, the company said.
As we reported last month, the British luxury-car maker is developing ethanol-powered versions of all of its large-engined models in an effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from its entire product range by 40 percent within three years.
A statement the company released on Tuesday said nothing more than we reported in the first paragraph of this story, but our sister site - Edmunds.com's very own Inside Line - managed to pry a few additional details out of Bentley spokesman David Reuter today.
Reuter said the biofuel Bentley will be more expensive than the Bentley Continental GT Speed, which sells for $203,000, and it will be more powerful than the 600-horsepower, 13-miles-per-gallon coupe.
However, unless the biofuel car is intended to run on E85 (85 percent ethanol, 15 percent petrol) - very unlikely - and gets substantially better fuel economy than the Continental GT Speed, describing the yet-to-be-named Bentley an eco-sensitive car would be a rather enormous stretch.
That said, we applaud Bentley for taking a step in the right direction. And from what we can see of the car from the teaser photo the automaker supplied (above), the biofuel Bentley is a beauty.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture will help the struggling ethanol industry identify the most efficient ways to produce the alternative fuel so more plants can stay in business, Tom Vilsack said in his first news conference as agriculture secretary.
Vilsack said the USDA should research, develop and promote "best practices" to improve efficiency at corn-based ethanol plants, which have been hit hard by volatile corn prices, followed by a sharp drop in demand for the biofuel, which is more expensive than gasoline.
"We need to make sure that the biofuels industry has the necessary support to survive the recent downturn, while at the same promoting policies that will speed up the development of second- and third-generation feedstocks for those biofuels that have the potential to significantly improve America's energy security and independence," Vilsack said.
His comments came less than a week after Panda Ethanol Inc. filed for bankruptcy for a plant it owns in Texas. VeraSun Energy Corp., the second-largest U.S. ethanol producer, filed for bankruptcy protection in October, and has closed 12 of its 16 plants.
Vilsack emphasized that the USDA needs to speed up work on biofuels made from non-food plant sources, as well as develop wind energy and other renewable sources of power.
The 2008 farm bill has several measures that should be quickly implemented to boost demand for new types of biofuels, he said, including tax credits, grants and loans for converting corn-based plants to use new feedstocks.
Vilsack also vowed that the USDA would be the "national leader in climate change" debate.
"This, of course, will involve conservation, greater efficiency with the energy we have and expanded opportunities in biofuels and renewable energy," Vilsack said, reading from prepared remarks.
President Obama has said he hopes to double renewable-energy production in the U.S.
The first loan guarantee from the Agriculture Department's biorefinery assistance program has gone to Colorado-based Range Fuels to help complete a cellulosic ethanol refinery in Georgia.
Range, which specializes in turning wood chips and other woody biomass into fuel, received an $80 million loan under the program.
The company broke ground on its Soperton, Georgia, cellulosic facility at the end of 2007 and said the first phase is scheduled to begin producing ethanol in 2010.
The loan guarantee program is designed to promote development of facilities and technologies aimed at producing ethanol and other biofuels from non-food resources.
GM Still a Big Backer, Even If Not as Publicly as in Past Years
By Dale Buss, Contributor
Of all the contrasts between this year's Detroit auto show and last year's -- most created by the intervening global economic melt-down and resulting car sales crash -- perhaps none is more striking than what happened to ethanol.
---------- Ethanol-capable vehicles such as GM's flex-fuel Yukon were common at last year's Detroit auto show, not so common this year. ----------
At the North American International Auto Show here a year ago, ethanol and ethanol-burning vehicles were the belles of the ball. Ethanol was promoted at almost every major automaker's press conferences and cropped up in interview after interview. Ethanol-using vehicles were everywhere.
This year, it's almost impossible to find mention of ethanol anywhere out on the 700,000-square foot auto show floor at Cobo Hall.
The talk has all been of electrification of the transportation system, electric vehicles, batteries for electric vehicles, and ventures to develop and build better batteries.
But ethanol hasn't gone away -- it is just lying low.
At least one automaker remains bullish on the long-term prospects for the fuel, especially the cellulosic variety.
By now we should all agree that corn ethanol is bad. For starters, it drives up the price of a grain that millions of poor people depend on, and corn requires enormous amounts of ocean-ravaging fertilizers.
Corn ethanol has come to be viewed as so undesirable that much of the industry is doing whatever it can to shift out of it and into ethanol produced from non-food biomass and waste materials.
With that in mind, we're delighted to report two related developments.
The Canadian biofuel company Enerkem announced this week that it's begun starting up a biofuel/biochemical production plant in Westbury, near Montreal. Once the startup phase is completed, Enerkem says it will be the "first producer of liquid fuels and green chemicals to commercially use renewable, non-food, negative-cost feedstock."
Enerkem's feedstock of choice is used electricity poles, a source the company doesn't have to pay for but actually gets paid to haul away. The company says one ton's worth of poles is good for 95 gallons of ethanol. Eventually, the plant is expected to produce 1.3 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year.
We especially like this fuel source because it reduces greenhouse-gas emissions in two ways: by using materials that would otherwise produce methane (a major greenhouse gas) when landfilled, and by producing a low-carbon fuel for cars, buses and trucks.
The other development on the ethanol front that we're pleased to report is POET's announcement this week that it has begun producing cellulosic ethanol from corn cobs.
Falling Fuel Prices Are 'Disincentive' For Consumers, Analyst Group Says
U.S. automotive executives are using the bully platform offered by the Detroit auto show to step up calls for an increase in the funding that Congress is considering - has already allotted in some cases - to finance development and production of advanced vehicles, biofuels and battery technologies that can help reduce the nation's dependence on oil.
What's missing is a call for a sensible fuel tax policy that encourages people to buy the fuel efficident cars the government says automakers must build.
Congress already has approved $25 million in loans to automakers and suppliers to use in retrofitting facilities - or building new ones - for the manufacture of advanced cars and trucks. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler has requested a combined $22 billion of the pot and would like to see the money increased.
President-elect Barack Obama, who is to be sworn in as the 44th president on Jan.20, has indicated a willingness to do just that, perhaps even doubling the $25 million loan pool.
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But the automakers would like to see additional funding made available in the $800 billion economic stimulus plan Congress is now developing at the behest of the incoming Obama Administration.
"It's an issue of economic security, of national security, of energy security," GM research and development chief Larry Burns told reporters during the North American International Auto Show's media preview days this week.
It would be devastating, he said, for the U.S. to merely go from being dependent on foreign oil to being dependent on foreign nations for the advanced batteries and other components needed to make electric vehicles - battery-electric, fuel-cell electric and hybrid-electric .
Granted, GM needs federal funds to survive right now and Burns has a lot at stake - his job, for instance - in promoting federal funding that helps the industry.
But we still agree with him.
We'd rather see a few hundred billion tossed to the companies working on lithium-ion and more advanced batteries, clean biofuels, fuel cell and electric charging and hydrogen fueling station infrastructure development than to be handed to the corn ethanol industry or to big banks so they can continue bolstering their reserves.
Need Tax Plan
Analysts in the London offices of Global Insight economic and business forecasting and consulting, looking at the U.S. situation from an outsider perspective, suggest that things could work well if federal tax policy encouraged purchases of and investments in more fuel-efficient vehicles.
As the nation's stockpiles of corn grow amid a slumping demand for ethanol, the nation's largest producer of the fuel has begin making cellulosic ethanol form corncobs at atest plant in South Dakota.
Cellulosic ethanol - produced from hard-to-break-down cellulose - is thought to be more energy-efficient and environmentally friendly than grain ethanol made from grain ethanol, which is largely made from corn starches.
Ethanol-maker Poet LLC opened its pilot cellulosic refinery, capable of annual production of up to 20,000 gallons, late last year and said this week that it produced more than 1,000 gallons in its first month of operation.
The $8-million fuel plant can provide a blueprint for commercial-scale production, Poet CEO Jeff Broin told reporters in a conference call today.
A report in the subscription-only E&E [Energy and Environment] Daily, said Poet, which is based in Sioux Falls, S.D., is planning to convert a 50,000-gallon-a-year grain ethanol plant in Iowa to a dual facility that could produce ethanol both from the sugars in corn kernals - the conventional way - or by breaking down the cellulose in corn cobs.
The refinery is scheduled to begin production in 2011 with capacity more than doubled to 125 million gallons a year.
Poet, which operates 26 refineries, has the capacity to produce more than 1 billion gallons of ethanol from grain corn annually.
The privately held company is working with Danish biotech company Novozymes to develop enzymes that cost-effectively break down thecellulosic plant fiber found in corncobs, E&E reported.
Broin said that as much as 5 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced in the U.S. each year from corncobs. Cellulosic ethanol from switchgrass, yard waste and other woody biomass, he said, could boost production to about 85 billion gallons a year, he said.
The corn-based ethanol industry dominates federal programs to support renewable energy, having taken two-thirds of all subsidies for renewable energy sources in 2007, the latest year for which such information is now available.
Corn-based ethanol received $3 billion in subsidies in 2007 -- almost twice as much as solar, wind, geothermal and other biomass combined, according to a report by the Environmental Working Group, which analyzed data from the Energy Information Administration.
Among tax benefits for renewable energy sources, corn-based ethanol received three-quarters of all benefits, the nonprofit group found.
Ethanol industry groups say they support greater investment in all kinds of renewable technologies, including wind and solar, but that it should not come at the expense of ethanol.
"This is an apples-and-oranges comparison, since ethanol does not compete in the power generation sector with wind, solar and geothermal technologies," Renewable Fuels Association spokesman Matt Hartwig said.
The report comes as lawmakers consider what, if any, additional incentives to include for ethanol in the economic stimulus package. Some lawmakers are seeking additional loan guarantees and tax credits for ethanol plants.
In a speech on the economy today, President-elect Barack Obama vowed to double the production of alternative energy in the next three years, but he did not specify which types of energy production he would include.
Environmental Working Group is among dozens of groups that have pressed lawmakers to repeal some of the tax incentives and subsidies for corn-based ethanol. The groups say that ethanol drives up food prices, pollutes waterways and accounts for too much federal spending.
Frankly speaking, we'd like to see some of the subsidies and tax credits diverted from the corn-based ethanol industry to efforts to perfect cellulosic ethanol, a promising biofuel made from wood, grasses or the non-edible parts of plants.
Okay, so what do your family car, a box of laundry detergent, the beans you're eating because you can't afford anything else in this economy and that Christmas tree you now have to get rid of have in common?
Well, if researchers at Pennsylvania State University are successful, the last three items could be combined to make fuel for the first.
A Penn State research team is genetically modifying woody plants for use in biofuels by adding a bean-based protein that makes them vulnerable to the enzymes used in laundry detergents.
Woody plants use a material called lignin to help form a tough outer layer that shields their soft cellulose insides from beetles and other pests. The lignin also gives the plants rigidity so they can grow upright.
But it also makes it hard to break them down and extract the cellulose for use in making cellulosic ethanol. That's the big reason we use easy-to-extract starches from corn for most ethanol production in the United States.
But the university says that two researchers, John Carlson and Ming Tien, have developed a way to introduce a protein that makes it easier to break down the lignin and extract the cellulose from woody plants and trees.
Right now, a lot of research is centered on using expensive, genetically engineered fungus and bacteria to do the work.
"There is lots of energy-rich cellulose locked away in wood," molecular geneticist Carlson said in an interview with the university newspaper.
"But separating this energy from the wood to make ethanol is a costly process requiring high amounts of heat and caustic chemicals. Moreover, fungal enzymes that attack lignin are not yet widely available, still in the development stage, and not very efficient in breaking up lignin."
Another approach is to reduce the amount of lignin in the plants, but that, scoffed biochemist Tien, is "like trying to engineer boneless chicken. It just doesn't make sense" because the plants would have no structure to keep them upright while growing.
That ought to be Washington's response to the Renewable Fuels Association's request this month for $1 billion in financial aid to struggling ethanol producers so they can finance current operations.
But wait, there's more. The RFA -- the ethanol industry's lobby -- has also suggested to the incoming administration that it create a $50-billion federal loan guarantee program to finance investment in the ethanol producers' expansion.
And furthermore, the RFA has told Obama & Co. that any automaker that receives federal aid should be required to only produce vehicles that can run on any gas-ethanol blend up to 85 percent ethanol, beginning with the 2010 model season.
Now, if the struggling U.S. ethanol producers were producing cellulosic ethanol, which holds promise as a truly "green" product, that would be one thing. But the struggling ethanol producers the RFA is talking about are, with few exceptions, folks who only produce corn ethanol.
Here's the deal with corn ethanol: So many research papers have been written on how un-green corn ethanol truly is that people who cover green-car news could do nothing but report on those studies and still they wouldn't have time to report on all of them.
Reporting on unfavorable corn-ethanol studies is like covering crime in Los Angeles. Sometimes there are so many fatal drive-by shootings and other unnatural deaths in the County of Angels during an eight-hour shift that a crime reporter simply can't get to them all.
Liposuctioning unwanted blubber out of pampered Los Angelenos may not seem like a dream job, but it has its perks. Free fuel is one of them, according to a recent article in Forbes magazine
.
For a time, Beverly Hills doctor C. Alan Bittner (pictured) turned the fat he removed from patients into biodiesel that fueled his Ford SUV and his girlfriend's Lincoln Navigator.
Fat -- whether animal or vegetable -- contains triglycerides that can be extracted and turned into diesel. Poultry companies such as Tyson are looking into powering their trucks on chicken schmaltz, and biofuel start-ups such as Nova Biosource are mixing beef tallow and pig lard with more palatable sources such as soybean oil, according to Forbes.
Mike Shook of Agri Process Innovations, a builder of biodiesel plants, says this year's batch of U.S. biodiesel was likely more than half animal-derived since the price of soybeans soared.
A gallon of grease will get you about a gallon of fuel, and drivers can get about the same amount of mileage from fat fuel as they do from regular diesel, according to Jenna Higgins of the National Biodiesel Board. Animal fats need to undergo an additional step to get rid of free fatty acids not present in vegetable oils, but otherwise, there's no difference, she told Forbes.
Greenies like the fact that waste, such as coffee grounds and french-fry grease, can be turned into power.
"The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel -- and I have more fat than I can use," Bittner wrote on lipodiesel.com, which is no longer online. "Not only do they get to lose their love handles or chubby belly but they get to take part in saving the Earth."
Using fat to fuel cars might be environmentally friendly, but it's definitely illegal in California to use human medical waste to power vehicles, and Bittner is being investigated by the state's public health department.
The U.S. Department of Energy said Monday that it was making available up to $200 million for advanced biofuel pilot refineries, expecting to award five to 12 projects over the next six years.
The department said that if deployed on a large scale, the commercial facilities could produce volumes that would contribute significantly to the new national renewable-fuels mandate.
"This funding opportunity will look for the most promising technologies that can advance the potential of renewable biomass as a resource for second generation transportation biofuels," John Mizroch, acting assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, said in a statement.
"The Department of Energy will select breakthrough integrated biorefinery projects that have technical and economic performance data at the bench or pilot scale to prove they are ready to move a step closer toward commercial readiness," he said.
The department intends the projects to come online within three to four years of each funding award. The biofuels produced from the projects are part of the effort to cut automotive emissions that contribute to global warming while increasing security of supply and weaning the country off energy import dependence.
Last week, the Energy Information Administration said it believed the country would fall short of being able to produce the 36 billion gallons of biofuels required by 2022 under the mandate. Of that, 21 billion gallons are required to come from advanced fuels such as cellulosic ethanol and biobutanol.
Cellulosic ethanol, which people from President-elect Barack Obama to struggling farmers from his home state view a promising biofuel, is actually worse than much-criticized corn ethanol because cellulosic ethanol results in more air pollution, requires more land to produce and causes more harm to wildlife, a major study has found.
The energy alternatives "that are good are not the ones that people have been talking about the most. And some options that have been proposed are just downright awful," said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, in a paper that reviewed and ranked major proposed energy-related solutions to global warming, air-pollution mortality and energy security.
"Ethanol-based biofuels will actually cause more harm to human health, wildlife, water supply and land use than current fossil fuels," he said, adding that ethanol may also emit more global-warming pollutants than fossil fuels, according to the latest scientific studies.
Jacobson has conducted the first quantitative, scientific evaluation of the proposed major energy-related solutions by assessing not only their potential for delivering energy for electricity and vehicles, but also their impacts on global warming, human health, energy security, water supply, space requirements, wildlife, water pollution, reliability and sustainability.
His findings indicate that the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options. His findings were published in this month's issue of Energy & Environmental Science.
President-elect Barack Obama leveled a stern warning at General Motors and Chrysler last week after the federal government promised them billions to help them survive: "The auto companies must not squander this chance to reform bad management practices."
---------- President-elect Obama on next week's cover of Time. ----------
Once he takes office, the bailout will give him a tool to prod the industry to change, but it will also test his resolve as he pushes it in new directions.
Obama, after all, has been thinking out loud about the future of the American automobile industry for years, well before his presidential campaign began. He co-sponsored two bills in 2006, during his second year as a U.S. senator -- one to raise fuel economy standards, and the other to encourage the use of alternative fuels.
His writings and speeches on the auto industry suggest a keen interest in finding ways, including new technology, to improve the fuel efficiency of the cars and trucks that Americans drive.
But with Detroit in a fragile financial state, it is unclear how many compromises he will have to make in pursuing his agenda for the auto industry, as he juggles other priorities such as providing a stimulus program for the broader economy, The New York Times reported Sunday. The United Automobile Workers union, which backed Obama, will want a say in the changes he envisions for the automakers.
Ray LaHood will look after highway infrastructure improvements, fuel-economy efforts, vehicle safety, spending on mass transit and clean car programs, even the national speed limit as President-elect Barack Obama's Transportation secretary, but the just-retired Illinois congressman is largely a cipher on those issues.
LaHood, 63 (left)
, has little transportation record beyond his support for Amtrak, the national passenger train program, and his apparently friendly relationship with the Teamsters Union and other transportation unions, which endorsed and financially supported him
during his congressional career. The national Teamseters Union also has endorsed his nomination
as Transportation Secretary.
Some pundits have suggested that his value is more as the Obama cabinet's lone registered Republican (retiring Defense Secretary Robert Gates considers himself a Republican but is registered as an independent) than as a transportation wiz.
But for what he has done on transportation issues, the former congressman from Peoria generally wins plaudits.
"While his environmental record is mixed, LaHood has proven himself as an ally of public transportation, consistently voting to support mass transit and intercity rail, systems which need vast investment to move America to the greener, cleaner infrastructure proposed by President-elect Barack Obama," said Rob McCulloch, transportation issues advocate for Environment America.
LaHood also has a record of supporting federal fuel economy increases, votiong for corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) hikes in 1993, 1995 and 2007, said Ann Mesnikoff, the Sierra Club's Washington, D.C., representative. "That at least means he understands the policy and the need to raise standards," she said.
The U.S. will miss by a wide mark its self-imposed, year-old biofuels mandate, according to the government's top energy forecasting agency.
The country will only blend about 30 billion gallons of fuels such as corn-based ethanol into gasoline by 2022. That's about 17 percent short of the U.S. mandate of 36 billion gallons by that year, the Energy Information Administration said this week.
The U.S. enacted the mandate, known as the Renewable Fuels Standard, late last year in an effort to provide jobs and begin to wean the country off foreign oil.
The mandate calls for corn ethanol, but also an increasing amount cellulosic ethanol made from fast-growing grasses and trees, and biodiesel made from non-food sources. Cellulosic is not yet made commercially.
Howard Gruenspecht, the Energy Information Administration's acting director, said the "key risk factor is rate of development of cellulosic biofuels technology." The near-term growth of cellulosic "is certainly a question mark," he said.
This year's oil price collapse and the credit crunch have hurt many biofuel companies financially and cut the amount of fuel some of them are making.
Loopholes in the mandate that allow regulators to waive the requirements, if needed, could also result in lower blending, Gruenspecht, said.
Energy-crops developer Ceres Inc. announced today that it has begun selling switchgrass and high-biomass sorghum seed in possibly the first seed sales of non-food, low-carbon crops developed specifically as raw materials for cellulosic ethanol.
The Thousand Oaks, California, company is offering the seeds direct to farms under its Blade Energy Crops label. The company reported that the first Blade products build on the inherent advantages of these highly efficient crops, offering double-digit biomass yield gains in many cases, which is a remarkable level of improvement by crop science standards.
High yields are needed since widely dispersed sources of biomass are cost-prohibitive to harvest and transport.
Anna Rath, vice president of commercial development, said that switchgrass and high-biomass sorghum can provide new options for growers, especially on underperforming land.
While she expects the bulk of Blade seed to be sold to bioenergy companies this first year, the company has set aside seed for growers interested in gaining experience with these crops as the market for biomass develops.
If you've been thinking of circumnavigating the globe in a donated diesel Toyota Land Cruiser, fueling it with biodiesel you make from waste vegetable oil you collect from bewildered but friendly people along the way, just so you can tell your friends you were the first person to do it -- and to make a green statement -- forget about it. It's been done.
Shusei Yamada (pictured), a Japanese photojournalist and rally driver, ended his round-the-world romp the first of this month in Vancouver, 360 days after setting out from Tokyo. He appeared no worse for wear.
The same could not be said for the Land Cruiser, which racked up 29,734 miles from start to finish. Yamada, who gave interviews along the way, often described the sport ute as the only biodiesel vehicle that can refine its own fuel from waste oil. Judging by the photo, the biodiesel fuel processing plant that filled the cargo bay was no Mickey Mouse production.
For further information -- like, how many people donated waste vegetable oil to Yamada (779) and how much waste vegetable oil did they donate (6,504 liters) -- check out the Biodiesel Adventure Website.
Almost three decades later, Jimmy Carter recalls how tough it was trying to get Americans to kick their oil habit even when soaring gas prices and record-long lines at the pump remained fresh memories.
Now President-elect Barack Obama is heading to Washington with a set of energy goals as ambitious as Carter's back in late 1970s.
From one president to the next, Carter offered this advice: Try to inspire Americans to see the virtue in making energy sacrifices. Get energy legislation to Congress during the presidential honeymoon. And stick with it.
"I think he can prevail if he does it early and with a great deal of dedication and enthusiasm -- and with tenacity," Carter said.
History isn't tilted in Obama's favor, the Journal noted. Presidents all the way back to Richard Nixon -- whose "Project Independence" promised to make America independent from foreign oil by 1980 -- were thwarted by short attention spans and gyrations in the energy market. President Ford set a similar target for 1985.
Today, as in the Carter era, Americans remain by far the world's biggest per-capita consumers of oil. About 70 percent of it is imported, compared with just over a third in 1981.
Steven Chu, President-elect Barack Obama's choice to head the Energy Department, has been a strong advocate of alternative fuels and a vociferous opponent of fossil fuels -- foreign oil in particular -- for years.
Most recently, the scientific interests of the 60-year-old Nobel laureate and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have centered on energy and finding ways to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources such as biofuels from plants.
But Chu seems to be at odds with Obama on the role of corn-based ethanol in America's future. The domestic ethanol industry had a huge friend in Obama for most of the past year, while Chu has never been a friend to corn-ethanol producers.
On a segment on PBS' The News Hour last year, Chu said "corn, at best, is a transition crop, but very quickly we want to transition away from corn to a grass that requires far less land for the amount of fuel, far less fertilizer, far less water."
Chu sees tremendous promise in other biofuels, particularly biofuels that would propel automobiles. In an interview with an Australian radio personality last year, he said transportation fuel is the most valuable form of energy we have -- even when that fuel is electricity.
Foes of increased use of corn or other food-chain crops in the production of ethanol should be pushing hard for a federal carbon emissions tax.
A new study by a government panel led by the departments of Energy and Agriculture, says a carbon "cost" of $25 per ton emitted would cause a drop in the amount of corn acreage being cultivated for biofuels.
Another way to cut back on the use of corn, the report said, would be to establish nationwide soil sustainability standards. The net result would be to push biofuel feedstock growers into using non-food crops that don't deplete the soil as much as do corn, soybeans and other food crops.
In all, the biofuel feedstocks report from the federal Biomass Research and Development Board, considered eight scenarios for increasing domestic biofuels production. The report is an outgrowth of the National Biofuels Action Plan published in October.
Among the study's key findings, according to an analysis by Greenwire, a subscription-only environmental issues news service, is that a 3-billion-gallons-a-year increase in corn-based biofuels production in 2016 - to 15 billion gallons from the 12 billion gallon baseline set in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 - would require a 3.6 percent increase in corn production with an accompanying 4.6 percent increase in corn prices.
That boost is far less than the corn price jumps over the past that have triggered debate over ethanol's role in food cost increases over the past two years, Greenwire reported.
The study says that the price of soybeans, which compete with corn for land, would increase in that scenario by 3.2 percent, while other major crop prices would rise by less than 1 percent.
The government's analysis also found that if biofuels production rose to 16 billion gallons by 2016 based on today's technologies, land planted for corn would increase by 4.1 percent, with non-ethanol corn use falling by 5.2 percent and corn exports falling 7.7 percent.
A carbon tax - or higher costs of water, fossil fuel-derived fertilizers and other products and services needed to grow corn -- could reduce the pressure to plant more acreage of corn for ethanol and encourage instead planting of non-food crops, such as switchgrass, and use of agricultural waste materials such as corn stalks, to produce ethanol distilled from cellulose rather than from corn starch, the study suggests.
While most everyone else is saving money at the pump these days, city officials in Portland, Oregon, are filling up city vehicles with biodiesel costing almost $7-per-gallon -- and racking up fuel budget overruns near $300,000, to boot.
Adding to problem: Recent research that suggests that canola-based biodiesel isn't all that green.
That possibility didn't occur to city officials two years ago, when they entered into a contract with Oregon farmers to buy canola-based biodiesel from them in an effort to kick-start a local biofuel industry.
Since then, the cost of canola has skyrocketed while the cost of soy and other biofuel-based commodities have not. The result: the city is paying twice for its canola-based biodiesel what it could be paying for soy-based biodiesel.
The practice isn't helping the city's bottom line one bit. Its Office of Transportation is between $260,000 and $320,000 over budget as a result.
Commissioner Randy Leonard, who spearheaded the buy-local contract, says the expensive biodiesel accounts for just five percent of all city fuel and he insists it's worth paying more to reduce dependence on foreign oil and create a new clean industry in Oregon.
Beam by beam, a plant that will churn out millions of gallons of cellulosic ethanol a year is now rising in Georgia. Its owner, Range Fuels, is vying to be the first business in the industry to claim a commercial plant.
Close on its tail, a handful of other companies--from corn ethanol veterans to startups backed by big-name investors--are pushing ahead with plans to manufacture non-food-based biofuel using everything from corncobs and wheat straw to waste wood and landfill trash, the subscription news service ClimateWire reported today.
The transition of cellulosic ethanol technologies from a lab-bench promise to a mass-production process has been moving quickly. These businesses are in the vanguard of an industry that is now driving the next generation of biofuels to the market.
Whether they can do this and make money is what everyone wants to know. The next three years will bring answers, based on the number of large-scale plants in the works.
"We are moving as prudently and with as much urgency as possible," David Aldous, the recently named CEO of Range Fuels and a former executive vice president of Royal Dutch Shell PLC, told ClimateWire. Aldous said that the plant, which will use heat, pressure and a chemical catalyst to convert wood into fuel, should be ready by late next year.
These pacesetters are assisted by a federal mandate that guarantees an initial baseline market--36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022, only 15 of which can come from corn-based ethanol, a number that industry is a few years away from hitting.
GM Holden Ltd., an Australian automaker based in Port Melbourne, has announced it is looking at developing an alternative fuel from lawn clippings.
The subsidiary of General Motors made the announcement in conjunction with news that in 2010 it will start selling a variant of its Commodore sedan that runs mainly on ethanol.
In a statement issued today, Holden said the car could be fuelled by a combination of grass clippings and household waste under a company plan to reduce Australia's reliance on foreign oil.
Holden Chairman Mark Reuss said the automaker is in talks with American biofuel developer Coskata to use micro-organisms to convert grass clippings, woodchips and general household waste into E85, a blended fuel that's 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.The plant would be the first of its kind outside the U.S.
Coskata claims its ethanol has the potential to reduce lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions by up to 84 percent compared to conventional gasoline.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is seeking to support up to four advanced biofuel projects with up to $250 million in loan guarantees per project.
The USDA defines advanced biofuels as fuels that do not use corn as a feedstock.
The program provides loan guarantees for the development, construction and retrofitting of viable commercial-scale biorefineries producing advanced biofuels. Preference will be given to projects where first-of-a-kind technology will be deployed on a commercial scale.
Applications will be accepted through the remainder of this month for loan guarantees first half of Fiscal Year 2009. Applications must be submitted between March 1, 2009, and April 30, 2009, for the second half of the fiscal year.
In a statement explaining the program, the USDA states that cellulosic ethanol production--a key next-generation biofuel--may be produced from switch grass, corn stover, forest waste, fast-growing trees, woodchips, canola, algae and other plant material rather than from the edible part of crops such as corn.
"These energy crops require further research and development, but they represent a key long-term component to a sustainable biofuels industry," the statement says. Clearly, someone at the USDA is keenly aware of the plethora of studies that have come out against ethanol production the past year.
The loan guarantees are available under the Biorefinery Assistance Program, authorized by the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (also known as "the farm bill").
The chief executive of chemical giant DuPont has called on America's major automakers to band together to create a butanol-powered, highly fuel-efficient "car of the future" within the next two years.
The endeavor could be called the Detroit Project, DuPont Chairman and CEO Chad Holliday (left) said in an address before the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday, and would be led by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler in a collaboration akin to the atomic-bomb-making Manhattan Project of World War II.
The car that Holliday proposed would be powered with butanol, which is a solvent and biofuel made by DuPont. At 85 percent strength, butanol can be used in cars designed for gasoline without any change to the engine (unlike 85 percent ethanol) and it contains more energy than ethanol and almost as much as gasoline. It can also be used as a blended additive to diesel fuel to reduce soot emissions
"This is a unique time in history," Holliday said. "It just seems like this is the one window when you can pull something like this off."
The project would require $5 billion in seed money, he said, which could be raised by selling U.S. bonds similar to the way the government raised money for the war effort during the 1940s. The project would yield a strong return on investment, he said, and calling upon citizens to invest in the effort would "build some national pride around the project."
While the Detroit 3 would comprise the core of the project, other companies would bring "a different mindset and different answers" to it. He named Intel, Microsoft, Dell, Boeing and Google as possible collaborators, adding that he had not approached any of them with his idea.
Palm oil plantations--a principal source of biodiesel worldwide--reduce plant and animal diversity, and do little to reduce carbon emissions, according to a major international study
.
---------- Palms stand where rainforest stood. ----------
Tropical forests are increasingly cleared to make way for palm oil crops, leading to a reduction in habitats for many rare species, scientists from seven nations concluded in a report published this week in the journal Conservation Biology (subscription required).
The problem is most acute in Malaysia and Indonesia, which produce about 85 percent of the world's palm oil.
Palm oil is a common vegetable oil, and is now regarded as a major source of biodiesel, however the researchers question whether it really offers environmental benefits over conventional fossil fuels.
Clearing land to start plantations involves burning huge tracts of forest, a process that produces large amounts of greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide. The researchers estimate at least 75 years of biofuel production is needed from the plantations to offset the amount of carbon dioxide produced by this burning.
Indeed, the lead author of the study, Finn Danielsen of Denmark's Nordic Agency for Development and Ecology, said it would take 75 to 93 years to see any benefits to the climate from biofuel plantations on converted tropical forestlands.
In its effort to receive Congressional aid, Ford Motor Co. today submitted a business plan to the Senate Banking Committee that stressed the automaker's need to bring more fuel-efficient vehicles to market.
---------- Ford CEO Alan Mulally hopes to make a better impression on Congress this week. ----------
But in the 19-page plan, which Ford hopes will move Congress to give the automaker a "stand-by line of credit" in the amount of up to $9 billion at a low interest rate and a 10-year term, America's No. 2 carmaker also asked the lawmakers to:
Prohibit states from creating corporate fuel economy standards that are tougher than the federal standards, which California and more than a dozen other states propose;
consider tax incentives for consumers to trade in older vehicles and move to more fuel-efficient vehicles;
consider continuing rewarding automakers with tax credits from money they spend on research and development.
To obtain a "balanced portfolio"--one that isn't so heavily weighed to SUVs and pickup trucks--Ford said it plans to deliver six new small- and medium-sized vehicles to the U.S. over the next four years. This, Ford said, will enable its car and crossover product segment mix to increase from 48 percent to 60 percent and result in volume and share growth.
In Troy, Michigan, engineers are reportedly tweaking what they believe to be the public transit vehicle of the future: a super-lightweight hybrid bus.
The GTB-40 (right) is made of a high-strength steel that will last longer than most bus frames. Its builder, Fisher Coachworks, says the chassis allows it to zip along with half the weight of its peers.
And, its hybrid-electric engine not only consumes less fuel, but also stores electric energy whenever a driver hits the brakes.
The result is a bus that gets 10 miles per gallon--if you convert its battery power to diesel equivalents, that is.
But the average diesel bus--the dominant vehicle in public transit--gets just over 3 miles to the gallon, so the new mpg number has city transit agencies taking note, the subscription news service ClimateWirereported today. Battered by fuel prices and hoping to spruce up their environmental records, they are buying more and more hybrid buses to run everyday routes.
Compared to the tens of thousands of diesel buses already in service, the hybrids are few. In most places, they haven't graduated from pilot projects. But they're at the front of a trend that's been building since early this decade. In 1995, according to the American Public Transportation Association, only 6 percent of buses ran on anything other than straight diesel or gasoline. In 2007, that number had risen to 22 percent, ClimateWire reported.
"They're all prototypes. None are really final in the sense that they're out on the road in any type of mass," Lurae Stuart, an alternative-fuels analyst with the American Public Transportation Association, told ClimateWire. "But that's still a rapid change for a technology."
A battle of words - and lobbying efforts - is building between the food and ethanol industries.
Angry over the Grocery Manufacturers Association's accusations that corn-based ethanol - the only kind sold in the U.S. - has had a negative impact on food prices, several major ethanol producers have formed a new trade association to push for increased acceptance of the fuel, the subscription-only E&E News reports.
Both sides, of course, want to win the ear of the new Congress and the incoming Obama administration - the grocery association perhaps a little more desperate as President-elect Barack Obama comes from corn-rich Illinois and supported increased use of ethanol during his successful campaign.
Ethanol foes, and there are many (we're not particularly fond of it either, the way it now is made), maintain that increasing demand for corn (and sugar cane, the other big crop from which a lot of ethanol outside the U.S. is made) has driven up food prices by taking a substantial amount of the grain out of the food chain and by encouraging farmers to plant it instead of other food crops.
A research team led by a Montana State University professor has found a fungus that produces a new type of diesel fuel, which they say holds great promise.
---------- An electron microscope's view of Gliocladium roseum, a plant fungus that produces a chemical very close to diesel oil. ----------
Calling the fungus' output "myco-diesel," Gary Strobel and his collaborators describe their initial observations in the November issue of Microbiology.
The discovery may offer an alternative to fossil fuels, said Strobel, MSU professor of plant sciences and plant pathology. The find is even bigger, he said, than his 1993 discovery of fungus that contained the anticancer drug Paclitaxel (or, commonly, Taxol).
Strobel, who travels the world looking for exotic plants that may contain beneficial microbes, found the diesel-producing fungus in a Patagonia rainforest. Strobel visited the rainforest in 2002 and collected a variety of specimens, including the branches from an ancient family of trees known as "ulmo."
When he and his collaborators examined the branches, they found fungus growing inside. They continued to investigate and discovered that the fungus, Gliocladium roseum, was producing gases.
Further testing showed that the fungus, when exposed to low amounts of oxygen, was producing a number of compounds normally associated with diesel fuel, which is obtained from crude oil.
"These are the first organisms that have been found that make many of the ingredients of diesel," Strobel said. "This is a major discovery."
In case Afghanastan, Iraq, formation of a transition team and coping with a national recession weren't concerns enough for Barack Obama on election day plus one, several of the country's biggest business lobbies held their hands out Wednesday for policy largesse from the President-elect.
The National Assn. of Manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Business Industry Political Action Committee all urged Obama to see things their way in making energy independence and economic stimulus his top domestic priorities.
The GOP-friendly business organizations were joined by a major green investment coalition that called on Obama to pursue environmentally friendly policies.
The manufacturing industry group, according to a report by the subscription-only E&E News, which specializes in energy and environmental issues, called on Obama to abandon federal mandates for use of alternative fuels and instead expand domestic production of fuel from oil shale.
The trade group also asked in an open letter to Obama, that his the administration support incentives for energy production from coal as well as development of carbon capture and storage technologies to reduce coal's environmentally damaging impacts.
U.S. farming and ethanol giant Archer Daniels Midland Co. says it will go to Brazil to produce ethanol from sugar cane now that the economics of corn-based ethanol in this country have soured.
Archer Daniels, one of the biggest ethanol distillers in the U.S., said it would enter the Brazilian market via a joint venture with Grupo Cabrera, investing $370 million in two new ethanol plants while its Brazilian partner invests $130 million.
It is unlikely any of Illinois-based Archer Daniel's sugar cane ethanol would make its way back to the States -- the U.S. slaps a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on imported ethanol.
President-elect Barack Obama, an ethanol supporter with his political roots planted deeply in Illinois -- the nation's second-largest corn producer -- isn't likely to change that.
President-elect Barack Obama made many pledges, laid out lots of goals and otherwise built a substantial political platformto appeal to environmentalists and green-car proponents during an 18-month White House bid that culminated in victory several hours ago. Among those pledges and goals:
Increase Fuel Economy Standards. Obama and Joe Biden will increase fuel economy standards 4 percent per year while providing $4 billion for domestic automakers to retool their manufacturing facilities in America to produce these vehicles.
Get 1 Million Plug-In Hybrid Cars on the Road by 2015. These vehicles can get up to 150 miles per gallon. Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe we should work to ensure these cars are built here in America, instead of factories overseas.
Create a New $7,000 Tax Credit for Purchasing Advanced Vehicles.
Establish a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Obama and Biden will establish a National Low Carbon Fuel Standard to reduce the carbon in our fuels 10 percent by 2020. Obama and Biden will also require 60 billion gallons of advanced biofuels to be phased into our fuel supply by 2030.
Promote the Responsible Domestic Production of Oil and Natural Gas. An Obama-Biden administration will establish a process for early identification of any infrastructure obstacles/shortages or possible federal permitting process delays to drilling in the Bakken Shale formation, the Barnett shale formation, and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Invest in a Clean Energy Economy and Help Create 5 Million New Green Jobs. Barack Obama and Joe Biden will strategically invest $150 billion over 10 years to accelerate the commercialization of plug-in hybrids, promote development of commercial scale renewable energy, encourage energy efficiency, invest in low emissions coal plants, advance the next generation of biofuels and fuel infrastructure, and begin transition to a new digital electricity grid.
Ensure 10 Percent of Our Electricity Comes From Renewable Sources by 2012, and 25 Percent by 2025.
These bulleted items were taken verbatim from Obama's official Web site last night as the Democratic senator from Illinois gave his victory speech. In addition, Obama made many statements during his campaign that we expect him to honor.
VeraSun Energy Corp., the bankrupt ethanol refiner, said it has won court approval to receive about $215 million in funding from creditors.
The funds would enable the South Dakota-based company -- the nation's second-largest ethanol producer -- to stay in operation.
VeraSun said it expected to receive about $40 million to $50 million in funding from secured creditors this week with the rest coming through within 20 to 25 days.
How about putting one million made-in-the-U.S. plug-in hybrid cars, each getting 150 miles per gallon, on American roads by 2015, and handing a $7,000 tax credit to anyone purchasing an "advanced vehicle"?
Or perhaps you'd prefer a $5,000 tax credit for anyone buying a zero-emission car and a $300 million prize to the company that reinvents the battery to make those cars possible.
That's part of the choice in Tuesday's presidential election.
The plug-in hybrid goal and $7,000 tax credit are among the green-car related issues in Democrat Barack Obama's platform, while the flex-fuel target and the $5,000 credit are being touted by Republican John McCain.
We know the election is nigh, and most people have already made up their minds, but for those still dithering, or not absolutely certain of their choice, here's a last look -- from an environmental automotive viewpoint -- at the candidates' positions on green-car issues.
Ethanol producers' profits are withering
like a thirsty cornfield on a 100-degree August day and it looks as if there's a push to persuade
friendly members of Congress to ante up some bailout bucks for an industry already awash in subsidies.
---------- Using corn for fuel is being challenged by many. ----------
So it can't come as good news to all those red-state corn growers and ethanol producers that a major conservative think tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute
, has just come out in favor of killing the federal government's mandate that U.S. production of ethanol for transportation fuels double to 8 billion gallons a year in 2012 from 4 billion gallons in 2006.
The institute issued a report today maintaining - as have many others on both side of the political divide - that demand for corn-based ethanol has resulted in "radically higher food prices and a massive loss of forests and grasslands."
U.S. ethanol companies are struggling financially, with their stock prices nosediving, cash reserves dwindling and bad bets on pricey corn contracts coming due as fuel prices decline, Greenwire reported today (subscription required).
"When you look at it from a firm-specific standpoint then a cash-market standpoint, the profitability could be even worse than what the cash market is implying," said Ian Horowitz, alternative energy analyst with Soleil Securities Group. "And the cash market is implying difficult times. It's going from bad to worse."
He added, "It is a very difficult backdrop [for ethanol companies], and at a difficult time, these guys at a firm-specific level have had some very big missteps with hedging programs."
Believing corn prices would continue to rise over the long term, VeraSun Energy in South Dakota and many other ethanol companies locked in corn contracts at high prices in early summer when commodity markets were booming, Greenwire reported. But corn is now selling for almost half its early-summer price, and companies are in precarious positions.
"The best situation for an ethanol plant is low corn and high gas prices, but when you have the opposite ... that's the worst possible situation," said Michael Schewel, a partner at law firm McGuireWoods who focuses on the development and financing of energy projects.
Publicly traded VeraSun has said it could have a quarterly loss of up to $103 million because of the beating the company is taking in the corn futures market. When a bid to raise more equity from investors failed, VeraSun hired investment bankers this month to seek strategic alternatives. Other ethanol plants in Kansas and Ohio have declared bankruptcy in the last week.
In yet another example of why it is foolish to install the roof before the walls are up, a government report finds that while federal agencies are meeting a mandate to buy and lease mostly flex-fuel vehicles these days, they rarely put anything but gasoline in the tanks.
That, of course, defeats the concept of using alternative fuels to boost our energy security - something you'd think federal agencies would be concerned about.
The problem is that alt fuel availability is pretty limited except in the midwest corn belt, where most of the nation's ethanol pumps are grouped.
Nationally, there are about 117,000 conventional gas stations but only 5,731 private and public alternative fuel stations.
That stunningly small total, compiled by the Energy Department, includes stations dispensing one or more of the various alt fuels: bio-diesel, compressed natural gas, electricity, ethanol, hydrogen, liquid natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, which accounts for 2,141 stations, or 37 percent of the total.
While Detroit loves to make flex-fuel vehicles - automakers get extra credits for them than help them meet federal fuel economy requirements even though the cars and trucks aren't being used to help lower petroleum consumption - fuel companies are loathe to spend the money to install alt fueling pumps.
Additionally, ethanol, the most common alternative fuel after LPG, is corrosive and must be shipped by tanker truck, so moving it from the refineries to areas with large populations of flex-fuel vehicles gets to be an uneconomical proposition.
Limited availability of non-petroleum fuels means that it is not likely that government agencies can comply with mandates to boost alt-fuels use and reduce petroleum-based fuel use over the next several years, the Government Accountability Agency said in its just-released report.
The GAO complained that while agencies made sure they met the mandate that 75 percent of their new-vehicle fleets be flex-fuel compatible by the end of fiscal 2007, many - including the Energy Department, which ought to have known better - never ensured that the vehicles used alternative fuels.
Investigators said 2006 data indicate that the agencies primarily relied on gasoline, and that while they failed to file reports for 2007, there was no reason to believe things have changed.
The watchdog agency also said it found "persistent data problems" that made it doubt the accuracy of government agency reports showing that about half have achieved the goal of using 10 percent more alternative fuel than in 2006 while two-third have achieved the goal of lowering gasoline and diesel usage by 2 percent.
Qualifying for home mortgages, car loans and other big ticket credit items is getting harder for many to do, and major banks are hoarding cash as they wait for better - or at least more certain - times.
But contrary to a lot of what's passing for conventional wisdom these days, cash for clean-tech projects including alternative fuels and other green transportation technologies still is out there.
It's not as easy to come by as it was just a few months ago, but the head of the National Venture Capital Association
says that the private investment community is expected to pump out $30 billion this year, with $4.5 billion of it for clean-tech investments.
The annual total is unchanged from last year, but the amount earmarked for clean technologies is up 50 percent from $3 billion.
"Clean-tech is getting a bigger slice of the same-sized pie," NVCA President Mark Heesen said in an interview with Energy & Environmental News
, a subscription-only news service.
Early-stage companies that rely on cash from venture capital investors are heavily buffered from the credit crunch because most venture capital firms are investing money they raised during the past two years, said Heesen.
"We're very different than banks," he explained. "We're about equity, not debt."
One of the most recent to benefit form the flow of venture capital is Cobalt Biofuels
, a three-year-old California company aiming to convert non-food plant material into a cellulosic biobutanol fuel
.
Cobalt said this week that it just raised $25 million in a new round of private financing, bringing total equity raised to $38 million.
General Motors today began sharing its ethanol research with China in the automaker's stated pursuit of an "energy strategy that addresses global energy and climate issues and helps reduce the automobile's reliance on petroleum."
In the first of a weeklong series of workshops, executives from GM's Global Energy Systems R&D department and Coskata Inc., an energy startup GM has invested heavily in, joined the Tsinghua University professor in charge of driving the prestigious university's biofuels research in giving an assessment of China's biofuels industry.
Given that China is nearly the size of the United States and that nearly 15 percent of its land is arable, the assessment was favorable. No surprise there. Indeed, China already is the world's third-largest ethanol producer (behind the U.S. and Brazil), with annual production of about 1 billion gallons.
That GM has been slow to shift from making gas-guzzlers to fuel-sippers is irrefutable, as is the automaker's history of putting nearly all of its "eggs" in the fuel-inefficient basket. It is downright depressing that not one of the top-10 vehicles by fuel efficiency in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2009 fuel-economy guide is a GM product.
But in China GM is doing something smart. When you consider that GM is committed to making cars and trucks that can run on combinations of ethanol and gasoline -- it's already produced more than 5 million such vehicles and plans to make half the vehicles it sells in the U.S. gas-ethanol flex-fuel by 2012 -- Detroit's biggest automaker is clearly thinking ahead.
Even as oil hangs below $70 a barrel for the first time in 14 months, the search for its replacement continues.
General Motors Corp. is in Beijing this week to promote biofuels, its favored short-term alternative to oil, at a conference and in workshops for Chinese media, The Wall Street Journal reported today (subscription required).
GM will be traveling with Coskata Inc., a startup it invested in, that claims to have bred a microorganism capable of turning everything from used tires to straw into ethanol, which can be used as a substitute for or blended into gasoline, the Journal reported.
Ethanol's supporters say it can reduce dependency on Middle Eastern oil imports and burns cleaner than fossil fuel. Critics say the ethanol boom has driven up food prices by diverting corn for use in ethanol plants.
In China, food security is a much bigger concern than in the U.S. The impact of inflation on basic foods can have a devastating impact on the hundreds of millions who are still relatively poor.
China has mandated ethanol blending in 10 provinces, but food security concerns have kept the government from expanding its commitment, the Journal reported, despite concerns over China's growing dependence on imported oil.
It may be one of the biggest green gambles of the century: a national goal of converting wood, grass, corn stalks and garbage into 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuels annually by 2022.
No commercial-scale refineries exist, researchers have yet to agree on the best technology for fuel conversion and there is no distribution network to handle fuel once it is made.
Add it all up and the country's not even close to meeting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's renewable fuel standards a mere 14 years from now.
So says an Associated Press article distributed Thursday that's well worth the time it takes to read.
KL Energy Corp. of Rapid City, South Dakota, has acquired cellulose-based ethanol maker KL Process Design Group in a move that effectively takes the energy company public and was completed in part to fund what the company describes as its second commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol production plant.
The acquisition was structured as a reverse merger and led to the issuance of $6.1 million in shares held by investors Fair Energy and The Green Fund, according to an announcement Wednesday by KL Energy Corp.
KL Process Design Group was formed in 2000 and has designed grain-based ethanol plants as well as a cellulosic ethanol plant near Upton, Wyoming, that uses waste wood as the feedstock.
It describes the Upton plant as a "small commercial-scale facility," but KL Energy CEO Randy Kramer said it produces 1.5 million gallons of ethanol per year and is geared more toward demonstrating the viability of the engineering process.
Kramer said he expects the new plant will generate between 5 million and 10 million gallons of ethanol per year. Discussions are ongoing regarding the location of that plant, he said, but the company intends to place it near a source of waste wood, such as a forest products mill operation.
Kramer said the company hopes to break ground on the second facility in March of next year.
Several companies are vying to build the first truly commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant, as researchers and engineers struggle to find cost-effective new ways to produce a fuel that has been widely criticized for driving up food costs when made from grains like corn.
University of Florida officials will cut the ribbon Friday on a research pilot plant that will convert a range of hearty, nonfood feedstocks into cellulosic ethanol.
The $2.5 million plant, paid for with state funds and located on the university's Gainesville campus, will be used to train graduate students in biofuel production, purification and testing.
Researchers will use acid to pre-treat shredded sugarcane bagasse, rice hulls, wood chips and other biomass. The feedstock will be fed into a stomach-like reactor, which will use heat, steam and enzymes to disintegrate the biomass's cellulosic structure.
The remaining sugary syrup will be fed into a fermenter full of bacteria to make fuel, said microbiology professor Lonnie Ingram (pictured).
Researchers will test specialty enzymes developed by Ingram and licensed to Boston-based Verenium Corp.
The research facility, slated for completion next year, could produce up to 2 million gallons of fuel annually from bagasse and other local biomass.
Ingram estimates that the state's lawns, orange groves, sugar cane farmers and forests produce as much as 124 million tons of biomass per year.
That's enough, in theory, to make 10 billion gallons of ethanol. And that ethanol would be made without the significant expenditures on fertilizer, herbicides and diesel fuel devoted to growing corn.
Cellulosic ethanol pioneer Mascoma Corp.
says it has received a $49.5 million cash infusion from the State of Michigan and the federal Energy Department for development of a newplant in Michigan.
Mascoma, one of two cellulosic ethanolcompanies being backed by General Motors Corp., has developed a process that uses proprietary enzymes to convert wood chips into ethanol fuel.
The grants announced today include $26 million from the federal government and $23.5 million from the state.
Boston-based Mascoma also has a demonstration plant in Rome, N.Y.
While conventional ethanol is made from crops including corn and sugar cane, cellulosic ethanol is made from waste products and non-food crops such as praire grasses.
Production of both types of the alternative fuel has drawbacks -- including potentially increasing heat-trapping carbon dioxide. But conventional ethanol production has been blamed for increasing the cost of grain-based basic foodstuffs.
The goal of cellulosic ethanol backers is to remove the fuel's impacrt on the food chain and, possibly, to reduce the amount of energy required in ethanol production.
The United States is positioned to become the single largest biodiesel market with 19 percent of consumption by 2012, according to a report released Tuesday.
Menlo Park, California-based SRI Consulting said the industry grew 50 percent from 2002-2007 -- the highest growth in the chemical industry -- and is poised to grow at 30 percent between 2007 and 2012.
It will be followed by Germany and France. New and large markets for biodiesel are expected to emerge in China and India, since the governments of both countries have announced major biodiesel initiatives.
SRI projects a slower pace of growth for the global biodiesel industry due to market uncertainties such as the ongoing fuels-versus-food debate, rising raw material costs, changing regulatory environment, a slowing global economy and the current financial crisis.
"An important development over the last several years has been the shift in global biodiesel patterns. Only five years ago Europe was a dominant player, with 83 percent of capacity. By 2007 the European share had declined to about 46 percent as North America and Asia grew to 23 percent and 19 percent respectively," SRI said.
SRI is a business research service for the global chemical industry.
When the American Le Mans Series
Petit Le Mans event at Road Atlanta wraps up this weekend, one of the trophies to be awarded will be for the winner of a new "Green Challenge"
race within the race.
Favorites are the series' clean-diesel cars, but the first hybrid race car (left)
since the Panoz Q9 GT hybrids of the late 1990s also is in the running.
The Green Challenge is a new contest in which cars in the race are judged on green criteria including fuel consumption and total environmental impact.
Electric vehicles such as the Chevy Volt and the recent new prototypes shown by Chrysler
are getting the lion's share of attention in the green car arena now, but when they roll out at dealerships in about two years these vehicles will represent only a tiny fraction of the cars on the road.
The EVs get the headlines, but out of the limelight, scientists are continuing to work on new and better ways to produce biofuels - such as cellulosic ethanol made from woodchips or other waste material rather than food-related crops such as corn and sugar cane - that can substitute for gasoline.
The fruits of their labor could be in your car's gasoline tank as early as 2010, thanks to recent significant advances in cellulosic chemistry.
Challenges remain, however, including the need to greatly expand the number of gas stations selling E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
Versions of that same infrastructure dilemma -- what good's the solution if there's no way to get it to people - also dog advanced technologies such as hydrogen fuel cell and battery-electric cars: There are only a handful of hydrogen stations in the country, most centered in Southern California; and while there are lots of electrical outlets, there are very few fast-charging stations that would enable an EV driver to pull in, charge up and be on the road again in under 30 minutes.
While the infrastructure debate rolls on, Mascoma Corp.
, a small Boston-based company backed by General Motors Corp., says it has developed a new and better way to produce cellulosic ethanol using genetically engineered microbes.
GM's Energy Czar Joins Board
GM invested an undisclosed sum in Mascoma last May, when the two-year-old company raised $61 million in its third round of financing from stakeholders that also included petroleum giant Marathon Oil
.
Undisclosed though it is, GM's stake has got to be fairly large: Andreas M. Lippert, the automaker's director of global energy systems, has just joined Mascoma's scientific advisory board.
The news was overshadowed by the attention being given in the media to GM's introduction just days earlier of the production version of its plug-in hybrid electric car, the Chevrolet Volt, due to hit the retail market late in 2010.
But we cared, and on the day of Lippert's appointment we joined him on a tour of Mascoma's R&D laboratory in Lebanon, NH, where he spoke with us about the company's technology and the importance of biofuels going forward.
Portland, Or. - Usually when a carmaker invites a bunch of journalists to a seminar, they get wined and dined and stuffed with all sorts of fun facts about how well the company's doing and what great new products it is working on.
Toyota turned things upside down this week with a day-long session it called the Toyota Sustainable Mobility Seminar.
We were wined and dined, but only after listening to a parade of top scientists and researchers tell us, in unsparing detail, how the planet is running out of oil and water; how the biofuels we look to as potential replacements for oil aren't worth the power and water it takes to make 'em, and how we now are consuming 40 percent more resources each year than the planet can sustain.
It was not, as you can tell, a particularly spirit-lifting session.
Bill Reinert, Toyota's North American advanced technology vehicles manager, took to the podium after the morning's sessions, held out his left wrist and, with a downward slashing motion of his right hand told us that after hearing all that had just been said he wanted us to know that the proper way to slit it was vertically, not horizontally.
Highlights - or low lights - included:
From Scripps Institute (San Diego) hydrologist Tim Barnett the cheery news that there's a 50 percent probability that the American West, where much of the next few decades' population growth will be centered, is likely to run out of water in the next 20-40 years.
Unlike most of the vehicles there, it won't be running, but a production model of General Motors Corp.'s Volt series hybrid car (left)
will be on hand for viewing at AltCar Expo 2008
this weekend in Santa Monica, Calif.
The two-day event, now in its third year, is one of the nation's premier showcases for alternatives to the conventional gasoline-burning automobile.
Organizers say more than 100 vehicles - cars, trucks, scooters and 'cycles with natural gas, battery-electric, hydrogen fuel-cell electric, compressed air, biodiesel, flex-fuel and hybrid propulsion systems - will be on hand, several available for test drives.
The expo, to be held Friday and Saturday at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, drew more than 10,000 attendees last year.
In addition to the vehicle displays, the event features numerous displays by alternative energy providers and proponents; a series of seminars addressing climate change and transportation and energy trends and featuring panelists from government, industry and advocacy groups.
Hard on the heels of energy billionaire T. Boone Pickins' $58 million push
for adoption of natural gas as the nation's preferred alternative to gasoline, the ethanol industry is planning its own lobbying campaign.
Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol industry trade group, plans to debut pair of television ads this week aimed at including the plant-based alcohol fuel in the national debate on energy security.
Greenwire, a subscription-only environmental issues news service, reports that the ethanol group has filmed separate 30-second ads and purchased time on cable news channels in the Washington and New York City markets.
The decision to mount the campaign was made after a recent study by the international management consulting firm Accenture suggested that neither consumers nor politicians in the U.S. are sold on the fuel.
That's largely because ethanol today is made from corn (and, in Brazil and many other tropical countries, from sugar cane) and there is widespread belief that increased production of the fuel has driven corn prices -and the prices of many foods based on corn and other grains - through the roof.
In an effort to end a Catch-22 situation, a bipartisan pair of senators from farm-packed states this week floated legislation to require half of new cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. to be able to run on any gasoline-ethanol blend of 85 percent ethanol or less starting in 2011.
The bill, backed by Democrat Tom Harkin of Iowa and Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana, would also mandate that that percentage increase from 50 percent in 2011 to 90 percent in 2013.
In perfect Catch-22 form, Detroit's Big Three automakers have been waiting for more 85-percent ethanol (E85) pumps to pop up nationwide before investing heavily in vehicles that can run on the blend, and the ethanol industry has been waiting for carmakers to produce more "flex-fuel" vehicles that can safely burn E85 before they install more gas-ethanol pumps.
Moreover, everyone is waiting for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to decide whether it's safe to use a 20-percent blend of ethanol (E20) in unmodified car engines -- a few engine and fuel-system modifications are needed before E85 can be used in vehicles that are otherwise identical to gasoline-only models.
Indeed, the EPA earlier this year warned that pumping E20 or E30 into a non-flex-fuel vehicle was a violation of the Clean Air Act and could result in fines for retailers as well as consumers.
The 10-percent blend is now the maximum legally allowed for unmodified engines. The EPA has approved E85 for designated flex-fuel vehicles.
Meanwhile, ethanol proponents say E20 and maybe even E30 are safe for unmodified engines, but the automakers disagree.
GreenHunter Energy Inc. said Monday it expects its Houston, Texas, biodiesel refinery to be out of service for six to eight weeks due to damage from Hurricane Ike.
The plant (right, pre-storm) can produce 105 million gallons of biodiesel per year, making it the largest biodiesel refinery in the country.
Located on 20 acres beside the Houston Ship Channel, it suffered floodwater damage and lost power when Ike came ashore early Saturday along the Texas Gulf Coast with strong winds and torrential rains.
The local utility in Houston, Center Point Energy, is expected to restore electricity and natural gas service to the location in six to eight weeks. In the short term, generators will provide temporary interruptible power.
GreenHunter can produce biodiesel from animal fats, vegetable oils or a blend of the two at the zero-emissions refinery.
The site was originally home to a waste-oil recycling facility owned by Channel Refining Corporation. GreenHunter bought it in early 2007 and converted it into a biodiesel plant.
The hordes of diesel trucks helping to clog Los Angeles freeways, and Los Angeles area residents' lungs, will soon be getting a new source of commercial biodiesel.
Tellurian Biodiesel
and fast-food industry supplier Golden State Foods
are jointly launching a new biodiesel storage and distribution terminal under an agreement forged earlier this year.
---------- High sulfur content in diesel derived from crude oil is responsible for much of the black smoke that pours from many trucks' exhaust stacks. Clean biodiesel can help reduce such pollution. ---------
The companies said they see a growing market for clean biodiesel to help meet the state's demand for low sulfur fuels and to help in the nationwide effort to reduce dependence on imported crude oil.
The biodiesel venture, located at an environmental waste collection storage and rail facility southeast of downtown L.A., is scheduled to begin operating later this month.
It will provide B99, or 99 percent biodiesel, to fuel jobbers and other wholesale customers throughout Southern California.
Florida startup New Generation Biofuels
said today that it plans to build a refinery in Baltimore, Maryland, that will begin producing synthetic diesel fuel next year.
----------
Oil from plants such as this field of canola can be turned into synthetic diesel.
----------
Lake Mary, Florida-based New Generation told subscription-only E&E News that it has signed a lease with Atlantic Terminaling to build a commercial-scale refinery on the banks of Chesapeake Bay.
The refinery -- New Generation's first commercial-scale facility -- is to be capable of producing 25 million gallons of the petroleum-free diesel fuel annually from vegetable oil, animal fat and other feedstocks, E&E reported.
The low-sulfur fuel would be produced using a proprietary technology and would be sold in the mid-Atlantic region for use in power plants, industrial boilers and marine diesel engines, Phil Wallis, New Generation's chief marketing officer, told the energy news service
"This is a renewable fuel of second-generation nature," Wallis said. "It's effectively just veggie oil or other renewable feedstocks with proprietary additives."
New Generation could increase the modular refinery's capacity to 50 million gallons a year is there is sufficient demand, said Wallis.
New Generation signed its first sales contract in June -- to supply Houston-based Dynegy Inc. with 1.7 million gallons of synthetic diesel fuel annually -- but has hopes of expanding nationally.
Virgin Atlantic used a biofuel made from babassul and coconut oils to power one of four engines of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet that flew from London to Amsterdam last February.
But a jet fuel derived from algae -- that is new. And Solazyme, a South San Francisco, Calif., company, says it has produced exactly that.
Solazyme said in a statement that its biofuel, as analyzed by the fuel analytical lab Southwest Research Institute, passed the 11 "most challenging specifications needed to meet the ASTM D1655 standard for Aviation Turbine Fuel."
Given that about 1.6 billion gallons of jet fuel are burned every month in the U.S. alone, generating tons of greenhouse-gas emissions and contributing to America's dependence on foreign oil, we wish Solazyme well in its effort to bring an algae-derived jet fuel to market.
A key panel of European Union lawmakers voted today to lower a target for using traditional biofuels from crops in gasoline and diesel as part of the EU's plan to fight climate change.
The move could curb the growth of a market coveted by biofuels exporters such as Brazil, Malaysia and Indonesia.
The executive European Commission has proposed that 10 percent of all road transport fuel come from renewable sources by 2020, without specifying how much of that should be biofuels, renewable electricity or hydrogen.
Environmentalists attacked the policy, charging that biofuels produced from grains and oil seeds contribute to rising food prices and deforestation.
The European Parliament's influential industry committee endorsed the overall 10 percent target but voted that at least 40 percent of it be achieved with electricity or hydrogen from renewable sources, or second-generation biofuels from waste.
That would leave just 6 percent coming from traditional biofuels made from grains and other food stocks.
The committee's decision will likely serve as parliament's position in negotiations with the 27 EU member states later this year or in early 2009 to fine-tune the laws.
Organizers of the Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize
opened the official registration process this week - the first step in qualifying for the fuel efficieny competition's $10 million in prizes - after receiving letters of intent form more than 120 teams.
The prospective entrants are from 17 countries, with most coming from the U.S. - 28 states are represented on the initial list.
The contest challenges entrants to design, build and operate a production-capable vehicle that can deliver, at minimum, the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon fuel economy.
Prospective entrants range from Indian automaker Tata Motors to a high school team from West Philadelphia.
Missing from the preliminary list are all of the major U.S., European and Asian automakers, but a few celebrities apparently will be on hand, among them Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Neil Young, who has said he intends to enter his 1960 Lincoln Continental - converted to a plug-in hybrid running on biodiesel..
Registration closes January 1, 2009, and entrants then will have about eight months to prepare for a series of competitions that will start in New York in September and take the vehicles to as many as nine major U.S. urban areas through early 2010.
Winning teams must deliver vehicles that achieve at least 100 miles per gallon-equivalent fuel economy and meet stringent emissions standards. the teams also must present compelling business cases for their vehicles.
Click here for more information about the competition, the prize and the entry process.
Now: "Let's see. I've got $50, so guess I'll get 12 gallons of regular unleaded."
Someday: "Gimme 10 gallons of that sewage sludge distillate please."
Sounds yucky, but sewage sludge and garbage and plant waste that used to go to the dumps may someday be part of the nation's transportation fuels supply.
A two-year-old California startup, Byogy Renewables Inc.
, said today that it has licensed a process developed by researchers at Texas A&M University that turns waste into high octane gasoline.
Production of the alternative fuel could begin within two years (could
being the operative wiggle word), said Daniel Rudnick, chief executive of the Bakersfield-based company.
The beauty of the biofuel Byogy hopes to produce is that it doesn't need to be blended with other fuels, he said.
And it can be shipped through existing gasoline pipelines and pumped from existing gasoline pumps, unlike biodiesel or alcohol fuels such as ethanol that are corrosive and need to be blended and, in some cases require a separate delivery and pumping infrastructure.
"This technology is important because it addresses many issues -- eliminating waste, producing economical fuel quickly and being friendly to our environment," said Kenneth Hall, associate director of the Texas Engineering Experiment Station
at Texas A&M University, which developed the waste conversion process.
"Furthermore, this technology is ready to be commercialized now and does not require any new scientific or technological breakthroughs to become a reality," Hall said in an interview with Greenwire, a subscription-only environmental news service.
Byogy uses a multi-step process that begins with fermenting the waste and then treating it hith heat and chemicals to produce intermediate materials that are subjected to heat and pressure to produce 95-octane gasoline, Rudnick said in an interview with Green Car Advisor.
LS9 Inc. says it has created synthetic "industrial microbes" that can digest sugar in plant-based food and excrete it as hydrocarbon-based "petroleum replacement products."
But that's not all. The South San Francisco, Calif., company says it can genetically tweak the bacteria to produce a variety of "DesignerBiofuels" that are essentially indistinguishable from gasoline, diesel and even jet fuel.
LS9 says the fuel its proprietary microbes produce can go straight into a car's gas tank or be sent to a refinery for further preparation.
What's more, the fuels are nearly carbon-neutral, LS9 reports, meaning that about the same amount of carbon dioxide is generated by the combustion of its fuels as is consumed by the plant-based foods eaten by the bacteria.
The company suggests that its bacteria's efficient use of biomass or sugar cane addresses the food-versus-fuel issue plaguing corn-based ethanol and other alternative fuels.
LS9 says it is "rapidly commercializing and scaling up" production so that the company can produce fuel by the barrelful within a few years.
While automakers wait for more 85 percent ethanol blend gasoline pumps to be installed at gas stations, the ethanol industry is waiting for automakers to produce more "flex-fuel" vehicles that can safely burn the E85 blend, in what has resulted in a widespread waiting game.
"E85 needs more infrastructure," Rick Gunther, Midwest fleet and commercial operations manager for General Motors, told the subscription news service Greenwire. "I tell retailers, 'We're the chicken, you're the egg.' "
Detroit's Big Three automakers are waiting for Japanese companies Honda and Toyota to be more active in the flex-fuel market to stimulate demand for more pumps, but so far their response has been slow. Toyota plans to introduce a flex-fuel version of its Tundra in 2009.
Pump manufacturers told Greenwire they are waiting for Underwriters Laboratories certification of safety and efficiency on the new blender pump, which would offer more options for ethanol blends -- beyond the 10 percent or 85 percent currently available.
And everyone is waiting for U.S. EPA to decide whether it's safe to use a 20 percent blend of ethanol in car engines. The 10-percent blend is now the maximum for regular engines, although EPA has approved E85 for flex-fuel vehicles.
Ethanol proponents say E20 and maybe even E30 are safe for regular car engines, although automakers disagree.
Researchers at the University of California at Davis have developed a process for making a new kind of biofuel -- one they say is cheap, easy to make and takes advantage of hard-to-use cellulose.
Research published by Mark Mascal and Edward Nikitin in the German journal Angewandte Chemie describes a method to transform biomass into fuels that could be used as substitutes for diesel fuel.
In an e-mail to Greenwire, a subscription-only environmental news service, Mascal said his process very efficiently turns raw materials into fuel and is simple and inexpensive compared to processes to make ethanol from cellulose.
Many U.S. and international companies are pursuing the conversion of biomass to ethanol, in large part spurred on by federal ethanol mandates.
But while using sugars to make fuel is fairly straightforward, producers have stumbled over challenges involved with processing plant waste and other cellulosic materials that exist in abundance and would avoid conflicts between food and fuel.
Mascal told Greenwire that while the recent publication covers just the processing of sugars into furanic fuels, his research shows similarly strong results for cellulosic materials that are currently being written up for a follow-up paper.
AE Biofuels Inc., a Silicon Valley energy-crops startup, announced today that it will open the nation's first integrated cellulose and starch ethanol demonstration refinery (right) on Monday.
The Butte, Montana, refinery is expected to produce up to 150,000 gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually from local wheat straw, corn stover and other agricultural waste materials, said Rory Mackin, a spokesman for the Cupertino, California-based company.
The refinery will use a patent-pending enzymatic process (see graphics) to break down tough cellulosic materials into fermentable stands of sugar, Mackin said. If the technologies work as expected, AE Biofuels will likely expand the plant to produce 1.2 million gallons of ethanol annually, he said.
"The enzymes do work," Mackin told Green Car Advisor. "It's only a matter of getting them up to commercial scale," he said, adding that company scientists "may have to do some tweaking" of the enzymes for certain feedstocks to make that happen.
AE Biofuels' project comes amid a high-powered political push to reduce the nation's dependence on fossil fuels.
President Bush signed an energy bill last year that requires the use of 36 billion gallons of biofuels annually by 2022. The legislation includes specific targets for cellulosic ethanol, starting with 100 million gallons in 2010 and escalating sharply over a decade.
Major oil and chemical companies are responding.
On Wednesday, British Petroleum PLC said it would invest $90 million in Cambridge, Massachussets-based Verenium Corp. to research and develop cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel typically produced from the non-edible parts of plants
Long the bane of lawn owners everywhere, the sunny-faced dandelion could revolutionize the rubber industry.
Scientists from Ohio State University and the Ohio BioProducts Innovation Center recently received a $3 million grant to design and build a processing plant that would turn sticky white dandelion root sap into quality rubber, according to a Discovery News article published this week.
"We still haven't been able to find an artificial substitute for natural rubber," said William Ravlin, a researcher involved in the project. "We're still harvesting [rubber] the same way they did 1,000 years ago -- by cutting into the tree and letting the sap drip into containers. It's not a very efficient system."
Efficiency, the Ohio scientists say, would be Midwestern farmers in air-conditioned tractors harvesting acres of dandelions with the same machines used to pull tulip bulbs.
Ten to 20 percent of the plant's carrot-like root is rubber-ready. "And that's without modifying them with biotechnology or breeding," Ravlin told Discovery News.
Researchers expect that within a few years the processing plant in Ohio could produce about 20 million tons of rubber annually.
Synthetic rubber doesn't perform as well as natural rubber. Car tires can contain as little as 10 percent natural rubber, but the more demanding the job, the more natural rubber is needed: Airplane tires are 100 percent natural rubber.
Some of the dandelion rubber will eventually go to Bridgestone, a leading tire manufacturer.
"I think this has some real potential," Bridgestone's Jason Poulton told Discovery News.
To be honest, we nearly decided not to report the following development, because as anyone who has paid the slightest attention to EPA Administer Stephen Johnson (right) the past year knows, he was as likely to approve Texas's request to halve the 2008 renewable fuel standard as he was to appear before the Washington press corps in a yellow polka-dot bikini.
In denying the state's request to cut the national biofuels mandate in half for a year, Johnson -- a Bush appointee -- said today that the renewable fuel standard "is strengthening the nation's energy security and supporting America's farming communities."
The mandate "will remain an important tool in our ongoing effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lessen our dependence on foreign oil in aggressive yet practical ways," he said.
Texas Governor Rick Perry asked EPA to lower the 2008 renewable fuel standard from 9 billion gallons to 4.5 billion gallons, saying the mandate was spurring skyrocketing food and feed costs and hurting his state's economy.
Politically, rubbing some Texans the wrong way given that the state can be counted on to vote Republican anyway is a small price to pay compared to losing campaign contributions from the agriculture industry and votes from swing states where agriculture is big business.
The race is on to develop cellulosic ethanol that comes from waste material and plants that aren't part of the normal food chain and can be grown in much of the country, as map (left) shows. The resulting fuel can help offset oil use in the U.s. and abroad.
Cellulosic ethanol refineries
seem to be growing these days like the switchgrass many hope to use to make an oil-replacement fuel for our cars and trucks.
The latest announcement comes from DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol, a new joint venture of DuPont
and Denmark's Danisco
(a food and enzymes conglomerate).
The two plan to build a 250,000-gallons-a-year cellulosic refinery and research facility in eastern Tennessee, near Knoxville, feeding it with corn cobs, corn stover - the leaves and stalks of corn plants - and with switchgrass grown by area farmers under a program aided by the University of Tennessee's Biofuels Initiative
.
Cellulosic ethanol is a plant-based alcohol fuel that is not dependent on food crops,
as is the corn-based ethanol now produced commercially in the U.S.
Its drawback, to date, is that it is more difficult to break down fiberous plant material to extract the sugars that are then fermented into alcohol. That has made cellulosic processes more expnesive and more energy intensive than producing ethanol from corn.
Rendering of a waste-to-ethanol plant being built in the Midwest by Coskata Inc., a start-up firm financed venture capitalists and by General Motors Corp.
Los Angeles County's decision the other day to give BlueFire Ethanol a permit to build a $30 million waste-to-fuel plant in California's high desert raised a question: How much money is being pumped into efforts to produce oil-replacing automotive fuels from things such as wood pulp, algae,wheat chaff and the gazillions of tons of garbage society creates each month?
A recent survey of venture capital firms - the same wells of largesse that helped fuel the dot-come and Internet booms - helps answer that.
It's not a whole lot when compared to the money being spent to turn food supplies into ethanol and to hunt for more, and more efficient, ways to suck crude out of the ground.
But, as my dad was fond of saying about any huge sum of money, it's sure a lot more than I make in a week!
In the first half of the year, according to the survey by Thompson Reuters reported in the New York Times, venture capital firms invested $612 million in biofuel development firms, up from $375 million for all of 2007.
The total for this year is likely to top $1 billion, and if even a few of the biofuel firms being aided by the investment funds manage to become commercially viable, the flood gates could open.
Maps from Iowa State University show existing biofuels plants (ethanol on left, biodiesel on right) in green, proposed plants in yellow.
The ethanol industry, until recently a golden child that got favorable treatment from Washington, is facing a critical decision on its future, the New York Times
reports today.
Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.
Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel.
Feed prices have soared in the last two years as fuel has begun competing with food for cropland.
"When you find yourself in a hole, you have to quit digging," Perry said in an interview with the Times. "And we are in a hole."
His request for an emergency waiver cutting the ethanol mandate to 4.5 billion gallons, from the 9 billion gallons required this year and the 10.5 billion required in 2009, is backed by a coalition of food, livestock and environmental groups.
Naturally, farmers and ethanol and other biofuel producers are lobbying to keep the existing mandates. Corn growers and ethanol producers say they are being made scapegoats for failed economic and energy policies.
The Timesreport will bring you up to speed on the ethanol mandates if you've fallen a little behind.
Right, BMW 7 Hydrogen on Nürburgring racetrack. The car or one like it will be available for test drives.
The Detroit area is famous for the Woodward Dream Cruise, a summertime showcase of thousands of hotrods, muscle cars and other exotics.
Now in an effort to improve Motown's gas-guzzling image, a new group has organized what they call Nextcruise, which will actually give the public an opportunity to drive what many see as the next generation of vehicles - hybrids, fuel cell, clean-diesel, plug-in electric and other green machines.
The low-emissions, fuel-efficient vehicles will be available for free 15-minute drives on a first-come, first-served basis in Pleasant Ridge, just outside Detroit, in mid-August.
The event will take place from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 16, and from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 17, at Memorial Park, 23925 Woodward Avenue, Pleasant Ridge 48069-1199.
Nine automakers have agreed to provide green vehicles and green-car-technology demonstrations for event to date. They are: General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW.
By now most of us are aware of the pitfalls of ethanol, among them: It's raising food costs worldwide, it requires a tremendous amount of water, it produces less energy than gasoline while emitting more pollutants, it's contributing to rainforest deforestation, it's displacing valuable food crops, the fertilizers it requires are wiping out marine life. The list goes on.
But here's one pitfall this writer was unaware of: Ethanol is allowing Detroit's Big Three automakers to manufacture more gas-guzzling vehicles and as a result is making the U.S. more dependent on foreign oil, not less.
In his book "Gusher of Lies," Robert Bryce points out that the Big Three love ethanol because the automakers can use it to inflate the fuel-efficiency ratings of their cars artificially at a time when the federal government requires them to increase the corporate average fuel economy of their vehicle lines.
The CAFE rules allow for a complex formula that increases gas mileage by factoring in a percentage of ethanol use, but only counting the gasoline consumed. If, for example, the gasoline-ethanol variant of the Chevy Suburban used gas 52 percent of the time and ethanol 48 percent, it would have consumed a gallon of gas in the first 15 miles, then would be refilled with ethanol and would have used a gallon or so over the next 14 miles. But of the nearly 2 gallons consumed, only the gallon of gas would be counted.
So what does Bryce, a freelance journalist specializing in energy issues, suggest as an alternative fuel? Biodiesel derived from algae, solar and nuclear power to feed a grid that charges plug-in electric cars, and super-batteries that haven't been invented yet but likely would be soon if private foundations, the U.S. Department of Energy, or both offered a $1 billion prize to its inventor.
"Gusher of Lies" gives alt-fuel fans lots to think about. It lists for $27, but can be found at Amazon.com and other online stores for $10 less.
Everett Henley's family have been grease middlemen for four generations now, so he's not unduly flustered by new competition from "grease rustlers" who know that recent price jumps have turned the commodity into liquid gold.
Henley simply makes more of the theft-proof grease receptacles he designed and supplies them to the hundreds of restaurants in metro Houston whose waste vegetable oil and other drippings his Central Texas Grease Recycling Co. picks up.
When a would-be thief tries to siphon waste oil out of one of the four-by-six-foot steel containers, a system of snags designed by Henley rips up the siphon hose.
As a result, Henley's business remains largely unscathed in what he and others in the business view as growing problem: grease rustling.
In a speech that every American ought to read or at least watch, former VP Al Gore today told an energy conference "to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge: for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. It's time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric. We need to act now."
It was in large part his inconvenient-truth pitch, but he broadened his case; he says we must abandon fossil fuels for national security and dire economic reasons, too. The New York Times' coverage made a nice note of the expansion.
But we could practically hear the ears of thousands of plug-in EV fans perk up when the Nobel laureate said, 27 minutes into his speech: "We could further increase the value and efficiency of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution, and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid."
Those 49 common-yet-wonderfully-arranged words were magic to Felix Kramer, one of this nation's most resilient proponents of plug-in EVs, and thousands of other plug-in fans.
"This definitive acknowledgment of the benefits of electrification gives advocates of steps on global warming a better answer for transportation than timid suggestions that more people buy more efficient gasoline cars or drive less," Kramer wrote in a passionate posting on his calcars.org site.
But it was another Website that came to mind when we heard Gore speak, the one belonging to Tesla Motors, maker of the all-electric Roadster. Tesla sponsors blogs for its customers, one of whom wrote something two years ago that stayed with us.
A transition to hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is entirely doable but requires nearly $200 billion in funding and further technological breakthroughs, National Research Council experts said today in a report requested by Congress.
While stressing the "best-case scenario" nature of their report, the experts concluded that hydrogen could be the key driver of a shift away from fossil fuels and emissions tied to global warming, with other clean technologies and biofuels helping in that transition.
"The benefits of hydrogen would be less in the early years but have a dominant effect" in the longer run, panel chairman Mike Ramage, a retired ExxonMobil executive, said in a conference call with reporters. "Hydrogen is a pathway to a sustainable energy future."
The best-case scenario assumes the automotive industry invests $145 billion and the federal government spends $50 billion over the next 15 years to drive down the costs of hydrogen production and vehicles that run on hydrogen.
"The number is big, but in perspective" it is doable, Ramage said, noting that the federal ethanol subsidy is at a pace to cost $160 billion over that same period. "We need durable, substantial and sustainable government help to make this happen, just as there is for ethanol."
A surge in Midwest corn production to meet U.S. demands for ethanol is drastically worsening pollution problems in the Gulf of Mexico, a team of federal and state scientists said today, according to E&E News.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting that a record spike in nutrients from the Mississippi River basin this summer will produce the largest Gulf of Mexico "dead zone" ever.
An area the size of New Jersey is expected to contain dissolved oxygen levels too low to support marine life, the respected subscription service E&E News reported.
Based on data collected by NOAA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium and Louisiana State University, the predicted 8,800-square-mile hypoxic zone would be 11 percent larger than last year's and the largest since scientists began monitoring the problem in 1985.
In a conference call, scientists attributed the gulf's deteriorating conditions to spikes in runoff of nitrogen and phosphorus, key ingredients in fertilizers needed to sustain record corn harvests in the Midwest.
The same day a World Bank report identifies biofuels as the principal cause
of the global food crisis, the Bush administration announces creation of a Web site that Americans can use to locate biofuel service stations.
"Need to know where to buy E85 or other alternative fuels?" today's announcement asks. "The U.S. Department of Energy's Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center now has an online station locator. Just specify which kind of fuel you want, then enter your address and the locator will map out the closest stations that sell that fuel."
It's been reported that the World Bank withheld publicizing its findings to avoid embarrassing President Bush. The World Bank's determination that biofuels are responsible for the food crisis that threatens the lives of 100 million people contradicts the U.S. government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3 percent to food price rises.
The White House must be delighted that Bush isn't the only Western leader with egg on his face today. The president's good friend, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, sparked outrage after it was disclosed today that he and other world leaders enjoyed a six-course lunch followed by an eight-course dinner at the G8 summit, where the global food crisis tops the agenda.
The prime minister was served 24 different dishes during his first day at the summit -- just hours after urging the world to reduce the "unnecessary demand" for food and calling on British families to cut back on their wasteful use of food.
For the low-down on that scandal, take a look at an article in today's edition of the British newspaper Telegraph.
Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75 percent -- far more than previously estimated -- according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian
newspaper.
The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally respected economist at the global financial body.
The figure emphatically contradicts the U.S. government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3 percent to food-price rises, the newspaper reported. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.
Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President Bush.
"It would put the World Bank in a political hot spot with the White House," said source is quoted as telling the Guardian.
The news comes at a critical point in the world's negotiations on biofuels policy. Leaders of the G8 industrialized countries meet next week in Japan, where they will discuss the food crisis and come under intense lobbying from campaigners calling for a moratorium on the use of plant-derived fuels.
Crude oil comes from zooplankton and algae that settled to the bottom of seas and lakes in large quantities over many millions of years.
Today, many researches believe that cultivated algae could supply enough biofuel to meet the world's transportation needs -- and do so using a fraction of the land other biofuels would require.
In fact, some scientists are of the opinion that enough algae can be grown on 4.5 million acres -- an area the size of Maryland -- to replace all of transportation fuels consumed in the United States.
Other researchers believe even less land is needed, and unlike corn and other materials that can be converted into biofuels, algae doesn't threaten food supplies, economies or the environment. In fact, algae gobbles up carbon dioxide, the worst of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
To get a better understanding of algae's promise as an alternative fuel to petroleum, turn on your computer's speakers and click here to watch a Wall Street Journal video on the subject.
CIBC chart shows 10 million fewer vehicles on U.S. roads by 2012 than today.
Gasoline prices in America have risen from around $1.80 in 2004 to the current $4 per gallon mark. The most recent surge in pump prices has, in inflation-adjusted dollars, already taken pump prices to a buck a gallon above the record prices seen in 1981...
Cameramen crowded the apron this morning to get shots of a Chevrolet Equinox fuel cell vehicle filling up with compressed hydrogen gas at the new Shell Hydrogen pump on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Los Angeles.
The hydrogen pump is the 46th in the nation and one of only two that shares location with a regular retail gas station.
The facility was dedicated in a ceremony attended by a number of Los Angeles area dignitaries including -- in the Equniox for the posed photo above -- David Nahai, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and (driving) Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl.
The pump is one of five being installed nationwide (others already in are in New York and Washington, D.C.) as part of a hydrogen fuel demonstration project cosponsored by the federal Energy Department, General Motors and Shell Hydogen...
Congress is vowing to take actions that it believes will reverse runaway crude and gasoline prices. Oil rose above $136 a barrel on Monday more than double what it cost a year ago and gas hovered around $4.07 a gallon nationwide.
Lawmakers have introduced nine different bills on speculation, not to mention many more that tackle other causes of escalating fuel and oil prices. Several of the speculation measures have bipartisan support...
Retail food prices could rise 23-35 percent over the next three years – or at much higher rate than many federal forecasters have predicted, according to the former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Keith Collins reached these conclusions as part of a study for Kraft Foods on the role of biofuels in farm and food prices. The company submitted the study as part of its request to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to waive the biofuels mandate included in last year's energy bill.
That mandate, signed into law last December by President Bush, calls for 15 percent of the transport fuels in the U.S. be made from biofuels by 2020.
Granted, Kraft Foods has a big vested interest in the role of biofuels in farm and food prices, because biofuels have increased Kraft's costs and will likely continue to do so. So, the study shouldn't be taken as Scripture, but rather food for thought.
Until recently, the domestic ethanol industry had a huge friend in Sen. Barack Obama and it still might, although he's now adding a caveat to his support of the biofuel.
"If it turns out that we've got to make changes in our ethanol policy to help people get something to eat, then that's got to be the step we take," he said last month in reply to some fairly jagged questions posed by the late Tim Russert.
It seems out of character that the bright senator would be slow to grasp the affect ethanol subsidies have had recently on global food prices: The more corn was removed from the food chain to make ethanol, the less of it there was to eat and to feed livestock, so the price of food rose.
Coskata Inc., General Motors' first partner in the cellulosic-ethanol business, is increasingly bullish about its overall prospects and says it soon could be announcing new partners to build ethanol plants that use its process.
At the same time, the Warrenville, Ill., startup now may not deliver initial quantities of its ethanol to GM’s test fleet in Michigan until as late as next spring, Wes Bolsen, Coskata's chief marketing officer, told Green Car Advisor.
Previously, the company had said that it planned to begin delivery of its cellulosic ethanol, made at a pilot plant under construction in Pittsburgh, by early next year. Coskata has a contract to deliver a total of 40,000 gallons of the alternative fuel next year for use in GM's test fleet.
Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, says he's part of a group of lawmakers preparing legislation to require that at least 50% of all new cars and trucks in the U.S. in 2012 and after be able to run on biofuels.
The goal, he said at a Senate hearing on the oil market, is to help ensure that the country is "not a hostage to oil."
The good senator, whose constituency includes a lot of farmers who have seen the interest in biofuels help push corn and soybean prices to new highs, needs to do a little more thinking and a little less grandstanding.
Congress can mandate all the flex-fuel or biofuel capability it wants, and GM, Ford and Chrysler can make all of their cars and trucks ethanol and biodiesel ready, but if there's no place for people to conveniently buy the fuels, it will do no good.
Accelerating its attempt at quick and massive polishing of its green credentials, General Motors is tweaking and testing its advertising and marketing messages in various ways that amount to one bottom line: reducing its associations with Big Corn and Big Oil.
In the most definitive of these moves that were discussed by Kathryn Benoit, GM’s corporate marketing director, at an advertising forum in Atlanta this week, the company has basically shelved a once-ubiquitous marketing campaign for its E85 flex-fuel vehicles that use corn-based ethanol.
“Live Green, Go Yellow” was the tag line of the GM corporate campaign – that also got product-specific – promoting its industry-leading lineup of vehicles that could be powered by corn ethanol.
Now, in the wake of global controversy between the contribution of corn-ethanol demand to higher food prices, GM says it will be promoting “fuel options” broadly, including E85, hybrids and electric vehicles.
And GM spokeswoman Kelly Cusinato said that the company may soon consider promoting its partnerships with two startup producers of cellulosic ethanol, whose processes use non-food raw materials.
Above, jatropha seedlings in Nicaragua. When mature, the trees will produce oil-rich seeds from which biodiesel can be made.
By Scott Doggett, Contributor A Florida company has entered the hunt for a replacement for fossil fuels, announcing this week that it is in the process of buying 61,000 acres in South America on which to grow Jatropha curcas L.
Crushing the black, almond-size seeds of the small tropical tree produces an oil that shows promise as a non-petroleum-based diesel fuel that can be used alone or blended with conventional petrodiesel in unmodified diesel-engine vehicles.
Or to put it another way, jatropha oil might make for a good biodiesel, one that isn't isn't plagued by major issues among them the food-versus-fuel dispute and deforestation to make way for fuel crops so common to other biofuels.
That's what the people at Global Energy Trading Company
, or GETCO, apparently think. The Fort Lauderdale company announced Monday that it was "in the process of purchasing 37,000 acres" in Colombia and "finalizing negotiations" on 24,600 acres in Peru for jatropha plantations.
GETCO claims to have spent "two years of meticulously researching new biodiesel fuel sources" and has concluded that jatropha, also known as Barbados nut, can grow nearly anywhere frost doesn't occur, has a 40-year fruit production lifecycle, is removed from the human food chain, and requires few pesticides.
Sanitation facility will extract hydrogen from methane gas in sewage tanks.
Some Southern California drivers may be able to tool around in "poop-powered" vehicles as early as next year, according to a Bloomberg report.
The motorists would have to be among those driving the limited number of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles that automakers including General Motors Corp. and Honda Motor Co. are beginning to make available.
Those who've got one will be able to fill up at a sewage treatment facility run by the Orange County Sanitation District, which plans to turn the inflow of excrement and other waste into hydrogen for electric vehicles that run on fuel-cell systems.
"Poop is actually a relatively minor portion of the material coming down the pipes,'' said Ed Torres, the district's director of technical services. "It's mostly food wastes and other organic materials washed down the drain, and all the paper that's flushed down the toilet."
A San Diego company claims it can turn algae into a green-colored crude yielding ultra-clean versions of gasoline and diesel without the drawbacks of biofuel production.
Sapphire Energy
uses algae, sunlight, carbon dioxide and non-potable water to make "green crude" that it says is chemically equivalent to the light, sweet crude oil that has been commanding record-high prices recently.
In a press release
issued Wednesday, the one-year-old company claimed its green crude could be processed in existing oil refineries and that the resulting fuels could power existing cars and trucks without any modifications.
The executive board of the European Union has fired the first shot in a potential transatlantic trade war by agreeing to ask the United States to address allegations its biofuel subsidies amount to an unfair trade practice.
The Guardian, citing confident documents, reported Monday that the European Commission will ask Washington this week to respond to anti-dumping complaints lodged by the European Biodiesel Board.
As we reported in March, a loophole in the 2004 subsidy act lets U.S. fuel blenders claim a $1 per gallon subsidy for entire boatloads of biodiesel produced elsewhere if they add just a dribble of petroleum-based diesel to the shipment before sending it off to Europe for sale.
Upon arrival, the biodiesel often sells at prices up to 30 percent below what European producers must charge...
A $16.9 billion renewable energy and fuels tax incentive package that includes a first-ever $3,000 credit for purchase of plug-in hybrid vehicles, has made it through the House Ways and Means Committee and is headed for the floor.
The credits are part of a $50 billion tax package.
Among the provisions are a $1.01 per gallon production tax credit for cellulosic ethanol – made form non-edible waste and plant material – and a reduction of the present ethanol blending credit to 45 cents a gallon from 51 cents. Those same credits and reductions are in the Farm Bill that has passed through congress and is on the way to the White House.
The tax measure would increase the credit for installation of E85 ethanol fuel pumps to 50 percent of cost, up from 30 percent, and establishes tax incentives worth $1.4 billion for coal power and gasification projects aimed at capturing and reusing or sequestering carbon emissions.
LAS VEGAS, Nevada --Energy gazillionaire T. Boone Pickens has been singing a variation of the same song for several years now, but it's a tune worthy of repeat play: The planet, says a man who made billions in petroleum exploration and ought to know his stuff, is using more oil than it produces, the situation isn't going to improve and nobody's doing much of anything about it.
"America is in a hell of a bad spot," he said in a presentation Tuesday at the Alternative Fuels & Vehicles annual conference here.
Without a radical reduction in the nation's appetite for imported crude, which now accounts for 72 percent of our total daily consumption, "we are going to be reduced to something less than the superpower we are now."
For Pickens, who has become one of the country's biggest backers of wind energy and of natural gas as a transportation fuel, the cure is painful but necessary.
We must cut back on the use of oil for automotive fuels and shepherd in a rapid and widespread adoption of domestically produced alternative fuels, he said,
Pickens, who left the oil exploration business in 1996 to set up his BP Capital Management investment company and, it turned out, to become one of the nation's biggest alternative energy boosters, has big holdings in natural gas and, not coincidentally, believes it to be the best interim solution on the transportation side of things.
"Everything" from propane to biofuels will have a place in the effort to reduce oil consumption, he said, but available supplies of domestically produced natural gas are the largest "alternative" energy source around and, if used entirely for transportation fuel, could reduce oil imports by 38 percent.
It's starting to look as if corn-based ethanol's future is dimming, although corn futures – the kind traded in the commodities market -- are still soaring.
Critics of using one of the world's basic food crops as a feedstock for fuel for cars and trucks have been scoring points in the debate over the past few months as prices of most grain-based and grain-fed foods climb.
Many insist that using corn for ethanol – and diverting land once used for other crops in order to increase corn supplies – is a big factor in those food price increases. the federal Department of Argiculture has estimated that corn ethanol and other biofuels are responsible for 20 percent of the food price surge.
On Monday, a group of 24 Republican senators – including GOP presidential candidate John McCain -- sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency asking that it alter rules that require a 400 percent increase in U.S. ethanol production by 2022, to 36 billion gallons a year from just over 7 billion gallons last year.
The senators' letter says that the ramp-up should be reduced, or suspended, to put more corn back into the food chain, where it is used for animal feed, and to free up land now used for corn for increased production of cereal grains such as wheat.
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama also have said that government promotion of corn-based ethanol ought to be reexamined in light of soaring food price and sport shortages of critical grains.
With its second major equity investment in a biofuels startup company in the space of five just months, General Motors is moving front and center in what may become a pivotal global economic development of our time: the rapid rise of the cellulosic-ethanol industry.
GM’s announcement on Thursday that it has made an equity investment in a Boston-based company, Mascoma Corp., is a bookend to its January deal to help fund Coskata Inc., based in Warrendale, Ill.
The two companies, partially nurtured by academics, use two different processes to yield similar crucial results: the production of ethanol for fuel from non-grain, essentially waste sources.
Mascoma's single-step cellulose-to-ethanol method is called consolidated bioprocessing, which uses cellulosic biomass such as woodchips and switchgrass in a formula that lowers costs by limiting additives and enzymes that are brought into other biochemical processes. Mascoma expects to begin producing ethanol later this year at a demonstration plant under construction in Rome, N.Y.
Chemicals giant Monsanto Co. has teamed with a California firm, Mendel Biotechnology, to develop a strain of elephant grass native to China into a renewable feedstock for ethanol production.
The move is part of a growing effort to derive energy from cellulose -- the non-edible parts of plants – and comes, unsurprisingly, just as Congress has earmarked cellulosic research for increased federal subsidies in the new farm bill wending its way through the legislative process.
The bill would increase subsidies for cellulosic ethanol and decrease subsidies for corn-based ethanol, which is being criticized in many quarters these days for diverting a basic food crop for energy production, thus diminishing global food supplies and helping to drive up the price of grain-based foods.
Computer rendering of Coskata's pilot plant for cellulosic ethanol production.
Coskata Inc., which recently inked a partnership deal with General Motors Corp. to develop its unusual process that uses gas-eating bacteria to produce ethanol from virtually any kind of organic waste, announced today it will begin construction of its first small-scale demonstration plant at a site near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The site will piggyback on plasma “torch†technology developed there by Westinghouse Plasma Corp., a division of Alter Nrg. The plasma gasifier superheats the source material into a synthetic gas comprised mainly of carbon dioxide and hydrogen.
Coskata's patented strain of bacteria feeds on the gas, excreting -- conveniently enough -- a virtually pure ethanol.
Shell Oil company representatives are pressing the White House for a one-year delay in implementing a controversial regulation that would expand America's biofuels mandate beginning in January.
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