The Big Biofuels Blog

Thirty five (at least) of the best biofuels pictures on Flickr (including a woman sitting on the bonnet of a car (why?))

In a move that will make all the difference to the bioethanol and biodiesel industries, President George W Bush has proclaimed October Energy Awareness Month.

I thought I should tell you as soon as I became aware of it myself. El Presedente was talking at the Advancing Renewable Energy Conference in St Louis, Missouri last week. I could find the fact

Check out this video from a group I've formed on You tube. It is one person's view of what's we need to do on the way forward to make the world a better place.

Technorati Tags: biofuels, solar, sustainability, sustainable, Tag 22, uk, video, youtube

Here's an interesting round-up on biofuels It is from Journey to Forever and addresses some of the concerns I've been raising about food or fuel for example.

Technorati Tags: algae, biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuels, biogas, water

The listed biomethane company uses anaerobic digestion to produce methane from a number of waste streams.

The new designs allow for the removal of sand and silt while the tanks are in operation, are significant enough that Intrepid and Andigen, through Utah State University , are applying for a joint patent.

Intrepid is adding a further 15 tanks to the existing three tank set up and when the construction is complete will be producing over 250, 000, 000 cubic feet of biogas/year. Intrepid is posting photographs of the expansion (http://www.intrepid21.com/ex_040106.htm)and has archives from the plant expansion which started in April.

I was put on to Intrepid by renewable energy access.com which is well worth checking out.

How big is the global market for biodiesel and bioethanol likely to get? That is a key question for firms making large bets on the growth of these businesses. One indication of the potential size has come from Sergio Trindade, R & D director of International Fuel Technology who estimates

Biofuel from algae, we've looked at it before, we'll look at it again, but Donkelphant pointed me towards a report in the Portland Press Herald about two young women presenting at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology their work into developing biofuel from algae, as part of a high school project.

Good for them. Good for Women in Science and potentially good for the planet too.

Technorati Tags: America, biodiesel, biofuel, US

Biodiesel and to a greater extent bioethanol will play a larger roll in the world’s fuel mix by 2030… that’s the good news the bad news is that increasing use will produce greater conflict with existing uses for the; and alternatives like lingocellulose face considerable technical hurdles.

That’s not my view, it’s the International Energy Authority’s in its new report World Energy Outlook 2006, which I’ve gained access to.

The report is chock full of interesting details, and I’d like to give everybody a free copy,

Technorati Tags: America, Asia, biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, Legislation, Report, International Energy Authority

US Sustainable Energy Corp says it has developed a method of producing very large volumes of a kind of biodiesel/biofuel hybrid.

Here's the video have a look, tell me what you think,there's just two things

The chaps over at the Biodiesel and SVO forum seem less than enthusiastic

Oh, and I remember that my mum told me that if it seems too good to be true then, it probably is...

Technorati Tags: America, biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, Transport, US

I came across this on the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory website about biofuel cells that don't really need much in the way of bio... It seems that some bacteria rely on proteins to distribute electricity on their surfaces as a way of dealing with excess energy they produce during metabolism.

Now, scientists for the first time have observed this electricity-shuttling process taking place sans cells, in purified proteins removed from the outer membrane of the versatile, metal-altering soil bacterium Shewanella oneidensis. Reporting in the current advance online edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society, they suggest that proteins rendered portable from the organisms that spawned them could make miniature bioreactor cells feasible.

"We show that you can directly transfer electrons to a mineral using a purified protein, and I don't think anyone had shown that before," said Thomas Squier, senior author and lab fellow at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The feat is the bacterial equivalent of removing lungs and coaxing the disembodied tissue to breathe.

Put that way it sounds quite revolting... but useful.

Technorati Tags: America, biofuel, gentic modification, US

Codexis and Shell Oil Products have agreed to explore ways of producing second generation biofuels, according to PR Newswire.

David Sexton, President, Shell Oil Products US, says

"Shell is committed to leading the development of second-generation bio- fuels that offer lower well-to-wheel CO2 production and enhanced performance. We are exploring the application of Codexis' proprietary technologies to produce alternative fuels from renewable, sustainable sources."

While Alan Shaw, Ph.D., Codexis President and Chief Executive Officer, says

"Our proven biocatalytic approach should provide the critical pathway to developing economically feasible alternative transportation fuels from renewable resources,"

From Planet Ark, Bioethanol and biodiesel in South East Asia got a shot in the arm yesterday as US president George Bush said in a meeting with Indonesia's presidentSusilo Bambang Yudhoyono:

"I am very supportive of biofuel initiatives, starting in our own country. It's important for us to develop alternative ways to power our vehicles if we want to become less dependent on oil," Bush told reporters in the hill town of Bogor south of Jakarta.

Bush added

"The president and I spent a fair amount of time talking about the ability to develop biofuels, particularly in Indonesia's case from sugar cane as well as palm oil, and the technologies are available to convert sugar into ethanol."

The report adds that Indonesia's calendar year 2007 palm oil production is forecast to rise to 17.60 million tonnes from an estimated 15.90 million in 2006, overtaking Malaysia as the world's largest producer, according to industry sources.

Technorati Tags: Asia, biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, Bush, ethanol, Indonesia, Palm oil, US

The Asian biofuel markets face big challenges, according to a report on ICIS news. Anu Agarwal has been talking to producers of ethanol and biodiesel in and around Singapore and discovered they are as concerned about the prospects for their industry as delegates at the World Refining Association's 2006 European Biofuels Forum in Warsaw, yesterday and Tuesday.

(Full disclosure: I work for ICIS)

Anu, says

Technorati Tags: Asia, biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, ethanol, Palm oil, Singapore

Biodiesel and ethanol are high on the radar of China's big oil companies. According to the People's Daily on Friday last week China's oil giants explore biofuels in their vision of the future...

China's oil giants...are making tentative moves into the green fuels sector. Earlier this month, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China's largest oil producer, signed an agreement with the Sichuan provincial government to develop bio-fuel in the southwestern basin famous for its agricultural industry and natural gas reserves.

They plan to produce 600,000 tons of automotive-grade ethanol made from sweet potatoes each year and 100,000 tons bio-diesel made from the seeds of jatropha curcas tree. CNPC has negotiated with four foreign companies on the introduction of the bio-diesel technology, the company said at its official website.

Is there a pattern here, with my earlier post today about Shell's biofuel bets. This points up the need for consolidation in the fuel ethanol and biodiesel sectors. If large companies like Shell and CNPC are actively involved then, providing they feel that they can make enough money from biofuels they will move in. It would be a mistake to think that big oil is made up of dinosaurs and biofuel players are the smart mammals that will out evolve them. companies like Shell,BP, and ExxonMobil have not been around for over 100 years without changing.

Technorati Tags: biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, BP, China, Jatropha, Shell, Sweet potato, ExxonMobil

The Czech Business Weekly has a useful piece scoping out the size of the biofuels markets in that country and the way foreign investors are driving it Those of us who like numbers, will find this passage about import levels useful, if you bear in mind that Mol is the country's incumbent gasoline supplier...

Mol’s latest target for 2007 is in the neighborhood of 50,000 metric tons for both biodiesel and bioethanol, with incremental annual increases averaging 10,000 metric tons through 2014.

Growing at about 20% year from the current level based on demand which falls some way short of the EU's target amount for biofuel consumption. Quoting again from Jacob Doyle's piece

As far as some local investors are concerned, Mol’s current schedule for blending biofuel into conventional fuels can be considered an accurate measurement of domestic biofuel demand. “We only deal with projects based on Mol purchase agreements,” said András Gereben, a corporate finance manager at Equilor Investment, which arranges secure financing for such projects.

That seems to be to be a sensible way of proceeding. The article contains good thoughts about taxation and the availability of local feedstocks.

Technorati Tags: biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, Companies, Hungary

Switch grass to ethanol got a boost today from Nexant ChemSystems, a big name in the world chemicals consulting in its new report Liquid Biofuels: Substituting for Petroleum . Nexant does some work showing the break even costs for different types of bioethanol production processes.

This seems to show that switchgrass could be a winner for ethanol production, even if the oil cost dips well below $30/bbl. The cost of making ethanol from sugar cane in Brazil, is around the same as using corn from the US. Canadian wheat and corn in China are also very expensive routes to making bioethanol.

Key conclusions in the Nexant report:

Technorati Tags: biodiesel, bioethanol, biofuel, Cassava, ethanol, global, Palm oil, Sugar beet, Sugar cane, Switchgrass, Wheat

There's an interesting discussion on the tensions in the US biofuels industry in Forbes magazine this week. It also contains some useful numbers on the output of bioethanol from places like Brazil.

Technorati Tags: America, Brazil, ethanol, US

The Chicago Board of Trade will be holding an information session for a planned Palm Oil contract. Here are the details

JADE Crude Palm Oil (CPO) Futures Contract

*Information Session*

DATE: Wednesday, December 13, 2006

TIME: 1:45 - 2:30 p.m.

LACE: CBOT® 5th Floor Vistor Center Theater

WHO SHOULD ATTEND: CBOT Members, FCMs, IBs, and Commercial Ag Firms

CONTENT:
Overview of JADE
Crude Palm Oil Market
Crude Palm Oil Futures Contract Specifications
Current Launch Information
Q&A session

To RSVP for the Information Session or for more information on JADE's Crude Palm Oil contract, call CBOT Business Development at 312-341-7955.

Technorati Tags: biodiesel, Palm oil, CBOT, US

Biopact tells us :

Mozambique Bio-Fuel Industries (MBFI) and its Indian partners announced they are investing €800 million (US$1 billion) to generate bio-electricity in Mozambique. This is a major boost to the African country's rapidly growing economy, where energy needs are increasing sharply. The company is radically choosing for a smart, decentralised approach, utilising locally produced biomass in small, modular power plants.

The company, supported by the Mozambican government, is collaborating with India on the project, showing once again that South-South cooperation strategies offer advantages in addressing crucial development problems. The EU too has several bioenergy-related initiatives in the country (earlier post).

It looks like Mozambique is on the biofuels map.

One of the partners Malavalli Power Plant Private Limited is invovolved in rural electrification in India, and is working with the USAID overseas Aid agency and GE.

Enel is planning a big push into biofuels and other renewables with investments likely to total Euro4bn ($5bn) in plans announced yesterday, according to planet Ark.

Enel, an Italian utility company, will invest 3.3 billion euros in creating new renewable energy plants with total capacity worth 1,700 Megawatt and innovative projects, like solar plant Archimede in Sicily, as well as biomass and biofuels facilities.

If only I'd known about this before christmas! Just what we need a 'Women of biodiesel calendar'

I am indebted to Camp Biche for the idea that rising commodity prices will make you thinner. The argument goes that using more corn for ethanol will reduce the amount of corn syrup available to sweeten US beverages. And this will make people thin. Sounds plausible as long as the soft drinks business doesn't switch to other sugars... Anyway it probably does for any chance of a lipodisel industry kicking off in the US. Thanks to Sustainability blog for that.

You should check out the Sietch blog for thoughts from people who've been involved in alternative energy and biofuel for a while. There's an interesting post on how China is becoming a 500 pound gorilla in biofuels... for example.

An Australian view on the race to biofuels is published in today's Australian newspaper. In a nutshel its a gold rush.

It might be worth keeping an eye on biofuelswatch, a UK organisation aiming to monitor the environmental effects of biofuels. They seem pretty fixated on forests (and why not), but certainly campaign.

Petron a large gasoline player in the Philippines has committed Philippine (Ps) 260m ($5.4m) to change its fuel facilities in readiness for the soon to be implemented biofuels act, according to my good friend Matt Kovac. writing on ICIS news.

(Disclosure: I work for ICIS. About ICIS)

The news came slightly ahead of President Arroyo signing the Philippines Biofuels Act into law.

Petron will upgrade its 1,000-plus service stations, as well as refineries, depots and pipes in order to comply with the law, which will mandate the use of a 5% ethanol/95% gasoline blend.

Range fuels will build a plant to convert waste woodchips to ethanol in Macon, Georgia, using technology which looks to be based on heating the wood until it gives off gas which is then chemically converted to ethanol.

Hat tip to the Macon Telegraph,  which says locals are excited by the idea of squeezing more out of their local pine forests.

I've just got in from an evening with Bill Crolius of San Francisco Biofuels.  I was hanging around their operation for a couple of hours and although its pretty low key there's real commitment to biodiesel within the cooperative.

The cooperative is not too easy to find by road. I played it carefully, taking a cab and moving in on foot  meeting Bill in an adjacent parking lot. The only "somewhat public" (thanks Anthony B) biodiesel pump in San Francisco is at the back of 521 8th Street. Like so many things, I guess its easy to find if you know where to look.

It seems strange to me that you have to be a member of a fleet to use 100% biodiesel in California. B20 can be supplied at traditional gas stations

There was a steady flow of people, five or ten during the hour I was there to fill their cars and large plastic containers with biodiesel, which is made from non-GMO soy. Bill explained that this route is being used because the biodiesel is consistent with consistent feeds.

The next big thing for San Francisco would be city fleets converting to biodiesel. And for San Francisco Biofuels Bill says he is hoping for a pump and a card-access system for coop members. That might be possible in a year or two's time.

Thanks for the evening Bill, say hi to Turtle.

Argentina has mandated the use of biofuels in a law signed by President Nestor Kirchner. Argentina's Agriculture Secretariat said the country would need 600 million metric tons of biodiesel and 160 million tons of ethanol to satisfy the demand created by the law, according to Deep Green Crystals

You should take a look at John Richardson's take on the weird and not so wonderful world of biofuels in his Asian Chemicals Connections Blog.

(Disclosure: Both John and I work for ICIS)

Broin is to use licensed DuPont technology in a cellulosic ethanol plant in Iowa in four to six years, according to Delaware online. 

Broin's cellulosic ethanol facility will be built adjacent to an existing ethanol plant in Emmetsburg. About 25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol will be produced at the new site each year. The rest of the plant will produce about 120 million gallons of ethanol from grain.

DuPont's Biofuels vice president, John Ranieri told the Piper Jaffray Alternative Energy Symposium recently that DuPont is following a three pronged biofuels strategy:

1. improving existing ethanol production through differentiated agricultural seed products and crop protection chemicals;

2.  developing and supplying new technologies to allow conversion of cellulose to biofuels; 

3.  developing and supplying next generation biofuels with improved performance

There's plenty of huffing and puffing over at the Huffington Post about Sen Barak Obama and his policy on biofuels its ethanol man vs ozone man.

Dynamotive pyrolysis biofuel is being used in Ontario, Canada as a fuel in local power supply.

The firm says it will sell renewable power to the grid

at 11 cents per kilowatt hour, or more, for up to 20 years. Fuel for the plant is derived from wood residues from Erie Flooring and Wood Products that are converted to BioOil through Dynamotive's patented fast pyrolysis process.

Dynamotive also claims, the plant is the first commercial plant of its kind in the world.

The idea is to heat the residues up so that they produce an oil which can be burnt.

Two interesting and contrasting views on how biofuels could affect the Brazilian ecosystem are outlined in Ethablog and biopact.

Ethablog looks at the common interests between Archer Daniels Midland and the governor of Matto Grosso state. Biopact wonders whether Brazil could produce enough bioethanol to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and slow global warming

Over on Trollhattan Saab, there's a beginners guide to biofuels. It seems the carmaker is making all the new cars in its range capable of using biofuels in the UK. 

Quoting from a report by Huey Freeman in the Decatur Herald&Review

David Wetzel, 79, was surprised to hear a knock on the door at their eastside home while he was still getting dressed.

Two men in suits were standing on his porch.

"They showed me their badges and said they were from the Illinois Department of Revenue," Wetzel said. "I said, 'Come in.' Maybe I shouldn't have."

I am slightly surprised the Wetzels weren't cuffed

The agents informed the Wetzels that they were interested in their car, a 1986 Volkswagen Golf, that David Wetzel converted to run primarily from vegetable oil but also partly on diesel.

Aha! got em!

Since the initial visit by the agents on Jan. 4, the Wetzels have been involved in a struggle with the Illinois Department of Revenue. The couple, who live on a fixed budget, have been asked to post a $2,500 bond and threatened with felony charges.

The Wetzels and two others got their day in the sun on 1 March when they testified before an Illinois senate committee on biofuels taxation.

The committee liked what it heard from them and unanimously approved  a Senate bill that would remove the bond requirement for those who use cooking oil in their private vehicles in Illinois. It just needs to be passed the Illinois Senate, Illinois House and be signed into law by the Governor.  Thanks for the coverage Huey.

It looks to me like the State of Illinois needs to get it self sorted out in terms of a biofuels taxation policy, that will actively encourage the use of small scale biofuels and not have its lawmen blundering around at the request of confused taxmen.

It is not a question of joined-up-thinking. No its more fundamental than that: Its about thinking in the first place and making the response fit the situation.

Hat tip to Mr Graydon Blair in the biodiesel & SVO Discussion forums.

Tesco is to pay for UK petrol damage, according to a report on Reuters. The news follows problems with gasoline that contained ethanol on, but which was contaminated by silicone oil the The news agency quotes the supermarket as saying

"We'd like to say how sorry we are," Tesco said. "More to the point, we'd like to promise to pay for the repairs.

"We have traced the problem to a batch of unleaded fuel from a storage facility used by one of our suppliers in Essex.

"All the affected stores in the southeast of England have been refueled with a fresh, clean supply."

Tesco is pretty well placed to do so, in 2006 30% of the UK supermarket sales went through Tesco's tills.

Dynamotive Energy systems says it has started commissioning it plant at Guelph, Ontario, Canada.

Dynamotive says

The joint ventured Guelph plant, is designed to process 200 tonnes/day of cellulosic biomass (recycled wood) and produce 175 tonnes (37,000 gallons) of biofuel/ day (12.2 million gallons a year) with the equivalent energy content of 550 barrels of conventional oil. Total development costs for the plant are currently estimated at US$ 16.5 million. Full operations are scheduled for the second quarter.

Food or fuel, or food and fuel, the debate continues with a story by Reuters on Planet ark today which asks: As biofuels boom will more go hungry?

Two world leaders talked biofuels in unusual circumstances recently... Remember when Fidel Castro phoned in to the Hugo Chavez Radio show?

"Hello presidente? This is presidente"

 That was surprising enough, to add to the excitement, they spent a chunk of time talking about biofuel. I've come across a transcript (my Spanish extends to Hello and two beers please).

Maybe Hugo and Fidel listen to The Big Biofuels Podcast. If either of you el Presidentes do please drop me a line. What would you like to hear more of...

Viva revolutionary media!

US meat processor, Tyson Foods, which generates around 2.3bn lbs (about 1000 tonnes) of animal fat/year as part of its food processing operations hopes to be able to turn most of it into biofuel by the end of the year, according to a report by Reuters on Planet Ark.

This is not the first time that Tyson has looked at using the waste products associated with food production. In 2001 it looked at chicken litter as a potential fuel. In January this year it formed Tyson Renewable Energy as a division to look at the possibly of using its waste materials as biofuel feedstocks.

The volumes are likely to be high, and I guess mostly biodiesel of some sort.The question though will be whether it will be competitive with other biofuels if the price of grain starts to rise...but then there's the possibility of cross-subsidising from processed food.

In the light of Tyson's proposed entry into biofuels, and Tyson's interest in Chicken, Pork and Beef which 'flavour' of exhaust gas would you prefer from your Tyson-Brand biofuel?

a) Southern fried Chicken

b) BBQ Beef

c) Roast Pork

and as a vegetarian option

d) Juicy Jatropha

e) Silky Soy

f) Creamy Canola

please vote by leaving a comment. Poll closes on 31 March 2007

This is an analysis, of how traditional fermentation processes are not really going to be the best long-term solution to energy needs in the US and some of the unintended consequences of switching to green energy sources.

The Jakarta News blog says that PT Medco is to build three ethanol factories in South Sumatra mainly for domestic fuel demand, but there could be ethanol export capacity...

It's worth digging out the US Department of Energy's view on ethanol and other alernative fuels. Plenty of links to other useful information.

Hugo Chavez says he's going to try to talk to Brazil's President Lula to persuade him not to promote ethanol in Latin America (so Mr Bush has had some effect South of the Border), according to The Devils Excrement blog.

Hydrogenating biomass could viably produce biofuel researchers at Purdue University say, according to Science Daily. The researchers say that adding hydrogen during the gasification phase (sounds to me like they're heating biomass up in air and seeing what comes off) changes the composition of the the gasses produced making them more interesting for fuel. Possibly through a Fischer Tropsh reaction.

My only environmental concern about the process is that Hydrogen doesn't grow on trees and a fairly large amount of energy is needed to generate it, even if that energy comes from

a "carbon-free" energy source, such as solar or nuclear power.

It would be interesting to see if the researchers Chemical engineering Professor Rakesh Agrawal, doctoral student Navneet Singh and Professors Fabio Ribeiro and W. Nicholas Delgass have carried out any energy balance studies for the process.

One the other hand biomass does grow on trees...

Sorry about this, I promised myself today that I wasn't going to write anything about Brazil, the US and Ethanol, but I see the Huffinigton Post has a long opinion piece on it...

China Confidential tells us that Japan's investors in the US biofuels market are taking a low-key approach, but are interested in what they see as a historic shift in US energy use, environmental awareness, and agricultural resource deployment.

The information is in a post dated 18 March.

I had great fun today. After we landed in Houston we hired a car. I've not driven in the states for about six years and the free way was nice easy, wide and with a speed limit of 50mph (about 80km/h) just about manageable.

(But why have multiple highway designations, why name exits on the distance from the start of the road and why only sign the exit at the exit).

The trip into town was made more exciting by the opportunity to try a couple of pieces to camera as we drove in. We'll try to put together a short video about biofuels and traveling while we're here. We'll fit it in with the others we'll be making about the NPRA meeting in San Antonio over the week end.  Thinking about the road took my mind off the camera... still it is interesting to see the size of vehicles here and the lack of vehicular occupancy. Three of us and our baggage wedged into our Pontiac seemed quite cramped in comparison.

Tomorrow we start our NPRA filming with a visit to FuelQuest a firm that makes software designed to help ethanol producers integrate their logistics with mainstream fuel suppliers amongst other things.

Have a look at the BBC's biofuel resources for reporting that is likely to be unbiased and pretty good quality.

Check out www.bioethanol.com.ph which claims to be a weekly update of ethanol news and information in the Philippines and the rest of Asia.

Sorry that the posts have been a bit erratic of late. I had a week in the States filming for ICIS TV (check it out) from the NPRA convention in San Antonio Texas, and after three days in the office (one of which was taken up with more ICIS TV stuff) I'm going on holiday until 16 April.

When I get back though, I'm straight off to Paris to film for ICIS TV from Incosmetics. You can't say that Journalism is a job with out variety... I will be posting over the next couple of weeks but its likely to be fairly infrequently.

In the meantime check out the Temas Blog for a good dissection of An IDB-Sponsored "Blueprint for Green Energy in the Americas". See you soon.

One way of using renewable fuels for energy production does not necessarily involve converting materials into liquid fuels by fermentation or wet chemistry. Instead biomass can be heated up and the gasses which come off can be burnt themselves... This might be more energy efficient than processes like distillation. Biomass gassification is being trialled in California.

Virgin wants to use biokerosene in its aircraft, Sir Richard Branson, the company's chairman is due to reveal in Chicago today, according to the Daily Telegraph.

The Telegraph says:

The test will see on of the plane's four engines being filled with a mixture of 60 per cent conventional aviation fuel and 40 per cent from alternative sources.

Work on developing the engine will take place on the ground over the next few months ahead of the first test flight, on which no passengers will be carried.

Should the trial be successful, Virgin will run further tests in which all four engines will be filled with a 50-50 mix of conventional and biofuel.

Given the amount of aviation gasoline/kerosene call it what you like that Virgin gets through this is going to be a pretty high volume, if it takes off. It also preempt's to some extent any changes to the taxation regime on aviation fuel, which may be along in the future. Currently, in Europe, aviation fuel is exempt from value added tax, and flights are heavily subsidised, despite their environmental impact.

In a different area:

"It's significant that Boeing and GE have said that they are interested in doing this," said Steve Ridgway, Virgin's chief executive. "Everyone has said that it will be a long time before we do this, but it doesn't mean we are not going to try.

Being a Derby boy, I'm a little disappointed that Virgin is going for GE engines and not Rolls Royce's excellent power plants

It is possible that farmers in parts of Latin America are turning from drugs to another cashcrop, produce for biofuels, according to Making Biodiesel.

It would be great wouldn't it if we could cure two addictions with one biofuel crop?

Over on the Doom Index there are more calculations about the US ability to grow enough crops to replace all the oil it imports. (Hint: They still can't).

There's no joined up thinking on biofuels at the UN, according to Global Dashboard reporting on the Guardian Newspaper this morning. This needs more work than I can give it at the moment, and I'm not sure why the UN should be blamed, or what it could do... But if we're going to cut down good forest to plant oil palms or farmers start using more marginal land to grow crops then we'll be in trouble.

UK Politicians love biofuels, that is the message from a couple of posts on Green Media. Kicking off with David Milliband (not a candidate for the Labour leadership) and linking through to Mark Lancaster, who is a Conservative.

Mainichi Weekly Online has a story about ethanol-containing gasoline going on sale in Tokyo on April 27. It also contains a list of useful translations of biofuel terms in to Japanese.

I've come across some economics about using wood biomas as energy on a US forest products document. The document by the USDA's Forest Products Laboratories pretty pro wood, but that said, the economics of using wood to generate energy seem to show that the cost of producing 1m British Thermal Units (BTU) of heat was about $2.50 in Wisconsin in 2003 compared with $24.90 for electricity.

Now its Big Biofuels fault that gas prices are so high and fuel efficiency of cars running ethanol blends in the states is so poor. Well that's the conclusion of Rob in North Dakota.

I think he's wide of the mark blaming Big Biofuel, for a couple of reasons, firstly compared to big oil, big biofuel is like a flea on the back of a rhino and secondly biofuel companies are usually squeezed between the consumer, and the farm companies that dominate the US corn market.

If I was going to blame anyone, and I'm not into the blame game as a rule, I'd blame the shareholders/owners of firms like ADM and Cargill first before the biofuel people.

Fundamentally, if you're only getting 19 mpg from your motor on gasoline, maybe you should buy Japanese or something. Unless you have to haul building materials/farm animals around.

Otherwise taking the tariff off imported biofuels (you're right Bob, that should happen) will only fuel the US' addiction to unnecessarily large and unnecessarily uneconomic cars.

This may seem a long post about a chap called Rob in North Dakota. And it is.

Who is he? How influential is he?

I don't know but he is representative of a group of people in the US that the biofuel industry needs to persuade that there is a point to swapping to ethanol blends, because otherwise, when the chickens come home to roost about the unstainability of corn ethanol it will have a difficult time persuading people that cellulosic ethanol, is different and better for the environment.

Neste Oil of Finland has inaugurated a new biorefinery in Porvoo which converts animal fat and veg oil to biodiesel.
Hattip to GAVe-mail.

Veg oil was a fine choice for Bob Teixeira, a guitar teacher from Charlotte North Carolina. He converted his Mercedes, bought some soya bean oil and set off down the road only to be fined $1000 last month for not paying his motor fuel taxes, according to the Charlotte Observer.

Sounds like a familiar story...

I've been bantering with chuck from the Biofuel network in the US in a forum on the DesMoinesRegister and had a look at his site. It's got a lot of state-by-state biofuel news and information.

Tata Chemicals said in late May, that it will be making biofuels in India in the Hindu Business Line.No details on the type or process yet.

Biofuels volumes in the UK are set to rise, but will the announcement by BP, Associated British Foods and DuPont increase the price of food in the UK?

The wide spread availability of biofuels in the UK took a major step forward today as BP, Associated British Foods (ABF) and DuPont announced major investment plans, totalling around $400 million, for the construction of a world scale bioethanol plant alongside a high technology demonstration plant to advance development work on the next generation of biofuels.

The bioethanol plant, in which BP and ABF subsidiary British Sugar would each hold 45 per cent with DuPont owning the remaining 10 per cent, will be built on BP's existing chemicals site at Saltend, Hull. Due to be commissioned in late 2009, it will have an annual production capacity of some 420 million litres from wheat feedstock.

Also in the release

The BP site in Hull has also been selected as the preferred location for a planned biobutanol demonstration plant, funded and owned equally by BP and DuPont which could produce around 20,000 litres of biobutanol a year from a wide variety of feedstocks.

It would be interesting to get some figures on the yeild they expect. I'll be seeing what the UK farming community thinks about this in later posts.

Aquaflow Bionmic Corporation is now developing wild algal jet fuel. The idea to harvest algae directly from the settling ponds of standard Effluent Management Systems and other nutrient-rich water. ABC says the process helps to optimise the efficiency of

I asked Air New Zealand to confirm or deny that it was involved in investigating biofuels from algae, after the post yesterday about wild algal jet fuels . Here's' what their spokesperson said:

A report published by EurObserv’ER, a renewable industry consortium, says biofuel use in the EU went up 78 per cent from 2005 to 2006 – from 3m to 5.38m tonnes, according to a report on the Parliament.com

What are biofuels doing to UK farming? If you are interested in this question then there's a paper in Environ. Sci. Tech a learned journal which is available by subscription.

Here's the abstract though

The United States and the European Union have set targets for biofuel production to decrease reliance on fossil fuels and to reduce fossil carbon emissions. Attainment of biofuel targets depends upon policy and infrastructure development but also on production of suitable raw materials. Production of relevant crops relies on the decisions that farmers make in their economic and political environment. We need to identify any farmer-related barriers to biofuel production and to determine whether novel policy and technology are required to meet targets. These aspects of the emerging biofuel industry are relevant across international barriers and have not yet been addressed quantitatively. We describe a case study from the UK of farmers' intentions toward producing two biofuel crops for which refining capacity either exists or is under construction. Given farmers' intentions, current land use, and conversion efficiency, we estimate potential biofuel production. These estimates indicate that EU targets are not achievable using domestically grown raw materials without policy intervention, use of alternative feedstocks, and either significant improvements in processing efficiency or large-scale changes in land use.

The authors are Elizabeth H. A. Mattison* and Ken Norris

Centre for Agri-Environmental Research, School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, University of Reading, Earley Gate, P.O. Box 237, Reading, RG6 6AR, United Kingdom

Good to see that academics are reaching the same conclusions as most of the rest of us, but with greater rigour

Mozambique has outlined a big biofuel push into ethanol and biodiesl from jatropha. According to Planet Ark.

Eugenio Silva, a senior PETROMOC official, said it would create about 800 jobs and lead to a maximum annual production of 226 million litres of ethanol and bio-diesel seven years after start-up.

PETROMOC intendsto get funding for the project from international donors and investors, according to the report.

The company inaugurated biodiesel production in Matola, on 22 August.

I think that the Mozambique government should insist that donors and investors have the use aid is put to audited as part of their conditions of accepting it. That is not to say that anyone involved is or would be corrupt, but it would give the organisations that fund the donors confidence that the money would go to the right place.

USA Today had a nice piece on Georgia's aspirations as a biofuel state, last week, which I've just seen. It covers some of the incentives that there are in the US to produce biofuels and just how much drivers in South Carolina can get back from the taxman if they use E85 bioethanol blend.... Georgia's secret weapon? Forests.

Natural US prairie looks like being a more potent biofuel source than switchgrass, according to researchers in the Midwest, quoted on Treehugger.com. The researchers are based at the Tallgrass Prairie Center, the Treehugger reports says:

in addition to producing more than twice the biomass than single-species planting (not less than 238% more than switchgrass), multiple-species plantations restored biodiversity, grew on degraded land and — perhaps most importantly — could be carbon negative.

This has to be a good way to go, if the energy balances stack up. It would be great if it is possible to mow down the prairie, leaving the roots and other biomass to protect the soil. It would also get away from the need for fertilizers (the US is structurally short in fertilisers and imports come from the Caribbean and Canada) . We might even see herds of Buffalo sweeping majestically across the plains. Give me land lots of land under starry skies above.

The New York Times gets Jatropha! in a recent story the newspaper with its finger on the beating pulse of the world's most important city (after the city in which you live) has discovered the magic plant.
My advice: Look out for more Jatropha speculators. My question to them: Will it grow in the Catskills?

China has a lot of biomass, it is estimated that the total amount of biomass resource is up to 5.2x108 tons of oil equivalent (TOE), according to a paper published on research and development in biomass energy in China.
The question is can it be mobilised.

The European Commission has come out fighting in its assertion that biofuels are a good thing, in response to an earlier comment from the OECD which said that subsidies for biofuels are distorting markets and fueling food price inflation.
The EU's response was reported by Philippa Jones in ICIS News.
(Disclosure: I work for ICIS: About ICIS)

Phillipa says in her report:

In a robust defence of biofuels, EC agriculture spokesman Michael Mann said: “It is absolutely the case that fuel from agricultural raw materials produces less carbon dioxide (CO2) than fossil fuels.”

The EC agreed earlier this year that 10% of the EU’s transport fuel will be provided by biofuels by 2020 and will publish a report later this year outlining how it plans to reach this target.

I don't think that the EC could have said much else given the strong position that the farming lobby holds in terms of budgets and lobbying power. It would be interesting to see if the EC could ever say that anything farmers do within the European Union was ever bad.

Hydrothermal cabonization is an approach to convert almost any kind of biomas into fuel. Biopact has written about hydrothermal carbonization and there's quite a bit about it on the web. Here are some carbonization links that might be useful. Please let me know if you come across any more I'll add them to the bottom of the list... and if you'd like to rank them for me that would be interesting. As would details of the catalyst and an energy balance. Many thanks to David Benson for giving me the idea.

Biopact
MPG:Coal from Biomass
A Stroke of Genius? A New Recipe for Coal
Back in the black: hydrothermal carbonization of plant material as an efficient chemical process to treat the CO2 problem?
Biomass Refinery for Biomass Town

I've joined some groups on facebook. I thought it would be interesting to see what the quarter fo the world's population that seems to live breathe, eat and sleep Facebook are thinking about bioufels, so I've joined the Pacific Biofuel Group; Biofuel--The dumbest alternative source for energy; Boycotting Gas Companies is Retarded - Buy a Fuel-Efficient Car Instead; BioFuel UK; UConn Biofuel Consortium. If there's anything half as interesting as I find on the Australian Biofuels forum and the Biodisel and SVO forum in the US (I'll be back on soon guys) It will have been worth the effort.

I've also found an excellent extension that lets me plug Twitter into my Firefox browser. That means you can see what I'm going to do before its posted by following my twitters, where I twitter as biofuelsimon.

I've just joined the Frybrid forums. I'll give it a go and see what it's like for a couple of months. I was put on to the site by a story about a biofuel fire in San Marcos, California which badly injured one of the biofuels community there.
This looks to have been a very rare event, as a search on google news for fires in whihc biofuels are impli8cated has been very low this year. .

What could derail biofuels. I've come across a panel discussion on youTube, its not clear who these chaps are... but I'm assuming that they've just given a presentations at a conference about biofuels of some kind.
It is interesting that the one thing that two agree on is the cost of capital and the volatility in the oil price which have the opportunity to make biofuels less attractive.
We have known about oil price volatility but the cost of capital argument could become much more pressing in the coming weeks and months. Capital is getting harder to get hold of, witness the run on Northern Rock. Northern Rock is a UK bank which used short term money to fund long term home loans, and had to ask the Bank of England for money to ensure that it can continue trading.
I guess this was shot before the sub-prime mortgage crisis. I will lay odds of a dollar to a pinch of snuff that funding for all capital projects that is not in place now will be harder going forward. What this means to the economics of debt-funded biofuels plants is yet to be seen, but it might not be pretty.
The last speaker's comments about disengaging with 'people who don't like us' is interesting, but I think misses the point about a global economy and winning hearts and minds. If you trade with people then you share the dependency and to some extent trust: you depend on them for products they depend on you for revenue. If you cut this link then it doesn't help understanding on either side of the equation, local self help though in the mid west is interesting thought...

share and enjoy

The United States will not meet the dual challenges of reducing global warming and its dependence on foreign suppliers of energy until it manages to reduce energy consumption. That should be its main goal.

That was part of an op-ed piece about the US Biofuels market in the New York Times Today. Lots of good stuff in it, worth a look.

The nations of Asia and the Pacific are being urged to study the issue of biofuels with greater care before deciding on how they will use their agricultural products to generate energy.

Scientists say there is an urgent need to support the current rush toward major decisions on biofuel policies in Asia and the Pacific with solid research and unbiased information about their potential benefits, impact, and risks, according to the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) after a conference which ended on 29 August.

Pretty general if sensible stuff. Hattip to Green Car Congress.

Tom Philpott has written a good Report over on Grist, connecting the recent study on biofuels published by the UK's Royal Society of Chemistry with a new one from the University of Minnesota. The killer quote from the University of Minnesota is,

[I]f one replaced a total of 5 percent of gasoline energy with ethanol energy, greenhouse gas emissions from driving cars would be a bit more than a half percent lower (5 percent times 12 percent)

Philpott adds

Whoa. In 2006, U.S. ethanol producers burned through 18 percent of the corn harvest to offset 3 percent of gasoline use. What the Minnesota study is telling us is that we could increase corn ethanol production by two-thirds (to achieve a 5 percent offset) -- burning through 40 percent of the corn crop -- and still only reduce greenhouse gas emissions by just a bit more than a half percent.

There is no point using expensive grain to make a gasoline extender if its just going to poured into inefficient autos and burnt. Robert Rapier said at the end of last year fuel ethanol is boondoggle.
That doesn't apply to all biofuels, but when you look at the potential gains in green house gas reduction, compared to the savings that could be made by making cars a little more efficient, you have to wonder where people's priorities are.

ICIS Chemical Bsiness, my old publication, has a feature on biofuels this week and is worth checking out.

SRIC’s Carbon Footprint of Biofuels & Petrofuels report suggests that...

land use is so critical [to the environmental impact of biofuels] that – at least from a global warming viewpoint – northern European farmers should plant trees and burn petrodiesel rather than plant rapeseed for biodiesel. Greenhouse gas emissions are reduced more by converting a Malaysian rain forest into a palm oil plantation for biodiesel than by filling tanks with petrodiesel. Yet, it is better to fuel with gasoline and to preserve the Brazilian rain forest than to knock it down to grow sugar cane for bioethanol

The report has a couple of good points about the capacity of different vegetation types to store carbon, and could be silent on what should be happening to vulnerable species, but its hard to tell most of the report is hidden behind a subscription wall...

The sweet smell of self sufficiency and profit wafted over the office after I read about a Thai pig farmer who is harnessing methane from his drove/farrow/litter/doylt/sounder or herd of pigs to make electricity, also in Planet Ark today.
I like collective nouns almost as much as I like gazing out of the window wollgathering. My favourites are an exultation of Larks, a murder of Crows and a Parliament of Rooks. Possibly in the biofuel industry a sheaf of ethanol producers; a syphon of straight veg oil users; a boiling or clarification of biodieselers... any more?

You can make your own biofuels at around 12pence ($0.24/Euro0.16)/litre in the UK if you use waste oil, according to EcoTec resources. That's a saving of around 88p/litre on a gallon of diesel. At those prices you could afford to pay the excise duty! And you should.
Hat tip to SenterNovem.

Business Week says that big oil has a downer on biofuels, and is actively trying to stop the spread of E85.

Big oil is apparently applying a range of efforts

from funding studies that bash the spread of ethanol for driving up the price of corn, and therefore some food, to not supporting E85 pumps at gas stations. The tactics infuriate a growing chorus of critics, from the usual suspects—pro-ethanol consumer groups—to the unexpected: the oil industry's oft-time ally, the auto industry.

That's a lot of people to be irritating.

There's more than palm oil in palm oil, according to a story in ICIS Chemical Business this week, which features Carotech, a company in Indonesia which has found ways of extracting phytonutrients and producing methyl ester from the palm oil in a continuous process. Carotech won an award.
Disclosure: I work for ICIS: About ICIS.

Richard Branson set early 2008 as a time for Virgin Atlantic, his airline to trial biofuel in a Boeing 747 flight at a meeting of Mortgage Bankers (its got to be more interesting talking about biofuels than mortages, Dickie*, but think of your audience).Reuters quotes him as saying:

In the meantime, Virgin will be conducting a test jet flight on renewable fuels. "Early next year we will fly one of our 747s without passengers with one of the fuels that we have developed," Branson told the annual conference.

*Dick is the UK contaction of Richard, so is Dickie.

There are many with romantic notions about the role of the biofuels industry. One thing is certain, according to a BP speaker at the ethanolintel conference in Singapore, there's no way we can meet demand in the future by using old chip fat, according to a report on ICIS news.

Citing a joint BP and McKinsey study, Sung-Woo Hur, vice president of business development at BP Biofuels Singapore, estimated that by 2030, 85bn-195bn gallons/year of biofuel will be produced, replacing between 10% and 24% of gasoline demand.

Assuming that biofuel is produced at 196bn gallons/year, this would require a "capital intensive" cumulative investment of $700bn from now till 2030 and a build rate of one times 100m gallon plants every 4-5 years, he said.

The biofuel industry will need to become very much more mature and integrated if it is going to manage to do this

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...

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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...

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...

D1 Oils is saying that biodiesel from Jatropha is different from biodiesel derived from other plant sources at the WTO meeting in Bali,and that not all biodiesel should be tarred with the same brush by NGOs, according to Biofuel Review.

There's a lot to be said for the D1 Oils business approach which seems to be based around free informed consent with growers, which may be at odds with other more unscrupulous producers. And if the D1 approach, which is to be integrated from the soil to the tank pays off perhaps it will be a model so compelling that other firms will follow it. One dis advantage of the D1 approach is that the firm is tied to Jatopha for a large part of its production. One big big advantage though is that because it is integrated it can capture value at a number of points along the chain from planting and harvesting Jatropha to refining and potentially blending.

Karl Watkin Founder and Non-Executive Director of D1 Oils said:

“Environmental and development NGOs are right to be critical of soya and palm that are produced unsustainably in areas such as Brazil and Indonesia", said Watkin. "There’s no point in an energy crop that worsens the problem by destroying forest or grassland. Because these attacks don’t differentiate the sustainable biofuel crops like jatropha from the less sustainable like soya and palm, the NGO campaigns are undermining the industry as a whole. We are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater."

Shell has teamed up with HR Biopetroleum of Hawaii to try and produce biodiesel from algae, according to Pacific Business News

Products like biofuel from algae would fit with Shell's stated biofuel aims.

Dynamotive is building a wood chip to biofuel plant in Willow Springs, Missouri. The plan will cost around $24m and will use fast pyrolysis to convert wood waste into bioOil. It will be capable of converting 200 tons per day of wood by-products and residues from nearby sawmills into 34,000 gallons per day of BioOil, according to GizMag

The power wasted in left-over food is outlined in this story on Far East Gizmos, a number of Tokyo's schools will be using waste food to generate power... Perhaps we could do the same with waste from supermarkets over the Chirstmas period?

If you don't know about the EU's Biofuel Cities group, you probably should. The fifth and latest email newsletter is out now.

One of the less tasteful ways of producing biodiesel is to use the fat removed during liposuction as the starting point. I've wondered about how many miles you could get out of a couple of kilos of fat.The answer has come from Australia. It appears that 10 litres of human fat will produce produced seven litres of biofuel, according to a post about the fastest eco boat in the world, which is aiming to circumnavigate the world in March next year, according to the Daily Mail On-line. To put things in perspective, the boat can carry 3000 litres...
Any volutneers?

I've just been given details of a site that looks like it tries to round up all the world's new biofuels plants by country its WorldBioplants.com.

North Carolina State Unviersity is developing a self digesting sweet potato, according to
Biopact. I guess timing the harvest right is going to be critical if that technology ever takes off.

Meet Danny the digester

Primafuel will build a 60m gallon biodiesel plant in West Sacramento with a $164,000 grant from the California Air Resources Board, so its not all doom and gloom.

Hattip to Sacremento Executive.

Will 2008 be the year that society turns against biofuels? Big questions today, but with good reason. Food costs alone will continue to rise because of the use of food crops to make biofuels. I know that the amounts are small in some cases but in closely balanced markets with little excess production it takes only a tiny imbalance to send prices rising dramatically.
The news that the US Department of Agriculture USDA expects the price of corn in the US to rise by 10% by the end of 2008. That will take the price of a bushel up to around $4.30 at the top end of projections. The proportion of the corn crop to be used in conventional ethanol production will be static at around 25%. This is probably due to the old supply/demand equations and the difficulty in securing cheap credit to build ethanol plants.
These factors should make the industry think hard about other sources of biofuels and to push for greater fuel efficiceny.

General Motors is getting into biofuels by backing Coskata to produce a combined pyrolysis and fermentation process (with gm bacteria that convert carbon monoxide and hydrogen to ethanol) from a wide range of waste materials.

Coskata says its process:

has the potential to yield over 100 gallons of ethanol per ton of dry carbonaceous input material, reducing both operational and capital costs. Coskata's exclusively licensed separation technology dramatically improves the separations and recovery component of ethanol production, reducing the required energy by as much as 50%.

Coskata estimates that it can produce the fuel at less than $1/gal.

Now this is interesting stuff, given the amount of waste that the world produces. In the UK we produce 11m tonne potentially suitable waste for this type of process, this could translate to around 1100 m (US gal) ethanol, or about 20% of the US production from corn in 2006.

Virgin Atlantic has been flying from London Heathrow to Schipol Airport, the Netherlands, in a series of trial flights, according to 24 oranges, a Dutch blog in English. Gina Cobb is neither insightful or offering a very useful perspective on her blog about the proposal to use 20% biofuel blend. But then I guess she's playing it for laughs.

Howver, Flight Global has the Virgin Atlantic test flights happening next month. I'd rather believe that source.

Indonesia plans to blend 10% biofuels in its fuel by 2010, according to Cassava vs Yams. Which makes me wonder where that leaves the econonmics of western biofuel producers predicated on palm oil imports. Palm oil is up 12% since the start of the year, according to the blog.

Solazyme says it is producing "thousands of gallons" of biofuels from algae . Solazyme says it has signed a biodiesel feedstock development and testing agreement with Chevron Technology Ventures.

Another butanol process is being developed, this time by the Washington University St Louis, this partly ferments cellulose and lignin into butyrate, which is then further fermnted, according to The Energy Blog.

Reserchers at the North Carolina State University (you may remember them from an earlier post about self digesting sweet potatoes) have exclusively licensed their Centia technology to Diversified Energy Corp. Which says the process can produce jet fuel and a range of other biofuels.

Will the process work with glycerine?

hattip to Greenbang
hattip to Renewable Energy

Burning biomass with coal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions at power plants could yeild enviornmental benefits. It at least has the benefit of using minimal energy to process the biomass before burning.
According to Earth2Tech blog

A Polish coal plant, which will cofire biomass (burn biomass at the same time as coal) to help reduce its emissions by 25% compared with the country’s current coal plants, is due to come online in 2009. A major Polish power group, Poludniowy Koncern Energetyczny, estimates its total cost at €500 million ($735 million

This is exactly the dilemma of most ethanol-based biofuels, it makes some difference but probably not much overall. (like jumping from the 20th instead of the 36th floor of a building you're less likely to die, but not much). Much better to work hard at reducing demand through greatly increased efficiency of electrical equipment.

Indonesia might use up to 1.5m kilolitres of biofuel/year domestically if it takes on board the recommendations of the National Biofuel Developement Committee, according to the Jakarta post.
Hattip to Green Car Congress

Non-impact man has two thoughts about biofuels, both of which are pretty fair. He lives in New York,so I suggested that he might like to start investigating pryrolising waste... that should keep him quiet for a bit.

Its a really bad day for biofuels, according to the Reality Based Community blog.it looks like they've put two and two together. I'm not sure if they've come up with either four or twenty two...

Many things have happened since I went on holiday... the most momentous is Richard Branson fuelling an aero engine plane with a combination of coconut and Babassu nut fuel and using it on a747 with three conventionally fueled engines to fly from London to Amsterdam. Useful because it shows that you can make aviation fuel out of coconut and a nut which grows in the rain forest.
Bad because, as far as I can see babassu oil is an edible oil...

Green Car Congress tells us that 19 state governors have signed up to an agreement to speed the adoption of biofuels in their sates. Which sounds fine as long as they have got plans to manage the increased water demand that this might produce... I wonder.

D1 Oils' chairman (Ron) Lord Oxburgh has responded to the Guardian Newspaper's columnist George Monbiot's piece on 12 February about biofuels today , you can see the full text of the exchange on in the comments on this post D1 oils says Jatropha is different in Bali.

Monbiot is a journalist who makes part of his living out of writing things that people will want to read (like me). Oxburgh is a business leader trying to develop a profitable business. One has to write for his readership, the other has

Nice piece by Amy Ziff over on the Huffington Post about Virgin's biofuel powered flight recently. I can't help wondering if we'd be better off using waste materials for fuel, than edible nuts, even if their market is in the Amazon Basin.

Its worth looking at this on Taza Kino - Citzen News for a feel of how some people in parts of the world (where English is not the first language) feel about biofuels.

Check out the latest Biofuel Cities e-newsletter. Interesting stuff about the feasibility of a global biofuel standard and some useful news to start with.

The US army uses its stomach (and brains) to make biofuels in Iraq. The US Army will be using kitchen and other waste to produce biofuel. The drive has come from the need to cut down on diesel convoys that are targets, but for whatever reason its beeing done, its good to see the army using a little biofuels imagination.
If the idea of portable biopower plants takes off in Iraq, then there is an outside chance that they might make their way into the mainstream.

There is more optimism today on the opportunities for non-food biofuel crops with a number of bloggers outlining the possibilities of non-food crops. Today we have Bobmorris' Politicis in the zeros' blog promising us non-food fuels in the next 15 years. To me though that's quite a long gap, we'll need to do something in the mean time. Perhaps we could use the organic parts of waste to produce biofuels.

Oklahoma to plant 1000 acres with switchgrass to demonstrate whether it is suitable as a cellulosic biofuel. According to PR newswire, the site will be 35 miles from Abengoa's biorefinery in Hugoton, Kansas.

Seeral thoughts strike me. Why not just let 1000 acres revert to prairee and use that instead of going to all the trouble of planting switchgrass. No metion of irrigation. its not clear if the Abengoa plant will use any of the grass, theres an implication that it might, but no concrete statement from the firm and finally, how's the switchgrass going to get the 35 miles to the refinery if it goes to that one?

My verdict: for what its worth. Useful as a demonstrator but probably not as sustainable as it could be.

Good to see big names in energy and the automotive sector investing in cellulosic biofuels in Mascoma's latest round of financing, according to Domestic Fuel.

There's a long reasoned piece of work by Biodiversist in Gristmill, which is worth looking at. The pay off for me is in the last line of the story... now don't just scroll down, read some on the way.

You might remember that I wrote a couple of days ago that there is no free grease anymore... well its got worse. Much worse. Words like "warzone", are being used, the battleground is partly in San Francisco, where the city uses waste grease to make biodiesel for its busses, according to an article in SF Gate.com.

This scenario fits quite well with point two of my four or five predictions for 2008. 

We would again caution, therefore, against hasty judgements driven by highly questionable, agenda-driven calculations, some of which have been featured prominently in the popular press. Many analysts both within and outside of government are currently working to model these questions, and the one certainty is that our data will improve substantially in the months ahead.

Appendix 1 Answers this question from Senator Bingaman: How has increased US. ethanol and biodiesel consumption affected domestic agriculture, and domestic food prices?

During the first 4 months of 2008, the all food CPI increased by 4.8 percent, with increased ethanol and biodiesel consumption accounting for about 4-5 percent of the increase in retail food prices.

Appendix 2 Answers this question from Seantor Bingaman: Has increased ethanol and biodiesel consumption in the United States contributed to increased global prices for agricultural goods? And if so, to what extent?

The price of corn increased by 61.7 percent from April 2007 to April 2008. Combining the change in corn prices with the corn weight of 8.1 percent, the change in corn prices contributed
5.0 percentage points to the estimated 45 percent increase in the global food commodity price index. Soybeans, soybean oil, and soybean meal exhibited larger price increases and play a much larger role in the global food commodity price index, a combined weight of over 15 percent. The combined effects of the increase in soybean, soybean meal, and soybean oil prices contributed 11.7 percentage points to the estimated 45 percent increase in the IMF global food commodity price index from April 2007 to April 2008.

And

The estimated impacts on global food prices are consistent with the estimates in response to Question 1. We estimate that the percentage increase in price ofcom from April 2007 to April 2008 would have been 23 percent lower in the absence of any growth in biofuel production in the United States. Based on this analysis, we estimate that the price of com would have increased by 47.5 percent assuming no growth in biofuel production in the United States, down from the actual increase of 61.7 percent, from April 2007 to April 2008.

The growth in biofuel production in the United States also has pushed up soybean, soybean meal, and soybean oil prices. We estimate the percentage increase in the prices of soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil from April 2007 to April 2008 would have been about 25 to 30 percent lower in the absence of any growth in biofuel production in the United States. Assuming no growth in biofuel production, the price of soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil in the global food commodity price index would have increased by 54.2, 51.2, and 61.5 percent, respectively, down from actual increases of78.6, 69.3, and 80.9 percent, respectively, from April 2007 to April 2008.

The effects ofbiofuel production in the United States on global price for agricultural goods is estimated by combining the individual commodity price impacts with their relative weights in the IMF global food commodity price index. Assuming no growth in biofuel production in the United States, the IMF global food commodity price index would have increased by 40.6 percent compared to the actual increase of 45 percent, from April 2007 to April 2008. Lower com prices contributed 1.2 percentage points, lower soybean, soybean meal, and soybean oil prices contributed 3.2 percentage points to the total reduction in the global food commodity price index.

However, combining soybeans, soybean meal, and soybean oil in the same index overstates the impact ofbiofuels on global prices. Soybeans are processed into soybean meal and oil and by including the effects ofbiofuels on the prices of all three commodities we magnify the impacts of biofuels on the global price index. If we exclude the impact of biofuels on soybean meal and oil prices, the IMF global food commodity price index would have increased by 42 percent assuming no growth in biofuels production compared to the actual increase of 45 percent, from April 2007 to April 2008.

Do you think that this is a fair assessment? I guess that as both of the secretaries of state are from the Bush Administration, they've got a political interest in playing the numbers down. The IMF numbers should give an element of impartiality though. Once again the prices of crops matters much less in countries where people eat a high proportion of processed food, but much more in countries where people eat unprocessed food.

I'm struck that

Iberol had intended to produce biofuels from sunflower, but the chairperson of the Nutasa group, of which Iberol is part, Joao Rodrigues, told the Portuguese news agency LUSA that it had run into "many difficulties", notably the theft of the crop at harvest time, and the shortage of skilled labour.

Rodrigues blamed this on "social problems", notably food shortages among the population. "How can I make vegetable oil for fuel when the people living in front of the plantation don't have oil to make food?", he asked. "It didn't go well, and it's not worth wasting any more effort".

Running Europe's fleet of heavy, gas-guzzling cars on biofuels rather than petrol is no cure. If Europe truly wants to end its addiction to oil, it should start by making cars twice as fuel-efficient as they are today.

hear, hear!

"The world needs to start again and plan properly. If biofuels are to play a part in a renewable energy strategy we must ensure that they benefit the environment and that poor farmers and consumers are not harmed by their use."

In general, GHG savings from advanced technologies producing ethanol are about
90% compared to petrol whilst syndiesel can generate savings in excess of 100%
through co-generation of renewable energy (excluding emissions from land-use
change).

These new biofuels are unlikely to see significant market penetration until 2018.

A specific obligation on transport fuel suppliers to supply fuels produced from
wastes, residues and feedstock grown on marginal land will encourage investment
in these technologies and provide a mechanism to encourage production on
marginal land.

The use of agricultural or forest residues as biofuel feedstock will also have an
opportunity cost since, in some instances, the GHG savings for heat and power
may be better than for biofuels. A similar issue was recently identified in the use
of tallow for biodiesel in an AEAT report43 for the Department for Transport. This
highlighted that the use of a limited feedstock, in this case tallow, for biodiesel
production can lead, indirectly, to higher emissions in another sector (in this case,
the oleochemical and meat rendering industries).

The EU has suggested that by 2020 advanced fuels could make a contribution
of up to 30% towards the proposed 10% target. Given the current stage of
development of technologies this appears optimistic.

Based upon current evidence a market share of 1-2% by energy of transport fuels by 2020 seems feasible. A higher target market penetration may be possible but will require
technology to develop, and new feedstock supplies to be identified, more rapidly
than currently envisaged. Further detailed work is needed before firm targets
should be set.

There should be a specific obligation on transport fuel suppliers to supply
biofuels achieving a high level of GHG saving (possibly greater than 75%) from:
- Appropriate wastes and residues;
- Feedstock grown on marginal land; and
- Other technologies and feedstocks that avoid indirect land change (for
example algae).

The EU needs to determine how increasing targets for heat, power and
renewable transport fuels compete for wastes and residues and how this
competition should be managed.