The Big Biofuels Blog

Chevron, the US oil company, and US National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists will collaborate to identify and develop algae strains that can be economically harvested and processed into finished transportation fuels such as jet fuel. Chevron Technology Ventures, a division of Chevron U.S.A. Inc., will fund the initiative, according to a press release from Chevron. NREL was the government laboratory which studied algae for over 20 years...

Little Blog in the big woods has decided that ethanol from corn is a bad thing, for a number of reasons. The blog has got hold of the ideas that there are not enough rail tank cars and that the pipelines run north south not east west along with more traditional thoughts about the volume of ethanol that could be produced. I'm not sure that I agree with the blogs points about cellulosic ethanol, if only because that is some way off yet... Worth looking at for a green perspective. Good thoughts about the need for switchgrass to be dry before its harvested...

Water again, but its not me this time, on always on, Lee Bruno has looked at the biofuel industry's need for water... in a piece called Three Biofuel Waves he thinks they need a lot of water.

We'd like use an eighth of your available water... will that be OK? I'm sure that is not quite how Pacific Ethanol put it to the city of Burley, Idaho, and it won't be a problem, according to a report on the South Idaho Press, in a clearly written and workmanlike piece. But it does point up the demands for water that production can have, along with a battle for water from a local river...

Biofuels made from food crops are a "crime against humanity", according to the UN's special special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, and there should be a five year moratorium on their production, according to a report on Reuters.

Jose Sergio Gabrielli, chief executive of Brazil's state petrochemical company, Petrobras, said the US should reduce the tariff on ethanol made in Brazil, because using corn to make ethanol is raising food prices.

The rapporteur's words may seem strong to those of us with comfy lives in the richer parts of the world, but he was speaking from the perspective of the 1bn people world wide who go to bed hungry.

hattip to Biofuelsdigest

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation has come out against the statement yesterday by UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, that biofuels are a crime against humanity, and is quoted by Biopact as saying:

We regret the report of the Special Rapporteur has taken a very complex issue, with many positive dimensions as well as negative ones, and characterised it as a 'crime against humanity'.

FAO strongly feels that food security and environmental considerations must be fully addressed before making investments or policy decisions, and we are actively working to ensure this happens.

However, a moratorium that ignores the potential of biofuels to support rural development and assist the economies of developing countries would not, in our view, be a constructive approach to this topic.

Distributing food fairly is of vital importance, as is using non-food crops where possible for biofuels and, fundamentally, greater fuel efficiency . Zeigler's comments are certainly eye- catching and it is surprising that they did not generate bigger headlines than they did. It is disappointing that he seems not to have discussed the ability of biofuel producers to sell those crops for cash enabling them to buy food, rather than growing it themselves. But I guess, in fairness, it can be difficult to stay detached when you see people starving.

There is considerable scope for producing biofuels from non-food crops in the developing world, but there are hurdles. Aside from tariff barriers and entrenched political positions in the developed world, there is also the danger of corruption in the developed and developing world.

This could see funds for improving infrastructure such as food distribution or biofuel production ending up in the pockets of people who should know better.

I've been doing some sums again, and the more I do these sums the more I think we have to get away from the idea that biofuels can ever be much more than spit in the ocean of gasoline (remind me of that in five year's time someone).

In the US for example the average vehicle (excluding buses and big trucks) consumed 743 gallons of gasoline in 2005 at an average fuel efficiency of 16.7 miles/gallon (US). This equates to consuming 179,100 million gallons (up from 57,880 million gallons in 1960) , according to RITA.
It takes 38lbs (17.41)kg of corn (or an average crop) to produce 1 gallon of US gasoline each year,(taking a conversion factor of 232kg corn to produce 50 litres ethanol from the UN), so each US car would need 28,463 lbs or 14.23 tonnes of crop to cover that mileage 2006. There were 241,194 cars on the road in the US in 2006 so we'd need adjusting for the lower energy density of ethanol about 4.9bn tonnes of harvested crops to match that volume of liquid fuels.The bad news is that the US harvest came in last year at 1.9bn tonnes, which would be enough to keep the US on the roads from January 1 to May 24.
People will say that this is a ludicrous calculation (which it is) and that I've not included the potential of cellulosic ethanol, biodiesel and a range of other factors, (which is true). But there is no mainstream alternative technology to ethanol at the moment.

If you've not got your corn position sorted for 2008 by now you could be in trouble, according to the last couple of graphs from US Wheat, the group sees marginal growth in global corn production, but shortages in wheat and soy and prices are likely to be stronger next year...

BioMCN won the innovation award at the World Refining Association's Bio-fuels 2007 conference in Vienna Austria from 29-31 October. The award was for finding a way to convert glycerol from biodiesel production into bio methanol.

The US National Academy of Sciences has produced a study Water Implications of biofuels production. The key points are:

Water is an increasingly precious resource used for many purposes including drinking and other municipal uses, hydropower, cooling thermoelectric plants, manufacturing, recreation, habitat for fish and wildlife, and agriculture. The ways in which a shift to growing more energy crops will affect the availability and quality of water is a complex issue that is difficult to monitor and will vary greatly by region.

In some areas of the country, water resources already are significantly stressed. For example, large portions of the Ogallala (or High Plains) aquifer, which extends from west Texas up into South Dakota and Wyoming, show water table declines of over 100 feet. Deterioration in water quality may further reduce available supplies. Increased biofuels production adds pressure to the water management challenges the nation already faces.

In the next 5 to 10 years, increased agricultural production for biofuels will probably not alter the national-aggregate view of water use. However, there are likely to be significant regional and local impacts where water resources are already stressed.

All else being equal, the conversion of other crops or non-crop plants to corn will likely lead to much higher application rates of N, which could increase the severity of the nutrient pollution in the Gulf of Mexico and other waterways. However, it should be noted that recent advances in biotechnology have increased grain yields of corn per unit of applied N and P.

In addition, biotechnologies are being pursued that optimize grain production when the grain is used for biofuel. These technologies could help reduce water impacts by significantly increasing the plants’ efficiency in using nitrogen, drought and water-logging tolerance, and other desirable characteristics.

A biorefinery that produces 100 million gallons of ethanol per year would use the equivalent of the water supply for a town of about 5,000 people.

Cellulosic feedstocks, which have a lower expected impact on water quality in most cases (with the exception of the excessive removal of corn stover from fields without conservation tillage), could be an important alternative to pursue, keeping in mind that there are many uncertainties regarding the large-scale production of these crops

That is a good point about excessive removal of corn stover, or other types of cellulose for future biofuel production, if too much is taken then soil quality will decline.

I particularly like the report's calls for more imagination than a straight cash payment per gallon of ethanol produced, and the policy might call for payments when policy goals are achieved and

To move toward a goal of reducing water impacts of biofuels, a policy bridge will likely be needed to encourage development of new technologies that support cellulosic fuel production and develop both traditional and cellulosic feedstocks that require less water and fertilizer and are optimized for fuel production. Policies that better support agricultural best practices could help maintain or even reduce water quality impacts. Policies which conserve water and prevent the unsustainable withdrawal of water from depleted aquifers could also be formulated.

For most of these points the volume of biofuels produced is the key as more is produced then the effects will be greater.

Water Implications of Biofuels Production in the United Sta ...
Read this free online

Biofuels are being used to minimise the amount of fish waste in a number of Pacific fisheries based around the US and Canada, according to World Changing which discusses using fish for fuel.

I can't see any problems with this(beyond the usual worries about overfishing)providing that it is "accidental", and happens with materials that would otherwise go to waste. We have to live in the world we live in and if people are catching fish it has to make sense to reduce the amount of waste from the process. After all if we lived in the stone age its unlikely that we'd let much of a mammoth go to waste if we were lucky enough to catch one.

But the comments about whales are interesting and it is the first time that I've seen those noble beasts of the sea linked in any way with biofuels... if only to say explicitly that they should not be hunted for their oil. And quite right too.

hattip to agricultural biodiversity weblog

UK bus operator Stagecoach is offering passengers 20p off bus fare with a litre of used veg oil on selected routes in Scotland as it trials biofuels on some routes.

According to a report on Scotsman.com

Locals can take their chip fat to a recycling point owned by Ayrshire Council, and from there it will go on to Argent Energy, which produces the biofuel using animal fat. The buses have been fitted with dual fuel tanks for mineral and biodiesel fuel, at a total cost of £40,000.

When they start, they will run on mineral diesel until the engine reaches the right temperature, when they will automatically switch over to biodiesel, which will power the vehicle for the rest of the day. Launching the scheme, Des Browne, the Scottish Secretary and MP for Kilmarnock and Loudon, said: "I welcome this innovative collaboration between two of our leading companies - a recycling initiative that fuels public transport cuts carbon emissions twice over.

I'm not sure if this incentive for micro collection really is a gimmick or if its a piece of inspired thinking.

According to Greenbang, the UK government has, today launched the renewable fuels agency headed by a group of green luminaries...

Florida's Governor will lobby to lower US Brazil ethanol import tariff according to today's Planet Ark.

Shell is taking a seat on Codexis' board and making a capital investment into the biofuels technology company as the firms announced their research collaboration is being extended by five years, according to a report on ICIS news.

(Disclosure I work for ICIS: About ICIS)

At the end of that time the firms hope to have developed a process to generate biofuels from cellulosic or other non-food sources, but Shell warned that it could be five to 10 years before they are available in commercial quantities.

We know that Shell is interested in biofuels, they also have a tie up with Iogen, which received part of a US Department of energy grant of $385m into cellulose ethanol earlier in the year. I had a day out with Shell which outlined some of its biofuel bets last November. At that time Shell didn't feel able to talk about the Codexis association, which was initially agreed close to the meeting.

That aside, one of the key messages from that for me came from Paul Snaith, vice president downstream marketing, Shell Global Solutions. He says biofuel should only be used if they

1 Make Economic sense

2 Are socially and ecologically sustainable

3 Are technologically sound.

Shell also has a policy of making capital investments into companies when they have at least two directors who understand the technology...

ABS Biodiesel is to build the UK's biggest biodisel plant in Bristol, according to Biofuels International. The plant will have capacity for 225 00 tonne/year, can be expanded to 500,000 tonne/year, is well placed for crops and for nearby refineries, according to the report. The report adds that there were 190,000 tonnes of biodiesel consumed in the UK, presumably in 2006.

Researchers in Belgium have looked at the energy that can be released from grass and maize by anerobic digestion (that's letting things rot down, to you and me). According to the research published in Environmental Research Web, energetically this way looks favourable.

It is interesting to see research in this area. In terms of biofuels there is a fixation on producing liquid fuels, and there is very little thought apparently given to processes that do not involve fermentation with yeast, or growing crops to extract oil.

Hattip to biofuel cities e-newsletter

There's an outline of BP's biofuel strategy from Rob New, head of the business at the firm, in a report from Rueters carried by Yahoo India.

What will you be doing when oil hits $100/barrel? Do you think that at that price biofuels will become viable?

Tallow, a kind of animal fat, is too pricey for an Australian biofuels group, which has decided to mothball at least one plant. The Australian Biodiesel Group (ABG) made an announcement to the Australian Stock Exchange yesterday ABG listing a series of measures it is taking to limit financial loss. These include selling off non-core assets, reducing headcount and mothballing factories.
I got the news from Envirofuel - Sustainable transport for Australia, and I quite like that blog's analysis of the situation because it explicitly shows how much of the biofuels industry relies on legislation for its existence and because for the business to be viable it needs access to consumers. It looks like that didn't happen .
That is one risk that business cannot easily reduce because countries and parliaments do what they like..

Palm oil is at a new high on food sector demand, according to my colleague Anu Agrual, writing from Singapore on ICIS news.

Disclosure (I work for ICIS: About ICIS)

The key message from the story is that in the far east Palm oil is more highly valued as food than as a fuel and that it will take government action to impose quotas before it can be used as fuel. Most Asian palm oil boidiesel plants are closed, he says.

The high price of palm oil, and the rising prices of alternatives means that the viability of any biofuel processes that are based on palm oil will be looking increasingly poor. It also means that there will be increased pressure to grow more palm oil, which could have repercussions for biodiversity and for the people who farm near on in the forests.

I think America makes enough biofuel to meet incremental gasoline demand. I've been wrestling with Excel for two days to produce this graph, which uses data from RITA, to give the volume of gasoline consumed historically in the US, the US renewable fuel authority for ethanol stats, the National Biodisel Board for volumes of biodiesel and the American Ethanol Coalition for volumes of ethanol produced in the US and the amount of the corn crop used to generate it. Their figures apply for 2004, 2005 and 2006, I've extrapolated them in the graph.
Here's the results of the hard work.

I've calculated the in compound annual growth in ethanol at of 2%/year since 1990, and ethanol production's compound annual growth of 10.2% in that time, and assumed that these are going to continue. In part of that calculation I've ignored a possibly rogue data point in the Rita numbers for 2004 which show a big spike in gasoline demand that year, and I've calculated the avearge of the 2003 and 2005 numbers and inserted it instead.

What is clear is that by 2013, about 40% of the US corn crop will be being used to make ethanol, and that will account for 5% of the total fuel consumption in the US. I am also assuming that cellulosic and other technology will make a negligible impact in that time. That there is no change in the US' stance on imports of ethanol from other low cost producers during that time.

What I'd really appreciate is for some one to run a ruler over the figures I've used...

By the way I posted this yesterday and realised that I'd forgot to make clear that I'd projected the data from the American Ethanol Coalition into the future. I've made that clear now.

US farmers in Iowa are asking their senators to try and change the way that the US Farm Credit system operates to allow it to loan money to ethanol plants that are not majority owned by farmers. According to Domestic fuel.

On the face of it this sounds silly to me. As one of the signatories to the letter sent to the senators put it...

“We understand the struggles of expanding the ethanol and biodiesel industry and trying to keep it profitable in changing economic times,” he adds. “Rising input costs and other factors are creating increasingly smaller margins for ethanol and biodiesel producers.”

In the UK at least, the banks prefer to loan you money to buy an umbrella when the sun is shining. If margins are shrinking and input costs are rising you are not going to have a compelling case to take to the banks.

Jim Schipper, is president of American State Bank at Osceola and current chairman of the Iowa Bankers Association. He explains that the Farm Credit System has preferential tax treatment and access to funding at interest rates a commercial bank is not eligible to get.

“That’s fine as long as Farm Credit lenders are within their mission–providing credit to farmers,” says Schipper. “But this expanded horizons idea goes way beyond that. If they want to finance enterprises that are not farmer-owned projects, then they should have to discontinue their federal support.”

UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, has visited a bioethanol plant in Brazil, He too rowed back from the position of UN's special special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, who said biofuels are a crime against humanity.

According to Brazilmag Ban said said:

"Some fear that land currently used to grow food will instead be turned over to fuel"Others worry that forests will be cut down to make way for biomass plantations. Still more worry about the effects on the environment and biodiversity."

National governments must take the lead in managing their use and ensuring that the benefits outweigh the costs, he said.

Hear Hear

I've been a bit sceptical of hydrogen as a fuel of the future, mostly because with traditional hydrogen technology, you have to keep making the stuff from water and that usually needs a fair amount of electricity. So by the time you get through the whole process of making and transmitting the electricity, then making, storing, releasing and eventually using hydrogen, it would probably have been as efficient too burn coal to generate steam to power your vehicle as to use hydrogen.
Now, some researchers at Penn State University have harnessed bacteria to the challenge, at a stroke turning it into a biofuel (yay!) and, they claim, increasing the energy efficiency of the process which is described in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. At the heart of the process lies a bio-electrochemically assisted microbial reactor
In other words to pep-up the hydrogen-generating-potential of the cells, which contained weak acetic acid (which typically is what you get when ethanol oxidises) they applied a small voltage (0.5-0.6V) and generated around 1.1m^3 hydrogen from each 1m^3 cell/day at an efficiency of around 82%.
There are several things I like about this. Firstly it relies on fermenting products found in waste water which, apart from the cost of the yeast, is free. Secondly, with a bit of luck the bacteria will be self sustaining (won't crawl out of its tank and go for world domination)
What I'm sceptical about... the rate of the reaction and the yield. It will take a relatively long time for the process of fermentation of organic matter to alcohol and its natural oxidation to acetic acid and finally how we are going to store and distribute the hydrogen generated?
Hattip to Wired.

The Government of Quebec has decided it will not allow any more biofuel plants to be built on its territory, according to Francois Cardinal, writing in La Presse. The ban is coming into force because the government of Quebec does not believe that corn ethanol is environmentally beneficial. Zut alors!

Thanks to trusty Babelfish we can get a glimpse of what the thinking behind it could have been...mostly its environmental.

The experts speak about an impoverishment of the soil aimed by the intensive culture, contamination of the rivers, the use on a large scale of weedkillers, insecticides and manure, the rise in the price of the foodstuffs and even of the reduction of the surpluses of corn usually sent to the countries in the need.

But there still, the benefit of ethanol would not be as large as claims it the Charest government. Sunday, in a letter published in the Press, the Beauchamp minister supported that the introduction of 5 % of ethanol into the gasoline sold in Quebec, obligatory from here 2012, will make it possible "to reduce by 780 000 tons per year the gas emissions for purpose of greenhouse".

However the director of the division of research on the toxic emissions of Environment Canada, Greg Rideout, question this kind of assertions. Last spring, network CBC revealed the conclusions of one of its studies: there is no difference between the emissions produced by a car which runs with regular gas or fuel containing 10 % of ethanol.

It is interesting to see a regional government cutting corn ethanol for environmental reasons. Is this a straw in the wind?

Thanks to biofuelwatch for the tipoff

Panda Ethanol has got an air-quality permit, enabling it to proceed with a 115 million gallon/year ethanol plant that will use 38 million bushels of feedstock-grade corn at Muleshoe, Texas.
The firm will use cattle manure for power.

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Check out this energy balance game Energyville, its pretty good for demonstrating how we need a balance of energy sources going into the future... its sponsored by Chevron, but as the brains behind it came from the Economist its probably OK.

There's more detail on Dyanmotive's fast pyrolysis process on Environmental Resarch web. This is fast pyrolysis which is pretty much a continuous process, by the looks of things.

The plant in Guelph will process 66,000 dry tonnes of biomass each year and produce the same amount of energy as 130,000 barrels of oil... which is a useful amount. The bio oil is being produced from waste wood.

Evolution biofuels will run the plant. Dynamotive has a minority shareholding in Evloution. This is the second time I've written about Dynamotive this month, earlier I mentioined the firm had secured more funding.

US BioEnergy has released its third quarter numbers which show an improvement on the prior quarter. A lot of this is down to the firm's hedging strategy which has seen the effective price it has paid for corn in the quarter fall from $3.58/bushel to $3.15/bushel and so increased the revenue it generates from each gallon of ethanol it sells. The opposite was true in the second quarter where hedging operations increased the cost of corn by $0.18/bushel.
Hedging the price of corn is an important part of the more sophisticated ethanol producer's armoury. The problem is that what you wins on the swings you loses on the roundabouts, its just that you don't win quite so much or (ideally) lose quite so much as you would do if you didn't hedge.
Hattip to Energy Refuge.com

I love the idea of the police using biodisel -- there's no mention of whether they're paying duty on it in the story. But being Thailand the contributions of waste veg oil are voluntary...

Good to see that 16 Japanese industrial organisations are cooperating in developing new biofuel technologies, over on Biopact. It is especially good to see that they are going to use waste biomass from industry and agriculture...

According to Biopact

The Japanese initiative, which will be announced and further detailed later this week, aims to ultimately push down the production cost of bioethanol to 40 yen per litre (€0.24/liter or $1.37/gallon) by the end of 2015 - a level considered to be competitive with other alternative energy sources.

Japan currently imports ethanol from Brazil, which delivers the most cost-effective biofuel on the market. But local production of bioethanol from sugar cane in Japan currently costs about 140 yen per litre, according to the Nikkei.

That kind of step change would make a real difference to the economics of production, the question is whether they will go along a cellulosic biofuel route or consider pyrolysis.

More deatails are due on Wednesday.

I'm going to be moderating the plenary session of the 2008 World Biofuels Markets Congress, to be held 12th-14th March, 2008 at the Brussels Exhibition Centre, Belgium. The organisers, Greenpower conferences, are expecting around 1300 people to turn up with CEO's banks and the financial community attending.

I'll also be appearing live and in person at the First ICIS Bioresouces Summit in Sedgfield, County Durham on 4 December, where I'll be honing my act.

UK Columnist George Monbiot has turned his gaze on the global bifofuels business, and doesn't like what he sees.

He makes some pretty good, if uncomfortable points about wealthy people's ability to pay more for food than the poor. He does miss the point that in Swaziland, where there is a shortage of food and cassava is being grown for fuel, the argument may not be quite as simple as he put it.

Using cassava ethanol would enable the country to import less oil based gasoline, which would leave the government with more money to subsidise staples or to buy food from overseas. Alternatively, farmers could sell the crop themselves.

Of course people have to have the land to do it and their legal title to that land has to be respected.

I'm giving a paper on 4 December at the 1st ICIS Bioresources Summit in Sedgfield Co Durham UK. Its been a salutary lesson to me about having too much fun over the past 18 months. Its like asking a Jackdaw to go through its nest and pull out a theme, not just the 25 shiniest things it can put its hand on... So what am I going to talk about?
I'm not going to tell you (before the event) but I've been rummaging around and found that
The US already uses 20% of its corn crop to make ethanol
That the UK produces around 117m tonnes of waste that might be useful as biofuels
That the US probably already makes its incremental demand for gasoline out of renewable fuels.
Sovereign risk is a bad thing(third definition)
I'll be chatting around those and a number of other areas in my capacity as a commentator. There will be many other speakers there who are more day-to-day involved in the business...

This pushes many of my buttons, its got water, its got California and its got Ethanol. It is symptomatic of the increasing doubt that the biofuel industry is facing in the US.

The Round Table on Sustainable Palm oil used its fifth meeting in Kuala Lumpur last week to outline its certification scheme for sustainable palm oil on a quick reading of the headings it seems to give some protection to indigenous people, but there is the possibility that some of the green groups that are part of the coalition may pull out because they feel the registration will enable governments not to legislate to protect rain forest.

This kind of voluntary agreement is a good way forward, if it is properly enforced, if the audit is sufficiently robust and if the group is prepared to withhold registration to non-compliant oil, or to eject organisations that stop complying.

With Thanksgiving just behind us in the US and Chrismass on the horizon, now could be a good time to think about what to do with the excess food we're going to try to consume in the richer parts of the developed world.
Researchers at Penn State University in the US suggest that table scraps could be a good starting point for bacteria-based hydrogen fuel cells...

I've just come across a pretty bad idea on a site which claims to be about popular science... popular hogwash if the rest of it is up to this standard.

As reported idea revolves around converting carbon dioxide from smokestacks to baking powder. Baking powder works by releasing carbon dioxide in the oven when it gets hot. That's why cakes rise.

Who's for perpetual motion then?

Glycerol one of the big byproducts of biodisel production could be converted to hydrogen rich gas using a process developed at Leeds University in the UK, and reported on Biopact.
This is not Dr Valerie DuPont's first venture in to this area. A report, published in Fuel Cells Bulletin in 2004 focused on her work on sunflower oil and two catalysts which generated hydrogen with 90% purity.

The new research is particularly interesting, because there is an increasing amount of glcyerol around in the marketplace and just as distillers grains help the economics of ethanol production, if it is possible to make hydrogen in reasonable quantities in reasonably quickly from glcyerol, then the economics of biodiesel might look a little brighter in the future. Assuming we can store and trasnport hydrogen effectively.

How good for the environment is ethanol? Ask Patty has the answer (to a point), in a nicely argued essay.

20% of the US corn crop has been used to make ethanol this year, according to a report on WJFW, and around 4m acres of the US were planted with corn.

I like this analysis of the US ethanol from corn market as it now stands and Geoffrey Styles, proposal for a smarter ethanol policy for the US. Styles points out that after 25 years' of subsidies the US ethanol market is not economically viable.

He says there is a strong case for

shifting the focus of the ethanol portion of US energy policy--and agricultural policy. Considering all the above factors, I believe a wiser ethanol policy would consist of the following:

1. Freezing the federal RFS at the current level of 7.5 billion gallons per year.

2. Phasing out all subsidies for ethanol derived from food sources within five years.

3. Phasing out the tariff on imported ethanol within two years.

4. Shifting the point of subsidy from the blender to the ethanol plant, to ensure that future subsidies go to US producers, rather than offshore.

5. Increasing the subsidy on cellulosic ethanol to $1.00/gallon until 2010, falling by 10 cents per gallon per year thereafter.

Such a program would focus federal incentives where they will do the most good, promoting the commercialization of cellulosic ethanol, which offers much larger energy and emissions-reduction benefits than corn ethanol and entails fewer concerns about sustainability.

I particularly like his proposal for the end of subsidies on ethanol from food sources and the end to protective tariffs. I guess there would need to be support for cellulose production in the short therm and I'd argue for it to be phased out over 3-5 years after commercial production starts.

Since cellulosic ethanol is expected to be cheaper to produce, once it achieves economies of scale, it should not require permanent subsidies or tariff protection, as corn ethanol has. The result would be a very tough market for current ethanol producers, but it would ensure that the ethanol we use as an oil substitute is produced as efficiently as possible, without merely substituting LNG imports for oil imports

It would also allow corn to be used for what it is best for Food. He asks an unanswerable question which points up the difficulties that the US renewable fuel industry faces.

Whether or not something like this could ever be enacted by the US Congress, this is where the debate should focus, rather than on arguing about expanding an inefficient program by a factor of five.

Of course, there's no debate about fuel efficiency or what the price of any of this fuel will be in the future...

The UK's first ethanol from Sugar Beet plant opened about a week ago...

Over on Biofuel Review they have some interesting figures on the kind of yield that super algae can produce in carbon-dioxide-rich environments.

The growth rate — an average productivity of 98 grams/meter2/day (ash free, dry weight basis) and reaching a high peak value of 174 grams/meter2/day — surpassed previous lab growth rates and exceeded all expectations going into the project.

Assuming that 60% of that weight is processable oil. That means that each square meter could generate 104g/oil day (that's about 4oz to the non metric). So it will take a goodly area of algae to make a barrel/day.
The key is sunlight and surface area. I wonder if it would be energetically worth while to illuminate algae at night to keep them growing 24 hours/day?
Hattip to Oilgae

Interesting story on the connection between farming, energy and midwestern primary elections on the Des Moines Register yesterday.

Good to see that there is talk of fuel efficiency in at least one of the bills. The US is going to use around 177 000 million gallons of gasoline this year, its already using 20% of the corn crop to produce around 5000 million gallons of ethanol via fermentation. That cannot be unless there is a big change in consumption, the volume of corn that will be used in the short term will become unsustainable pretty quickly. Of course auto engines need to change to accept higher ethanol blends... and the fuel needs to be more widely available.