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.
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.
Sugary Waste From Soda Pop Makes Good Ethanol Feedstock, Companies Say
Maybe there's some use for flat Coke after all.
GreenHouse International, which earlier this year started distributing a fueling system that helps convert organic products such as beer-brewing waste into ethanol, is working on a similar plan involving products such as waste from soft-drink manufacturing.
The San Diego-based company whose investors include basketball star Shaquille O'Neal, is partnering with Farmersville, Texas-based Allard Research & Development on a fueling system that converts soft-drink waste, used beer yeast and other products into ethanol, the companies said.
----------
An Allard-developed automated ethanol refinery.
----------
GreenHouse has the exclusive rights to sell Allard fueling systems to soft-drink companies and governmental entities. Allard's customers also include ranches and farms, which use agricultural and livestock waste for feed stocks.
Sales of the fueling system to soft-drink companies would be notable because they would represent a so-called "closed loop" system, where waste elimination and fuel production take place at the same site.
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.
----------
The Progressive Automotive X Prize was launched at last year's New York Auto Show.
----------
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.
Even as questions about ethanol's role in the energy supply chain continue roiling the industry, cellulosic ethanol pioneer Coskata Inc. unveiled and fired up its 50,000-gallon-a-year "semi-commercial" plant in Madison, Pa., today, pushing itself toward the forefront of fledgling second-generation ethanol producers.
Towering over the surrounding countryside, the 65-ft. structure with an 8,000-degree torch that blasts the wood chips serving as a raw material, the plant is the $50-million result of research and development efforts going back several years.
It moves the Warrendale, Ill.-based start-up closer to the 55-million-gallon plant Coskata anticipates opening by the end of 2012.
"We now have verification of everything that we'd earlier expected, and a tuned message that we can deliver about the costs associated with the build-out of a commercial-scale plant, and eventual operating costs," Bill Roe, Coskata's chief executive officer, told Green Car Advisor.
"This gives us a proof statement and demonstrated capabilities."
Volume Questioned
Coskata already has been delivering small quantities of cellulosic ethanol to General Motors Corp. for use in its test fleet in Milford, Mich.
GM was an initial investor in the company and continues to support its aims, but the volume of ethanol needed in the future is uncertain. Automakers are among the parties raising concerns over a proposal that the federal government increase the ethanol "blend wall" to as high as 15 percent of a gasoline-ethanol mixture from the current limit of 10 percent.
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.
While ethanol from the starch in corn kernels is a bad thing - less energy-efficient and with a bigger carbon footprint than gasoline - ethanol from the corncobs that usually are plowed back into the ground may provide a way for corn-for-fuel farmers, and corn-ethanol producers, to stand tall again.
----------
Corncobs, now jettisoned from the rear of corn harvesters, or combines, could become a major source of cellulosic ethanol and a new source of income for "fuel farmers," reducing need to increase acreage devoted to corn when only kernels are used for standard ethanol.
----------
Ethanol from the woody, non-food byproducts of food crops such as corn and sugar cane is called cellulosic ethanol - made from cellulose - and while its is more costly to produce than regular corn ethanol, the department of energy estimates that its carbon footprint is about 90 percent less.
That's got the nation's largest ethanol producer, Poet LLC, thinking corncobs rather than corn and is why the South Dakota-based company has just earmarked a $6.9-million Energy Department grant for the purchase of corncobs from farmers near a proposed Poet cellulosic plant near Emmetsburg, Iowa.
The vast majority of U.S. federal subsidies for fossil fuels and renewable energy from 2002-2008 supported fossil energy sources that emit high levels of greenhouse gases when used as fuel, according to research released today by the Environmental Law Institute in partnership with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Applying a conservative approach, the respected organizations found that the U.S. government provided substantially larger subsidies to fossil fuels than to renewable fuels.
Subsidies to fossil fuels -- a mature, developed industry that has enjoyed government support for many years -- totaled approximately $72 billion over the study period, representing a direct cost to taxpayers.
Over the same period, subsidies for renewable fuels -- a relatively young and developing industry -- totaled $29 billion, the study found. What's more, of the $29 billion, more than half -- $16.8 billion -- went toward corn-based ethanol, the climate effects of which are hotly disputed.
The study also found that most of the largest subsidies to fossil fuels were written into the U.S. Tax Code as permanent provisions. By comparison, many subsidies for renewables were time-limited initiatives implemented through energy bills, with expiration dates that limit their usefulness to the renewables industry.
Lotus Engineering announced today that it will unveil a range-extending engine-generator for series hybrid vehicles at the Frankfurt Motor Show, held later this month.
Attached to the hybrid's electric motor via the crankshaft, the Lotus Range Extender sustains vehicle operation beyond the range provided by the vehicle's batteries.
Lotus said in a statement that the 1.2-liter, three-cylinder engine-generator can use gasoline or alcohol-based fuels, was designed for maximum fuel efficiency and can recharge the batteries of a series hybrid as well as provide direct power to the electric motor that propels the vehicle.
The Range Extender features an innovative architecture comprising aluminium monoblock construction, integrating the cylinder block, cylinder head and exhaust manifold in one casting. Lotus said this results in reduced engine mass, assembly costs, package size and improved emissions and engine durability.
The engine-generator is optimized between two power generation points, giving 15 kilowatts of electrical power at 1,500 revolutions per minute and 35 kilowatts at 3,500 rpm via the integrated electrical generator.
Lotus said the Range Extender's low weight (123 pounds) makes it ideal for the series hybrid drivetrain configurations for which it is designed. The engine uses an optimized two-valve port-fuel injection combustion system to reduce cost and mass.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gasoline prices have been creeping up since about the start of the year, and that's a good thing if you're in the ethanol business.
According to the American Automobile Association, the nationwide average price of gasoline today is $2.51 a gallon, or about 50 cents a gallon more than it was only four months ago.
But according to E85Prices.com, the nationwide average price for a gallon of E85 (85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline) is $2.02 a gallon today.
Or put another way, gasoline now costs 19.4 percent more than E85, the most common of the various ethanol mixes.
So, this is a good time to own a flex-fuel vehicle, right? Not necessarily, because what most people don't realize is that ethanol is 10-25 percent less efficient than gasoline.
If your flex-fuel-accepting engine is more than 19.4 percent less efficient when you've got ethanol in your tank, you'd be better off filling it with gasoline.
We're pointing this out because a number of blogs are making a big deal about the current gasoline-ethanol price spread without mentioning the significant efficiency difference that exists between the two fuels.
Unfortunately, the automakers that produce flex-fuel vehicles don't say which of them are more (or less) efficient in their use of ethanol. Rather, the owners of flex-fuel vehicles are left to figure it out for themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
----------
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.
----------
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.
Low gasoline prices are a boon for recession-weary consumers who are struggling to make ends meet. But cheaper gasoline also can be a deal-killer when it comes to persuading motorists to pay a relative premium for hybrid cars, fuel-sipping diesels or vehicles with fuel-efficient but relatively expensive direct-injected, supercharged engines.
So green automotive technology buffs had best fasten their safety belts before reading the federal Energy Information Administration's annual "Short-Term Energy and Summer Fuels Outlook."
Domestic gasoline prices are forecast to stay relatively low during the summer months that typically are a high-demand season. The EIA forecast calls for regular-grade gasoline to peak at $2.30 per gallon, with the summer average falling to $2.23 per gallon. That would mark a dramatic drop from last summer's per-gallon average of $3.81.
Though motorists will continue to benefit from lower petroleum prices, the weak economy will continue to dampen demand. Gasoline consumption should grow by 1.0 percent to 9.1 million barrels per day, according to the EIA forecast, but that growth is measured against last summer's consumption, which was "low due to the high gas prices and hurricane-related distribution problems."
Flat Until Q3
EIA doesn't expect gasoline consumption to begin showing consistent year-over-year growth until the third quarter.
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.
The nation's largest ethanol production and marketing company joined forces today with an energy distribution firm that has proposed construction of a $3.5 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline (click on map for large view)
to carry ethanol from the Midwest cornbelt to the auto-dependent Northeast.
South Dakota-based Poet, which represents ethanol companies with 1.8 billion gallons of annual production capacity, has signed a joint development agreement with Magellan Midstream Partners to study the feasibility of the dedicated ethanol pipeline.
When we originally wrote about the proposal in February 2008, the pipeline was supported by Oklahoma-based Magellan and Buckeye Partners of Pennsylvania. But Magellan today said that Buckeye had "recently decided to focus on other priorities and have discontinued their role in this pipeline project."
The project is far from a done deal.
"Federal legislation revising the U.S. Department of Energy's loan guarantee program is critical for a project of this nature to move forward," Magellan said, adding that even with a federal loan guarantee, "the feasibility of this project is dependent upon the successful outcome of ongoing studies addressing technical and economic issues associated with the transportation of ethanol via pipeline."
The pipeline's cost also seems to have risen from the $3.billion estimate in early 2008 to "in excess of $3.5 billion," according to today's news release.
"A project of this nature would provide benefits throughout the ethanol industry, agricultural community and the economy in general," Poet Chief Executive Officer Jeff Broin said in a statement. "It would also represent another major step forward in the efficiency of producing and delivering ethanol to the marketplace."
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.
The subscription-only Kiplinger's Biofuels Market Alert newsletter is reporting this week that it has obtained a letter from Ford's sustainability and environmental chief, Susan Cischke, to the chief executive of Poet, the nation's largest ethanol producer, in which Cischke writes that:
"Ford endorses efforts to increase base level blends up to E15 and collaborate with key stakeholders to overcome challenges with introducing these higher levels of ethanol in the base fuel blend used by all vehicles in the near term ... Based on our biofuels discussions, it is clear that Ford and Poet share a common vision to accelerate renewable fuel use."
E15 is a blend of 15 percent ethanol and 85 percent gasoline.
Present U.S. law limits gasoline's ethanol content to 10 percent -E10 - except for blends made exclusively for flex-fuel vehicles made to run on blends of up to E85.
The Kiplinger report quotes an unidentified Ford executive saying that Ciscke's letter is meant "to drive consensus" and that Ford isn't making an outright endorsement of E15 although it is not demanding more extensive testing of the fuel, as are other automakers.
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.
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.
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."
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
The announcement comes as USDA and EPA discuss possible increase in ethanol blend.
By Scott Doggett, Contributor
Underwriters Laboratories, which verifies safety compliance of all manner of equipment, says that service-station pumps it's certified to dispense E10 - an automotive fuel containing 10 percent ethanol - are not certified for higher blends.
The company made the announcement amid ongoing talks between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to raise the amount of ethanol blended into the U.S. gasoline supply.
The significance? If the USDA and EPA come to an agreement to raise the blend from 10 percent to, say, 15 percent, there won't be many pumps that can handle it. Not immediately, anyway.
No doubt the agencies are trying to address the fact that U.S. ethanol producers are going out of business right and left these days, with 21 percent of the U.S. capacity for ethanol production standing idle.
That percentage was provided by ethanol-maker Archer Daniels Midland Co., which has vested interests, but it sounds about right.
As we're reported on more than one occasion, the nation's second-largest U.S. ethanol maker - VeraSun Energy Corp. - filed for bankruptcy protection in October as an industrywide expansion of production facilities greatly outpaced demand for ethanol.
The American Coalition for Ethanol, the nation's largest ethanol advocacy organization, is going ballistic, accusing Underwriters Laboratories of "arbitrarily" changing its position regarding the safety of E10 dispensers.
ACE Vice President of Marketing Ron Lamberty said that "for years the fuel-marketing community has understood the standard 'UL 87' to cover the use of up to 15 percent ethanol in standard gasoline pumps. But in a January 7 statement, UL now says that those pumps are only certified to handle up to 10 percent ethanol."
We've heard of ethanol being made from swamp muck, garbage and even grubs, but until today we'd not heard of anyone making ethanol from beer-brewing waste.
Yet that's exactly what E-Fuel Corp. and the Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. intend to do. The companies have agreed to house small E-Fuel-made MicroFuelers at the Chico, California, brewery. The MicroFuelers will enable Sierra Nevada to make E100 (100 percent ethanol) using waste from its brewing process.
Testing is scheduled to begin the second quarter of this year with a goal of achieving full-scale ethanol production in the third quarter.
Sierra Nevada sells 1.6 million gallons of unusable bottom-of-the-barrel beer yeast waste each year to farmers, who then feed it to dairy cows.
The waste contains 5-8 percent alcohol and enough yeast and nutrients to enable a MicroFueler to raise the alcohol content to 15 percent. The MicroFueler can then remove water from the waste to produce high-quality ethanol.
According to E-Fuel of Los Gatos, California, their EFuel100 MicroFueler (pictured) is the world's first portable ethanol micro-refinery system and can create up to 70 gallons of ethanol each week using an alcohol feedstock.
The MicroFueler has a suggested retail price of $9,995, but can cost as little as $6,998 after federal tax credits are applied.
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.
Now we know why GM has been so enthusiastic about ethanol. The often-corrosive alternative fuel has proven to be the undoing of nearly a quarter million of rival Toyota Motor corp.'s high-end Lexus luxury models.
---------- Lexus LS 460 models from 2006 through 2008 are among the cars being recalled. ----------
Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are launching a safety recall affecting about 214,500 Lexus GS 300, GS 350, IS 250 and IS 350 and LS 460 and LS 460L vehicles from the 2006 through 2008 model years because of a potential fuel line problem.
Seems that low-moisture ethanol blends can corrode the cars' fuel delivery pipes, causing a warning light to come on and possibly eating a pinhole through the pipe wall, causing a fuel leak.
The automaker said no other Lexus models are affected.
Owners with cars covered by the Lexus recall will be notified by mail starting later this month and will be asked to contact local Lexus dealers to schedule inspections and possible repairs of any ethanol damage.
Toyota Motors Sales USA, which is managing the recall for the automaker, said repairs will involve replacing the fuel pipes with new ones that won't be affected by ethanol. The repairs will be done at no charge, the automaker said.
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.
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 a test 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.
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.
Bentley Motors is developing ethanol-powered versions of its large-engined models and plans to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions from its range by 40 percent within three years, according to an English newspaper.
The Telegraph reported that Bentley will unveil its first ethanol-powered model at the Geneva Auto Show next spring and that the automaker is negotiating with the British royal family over supplying ethanol-powered vehicles for state use.
While the luxury carmaker won't likely have to meet the European Union emissions requirements -- they've yet to be firmed up, but companies making fewer than 10,000 cars a year are expected to be exemped -- Bentley will still be subject to some demands to reduce its greenhouse-gas output.
A Bentley spokesman told Telegraph reporter Andrew English (we kid you not) that while the carmaker was focusing on ethanol in the short term, it had not ruled out fitting its automobiles with clean-diesel engines.
If you've been looking to justify spending $200,000 or more on a Bentley to your spouse, you'll soon be able to plead "But it's good for the environment!" And good luck with that.
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.
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.
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.
Enterprise Rent-A-Car, America's largest car rental company, has added 100 hybrid vehicles to its fleet of rental cars and SUVs at Denver International Airport.
Founded in 1957 and headquartered in St. Louis, Enterprise now offers 26 locations across the U.S. where travelers can rent Toyota Prius and Camry hybrid sedans and Ford Escape hybrid SUVs online or by phone starting at $59.99 per day, about $10 more than a standard internal-combustion vehicle of similar size.
The company intends to include 7,000 gas-electric hybrid vehicles in its national rental fleet, which currently contains 2,000, officials said.
In addition to the 26 locations mentioned above, Enterprise offers eight E85/FlexFuel sites where up to 30 percent of the vehicles for rent can run on the gasoline/ethanol blend.
The inclusion of hybrid and flex-fuel vehicles in Enterprise's rental fleet is but one of many efforts the company is taking to improve the environment. As the illustration shows, the fleet contains nearly half a million fuel-efficient vehicles.
Beyond that: Enterprise is planting 1 million trees annually until it has planted 50 million. The company offers customers the opportunity to contribute to certified offset projects that work to remove climate-changing gases from the atmosphere. And, the family that owns Enterprise last year spent $25 million to create a plant science research facility.
Visit our sister Website, Edmunds.com's InsideLine, or go to Enterprise's Website to read more about the company's environmental efforts.
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.
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.
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.
For years, members of Congress have been saying we needed to have more aggressive fuel-economy standards. And for years--32 to be precise--Detroit's automakers have lobbied aggressively to prevent that from happening.
The person the car companies have routinely turned to to fight their battles in Washington is Democratic Representative John Dingell of Michigan (right), the longest serving current member of the House and second-longest serving member in our nation's history.
For more than half a century, Dingell has fought virtually every regulation the automakers have opposed, from seatbelts and airbags to tailpipe emissions and fuel-efficiency standards. His position as chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce has given him enormous influence over such matters.
For nearly as long as Dingell has been in office, critics have charged that elected officials such as him are far too beholden to large corporate interests to regulate them in a socially responsible manner.
One of those critics is Democratic Representative Henry Waxman of California, who has been as strong advocate of fuel-efficiency standards and legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. And this week Waxman stated his intentions to replace Dingell as chairman of the Commerce Committee in a power play the chairmen of the Detroit 3 can only dread.
On Wednesday, Waxman (left) released the following statement:
"When the new Congress starts in January, we will face unprecedented opportunities and challenges. The public expects Congress and President-elect Obama to work together to find solutions to the nation's most pressing problems. But the issues we will confront are immensely difficult. We will need the very best leadership in Congress and our committees to succeed.
"That is why after long thought I have decided to seek the chairmanship of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Some of the most important challenges we face--energy, climate change, and health care--are under the jurisdiction of the Commerce Committee. In large measure, our success as Congress will depend on how the Commerce Committee performs.
"Enacting comprehensive energy, climate, and health care reform will not be easy. But my record shows that I have the skill and ability to build consensus and deliver legislation that improves the lives of all Americans."
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."
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 platform to 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."
Despite waves of articles the past year about the staggering growth of the U.S. ethanol industry, in just the last few days many publications in corn-belt states are reporting that the boom may have gone bust.
---------- Remants of Hurricane Ike took a devastating toll on corn crops last month. ----------
Rising corn prices, falling gas prices, storm-triggered flooding and late corn harvests have caused or contributed to a host of ethanol plants closing and plans for others to be scrapped.
Among a recent spate of setbacks for the industry are refinery closures at Emerald City Ethanol in Harvey County, Kansas, VeraSun Energy in Linden, Indiana, Abengoa Bioenergy in Portales, New Mexico, and the circular filing of plans for a $200-million project in Belle Fourche, South Dakota.
An article in Hoosier Ag Today reports that with oil prices are approaching $60 a barrel, the profit margins for ethanol producers are shrinking. It also reported that the credit crisis is making capital harder for ethanol investors to come by and "the ethanol industry is facing some tough political times as the government subsidy for ethanol has come under attack from presidential candidate John McCain."
A piece posted at Gas2.0 notes that "every time the price of oil drops, the demand for that same product increases and the demand for alternate fuels decreases." The online publication has links to many ethanol businesses that have gone belly-up in recent weeks.
The editors at Biofuels Digest contend that access to capital via "lawmakers who have the vision to see its proper role in a national energy solution, will be the key to ethanol's growth" in this country. The editors also said that industry leaders in the U.S. must do a better job of winning support for ethanol in Washington, D.C.
---------- Chart shows extra steps that must be taken to produce ethanol from woody (cellulosic) feedstocks. ----------
Cellulosic ethanol - produced by using enzymes, solvents and bacteria to break down the tough cellulose in non-food plant materials such as wood chips, corn stalks and prairie grasses - could provide a renewable replacement for at least some of the petroleum now consumed for transportation fuels.
General Motors Corp., among others, has become a big proponent and has investments in several cellulosic companies.
The processes for commercializing cellulosic ethanol are still mostly in the start-up, exploratory stages, though, and as the economy spirals downward, there is concern that finding for such programs could start drying up.
So we're heartened by word out of Canada that a major oil producer from Calgary and a biotechnology research firm from Vancouver are discussing a joint venture to build a new cellulosic bio-refinery in Colorado.
It would be a "demonstration-scale" plant, meaning too small to churn out commercial quantities. If successful in demonstrating cost-effectiveness, the project could add to the momentum building behind cellulosic ethanol.
The deal announced today calls for Calgary's Suncor Energy Inc. and Vancouver's Lingol Energy Corp. to build a 10-million-liter-a-day refinery in Grand Junction, the major Colorado city on the western slopes of the Rockies.
The U.S. government would pay for about $30 million of the refinery's $80 million capital cost under ongoing federal incentives for alternative fuels developers.
Suncor, which would have controlling interest in the facility, would foot the rest of the bill and the cellulosic plant would be located within an existing Suncor petroleum refinery in grand Junction.
The Canadian companies said they hoped to ink their deal by mid-January and to have the refinery up and producing ethanol by 2010.
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.
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.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today issued its 2009 fuel economy guide
, with Smart cars and Volkswagen diesels now appearing on the government's top-10 list of most fuel-efficient vehicles available in America.
The Toyota Prius once again retains its position atop the list, with fuel-economy ratings of 48 miles per gallon in the city and 45 on the highway.
The additions to the top 10 list this year are the Smart ForTwo convertible and coupe and the Volkswagen Jetta diesels.
The Smarts, which arrived in the U.S. in January, were too late to make the 2008 guide. This year the Smart models hold down the No. 5 spot with ratings of 33 mpg city and 41 mpg highway.
The Jetta diesels were too heavy on emissions to enter the U.S. market last year, but they are in this year with improved emissions controls.
The Jetta diesel sedan and wagon with manual transmissions are in seventh place with ratings of 30 mpg city and 41 mpg highway. The sedan and wagon with automatic transmissions are in eighth place with ratings of 29 city and 40 highway.
Without further ado, here is the top 10 list for 2009:
General Motors Corp. announced today that it will partner with 10 states to increase the fueling infrastructure for gasoline-ethanol blended fuel.
The automaker will team with state officials, ethanol producers and retailers to find optimal locations for E85 fueling stations, promote use of the ethanol-gasoline blend and optimize supplies of the fuel.
The 10 states in the partnership are: Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
E85, which is 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, is the most common form of flex fuel in the U.S. It can be found at 1,665 fuel stations nationwide and is currently unavailable in six states, according to the Energy Department. The lack of fueling infrastructure is one of the largest hurdles standing in the way of wide-scale flex-fuel use.
"The infrastructure for E85 needs to expand now if the nation is to be ready for the significant growth in ethanol coming from new cellulosic and biomass sources," Beth Lowery, GM's vice president of environment, energy and safety policy, said in a statement.
An estimated 7 million flex-fuel vehicles are on U.S. roads today, 1 million of which were produced in 2007. GM and other domestic automakers have committed to making at least half of their new fleet offerings flex-fuel capable by 2012.
The U.S. consumed 6.8 billion gallons of ethanol last year. That number will need to grow substantially to meet the national renewable fuel standard established in last year's energy law, which will require 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be used annually by 2022.
Democrats nationwide are using Republican presidential candidate John McCain's long-standing opposition to ethanol subsidies and farm support programs to sway Republican-leaning rural voters in several key states, according to a report published today by Greenwire.
While the financial crisis has overwhelmed ethanol as a campaign issue, the Arizona senator's views on ethanol supports and his vote against the farm bill -- both welcome events as far as environmentalists are concerned -- are seen by some political scientists as adding to voter unease about the Republican's economic policies among rural voters.
"It definitely doesn't help McCain at all to not be strongly supportive," Mack Shelley, a political science professor at Iowa State University, told the energy and environmental subscription news service. "I don't know that it makes a difference of more than a point or two, but it certainly doesn't help McCain, given all the other problems he has."
Iowa is the focal point of the ethanol debate. McCain's opposition to ethanol subsidies has been an issue there since his 2000 primary run. Recent polls show him trailing Democrat Barack Obama by double digits in the state.
But several Midwestern states remain battlegrounds, and Democrats are using the ethanol issue there. They have even focused on ethanol in states that have scant biofuel production but where alternative energy is a major concern.
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 new plant in Michigan.
Mascoma, one of two cellulosic ethanol companies 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.
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.
The New York Times
reports today that the politics of energy are convoluted and volatile in Congressional campaigns across the U.S. this summer, as candidates search for a Goldilocks approach that is neither too hot nor too cold, and that voters will believe is sincere.
The pandering and waffling of candidates is producing a convergence of sorts around the idea that more is better, the Times reports, that an expansion of energy production from all sources and places will somehow fix things, lower prices and restore stability to the economy.
But the more complex components of the energy debate, from climate change to conservation, often get mostly lost in the drumbeat of simplified answers, leaving some voters more confused, or torn, than ever. The article is well worth the time it takes to read.
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.
The annual Center for Automotive Research Management Briefing Seminars confab in Traverse City, MI, put together a feisty session Tuesday called "Energy, Efficiency and Climate -- What Role Auto?" And while the session resulted in some prickly give-and-take between auto-industry and environmental representatives, there was essentially agreement on one point: California needs to give up its crusade to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.
Mike Stanton, president and CEO of the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, which represents almost all domestic and import automakers doing business in the U.S. and a longtime auto-industry rep in Washington, DC, said simply, "It's a little ridiculous," to have federal emissions standards, competing state emissions regulations, and the potential for even more conflict with California's CO2-regulating proposal.
He said the 14 manufacturers represented by the AIAM want "one national standard" for emissions regulation.
But he also said political winds appear to be blowing against their wishes. Both presidential candidates support granting California's waiver to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions.
"Neither candidate (Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain) has been terribly supportive of us in the past," Stanton said. Either presents challenges to the AIAM's hope for sanity in the emissions-regulation structure, he added.
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.
Large-SUV segment: Could reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated?
The run-up in gas prices from April through June spooked American car buyers into a manic rush to find the most fuel-efficient vehicles they could and to dump their gas guzzlers.
So new-car buyers nearly abandoned the large-SUV and pickup-truck segments, grew lukewarm about crossovers even compared with the first quarter, sought out small cars, pushed OEMs' subcompact-car manufacturing capacity to the max, and completely sucked up supplies of Prius and of some other hybrids. All the while, overall sales tanked.
So automakers made some of the most precipitous and significant decisions ever about production cutbacks and segment reallocations. Each of Detroit's Big Three and even Toyota moved quickly and massively to slash pickup and SUV production and goose small-car output as much as they could.
But the latest Edmunds.com data indicate that the industry may well have rushed into these moves too soon, perhaps overreacting -- along with the news media and other entities -- to how American consumers plainly were responding to skyrocketing gasoline prices.
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
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.
Auto dealers and consumer advocates told federal rulemakers today that a proposed 25 percent mandatory increase in fleetwide fuel economy standards is out of touch with importance buyers now give fuel-efficiency.
Mark Cooper, research director for the Consumer Federation of America, said rulemakers wrongly assumed U.S. drivers would continue to covet large trucks and SUVs, even though car buyers began moving to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars in 2004.
"The auto industry acts as if plummeting SUV and pickup truck sales are a new phenomena," he told the National Transportation Safety Board at a Washington public hearing. "The fact is, gas-guzzling-vehicle sales have been falling off a cliff for over three years. And yet the administration's proposed fuel economy standards presumes no fall and no cliff."
As a result, Cooper said, the proposed fleetwide fuel economy standard of 31.6 miles per gallon by 2015 would fail to meet consumer demands. According to a study performed by his organization, 59 percent of those surveyed want their next vehicle to get more than 35 mpg. Meanwhile, only 1 percent of new models offer that degree of fuel economy.
Adam Lee, president of Lee Auto Malls, which has a dozen Maine dealerships, said he has seen firsthand the shifting buying trends that have resulted in across-the-board losses for major carmakers.
Lee said he has laid off salespeople while waiting for automakers to produce the type of cars Americans want. "We just don't have the cars to sell," he said. "And I'm not just talking hybrids.... Consumers are waiting for good, old-fashioned small cars."
With almost daily announcements of initiatives aimed at chopping the price of fuel at America's pumps, West Virginia, one of the nation's most prolific coal-producing states, is making a serious move to leverage the lumpy black stuff for transportation fuel by fast-tracking construction of a commercial-scale plant utilizing a proven coal-to-gasoline process.
The coal-to-liquids plant, which will be the first in the U.S., could be up and running as quickly as three years from now, according to published reports, at a cost of some $800 million.
The planned facility is in Marshall County, located not far from the major cities of Pittsburgh and Cleveland in the state's Northern Panhandle. It will be operated in a joint venture between Pittsburgh-based Consol Energy Inc. and Houston's Synthesis Energy Systems Inc.
The plant will employ standard coal and waste coal from a nearby Consol mine and could draw on coal from two other nearby mines.
The joint venture, called Northern Appalachia Fuels LLC, will employ SES's U-Gas process to gasify coal to synthetic gas then convert it to methanol, the primary product of the process.
Synthetic Energy then uses its proprietary methanol-to-gasoline process to convert the methanol to gasoline. The company is negotiating with Exxon-Mobil Research and Engineering to license the process.
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.
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.
Los Angeles County officials today approved a proposal by BlueFire Ethanol
to build what might be the first commercial facility in the U.S. to process biowaste into ethanol.
Members of the county's regional planning commission voted today to issue a permit to BlueFire Ethanol of Irvine, Calif., to build a $30 million facility in Lancaster, 70 miles northeast of downtown L.A.
Ethanol is the type of alcohol found in alcoholic beverages and in thermometers, but it's largest single use today is as a fuel for internal combustion engines and as a fuel additive.
BlueFire President Arnold Klann said the plant would be the first commercial facility in the nation to make ethanol out of wood chips, paper and other biowaste.
Construction of the plant, which would be located next to a landfill, is expected to begin this fall.
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.
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."
While most automakers have shifted production to focus on smaller vehicles, nearly 70 percent of consumers want the companies to invest more in existing and emerging powertrain technologies, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Alternative Powertrain Study released today.
Now in its third year, the Alternative Powertrain Study examines the reasons why consumers consider or avoid alternative powertrain vehicles, such as gas-electric hybrid, flex fuel and clean diesel models.
The study includes the Automotive Environmental Index, which rates the 2008-model-year vehicles on the basis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data to fuel economy and greenhouse-gas emissions, as well as expert input from J.D. Power & Associates.
The study found that more than 80 percent of the 4,000 consumers polled believe the U.S. is currently facing an energy crisis. Only 18 percent of these respondents believe the issue can be addressed by building small, fuel-efficient vehicle.
Thirty percent believe automakers should continue to produce a comparable vehicle lineup with a focus on gas-electric hybrid, clean diesel and flexible-fuel vehicles, while another 39 percent believe carmakers should focus on developing fuel cell and all-electric vehicles.
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.
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...
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.
Corn futures passed $8 per bushel for the first time Monday, prompting fears of an ethanol wipeout.
Analysts downgraded BioFuel Energy Corp., VeraSun Energy Corp. and Archer Daniels Midland Co. among speculation that many ethanol plants – both operating and under construction – would be closed or hibernated for the duration of the price crisis...
Mazda Motor Corp. has signed a collaborative research agreement with Hiroshima University to develop a bioplastic from non-food-based cellulosic biomass and have it ready for use in motor vehicles by 2013.
The bioplastic will be made from cellulosic biomass produced from inedible vegetation such as plant waste and wood shavings, Mazda said in a statement Friday.
Because cellulosic biomass is plant-derived and therefore carbon neutral, the bioplastic will reduce reliance on limited fossil fuel resources and alleviate carbon-dioxide emissions...
An Escape plug-in ethanol-electric hybrid that Ford is currently road testing.
Ford Motor Co.'s top executive for North America said today that the federal government must make plug-in hybrid vehicles "a national priority" and substantially invest in them, or risk swapping one foreign energy dependency for another.
"For those looking to plug-ins to answer our energy security concerns, we must ensure a domestic battery supply," Mark Fields told a conference on plug-in hybrids in Washington. "Moving from imported oil to imported batteries clearly would not address this growing concern."
Fields said that based on the necessary research and development costs, manufacturing and production investments, the lack of a national refueling infrastructure, and the lack of domestic battery manufacturing, "it seems clear that a business case will not evolve, in the near term, without support from Washington."
Detroit automakers have long complained that foreign nations spend far more on research into advanced batteries for hybrids...
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.
Subscribe to the Edmunds Automotive Network Newsletter and enter the $500 Gas Card Sweepstakes. Sign up now and enter for your chance to win a $500 Gas Card!Official Rules
Nothing says "I 
