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Joule Unlimited ready to start construction on biofuels demonstration plant in Hobbs, New Mexico, that will convert sunlight, CO2 waste into up to 75 million gallons of biodiesel, 125 million gallons of ethanol per year Nov 11, 2011 – as Headlines are rewritten for editorial clarity. The original story and headline begin below. Original Headline: Construction to begin on NM biofuels plant HOBBS, New Mexico, November 11, 2011 (as) – A Massachusetts company is ready to start construction on a biofuels demonstration plant in New Mexico. Joule Unlimited Inc. plans to convert sunlight and carbon dioxide waste into biofuel at...

Greening the European Union has suffered a setback. The European Biodiesel Board is reporting that the European Union biodiesel industry production forecasts are noting a 2011 decrease in output, the first since data has been gathered, down from 2010 figures of 9.57 million tons. The European Biodiesel Board reported that biodiesel generation in Europe in 2010 grew by 5.5 percent over 2009 production figures, while in 2009 the European Union’s biodiesel industry grew by 17 percent. Recently the European Union’s best year for biodiesel output was 2008, when the growth rate surged 35 percent over 2007 levels. Germany and France...

Researchers with the DOE's Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have identified a potential new advanced biofuel that could replace today's standard fuel for diesel engines but would be clean, green, renewable and produced in the United States. Using the tools of synthetic biology, a JBEI research team engineered strains of two microbes, a bacteria and a yeast, to produce a precursor to bisabolane, a member of the terpene class of chemical compounds that are found in plants and used in fragrances and flavorings. Preliminary tests by the team showed that bisabolane's properties make it a promising biosynthetic alternative to Number 2...

Robert Rapier invests a lot of effort in an attempt to discover what is going on with USDA reports of improving ethanol EROEI. The USDA is obviously being hammered by congress to make their giveaways to corn growers look less stupid. My bottom line is this: 1. USDA is obviously under pressure to fiddle their accounting to make subsidized corn ethanol look as good as possible.2. Some of the tricks are just laughable, like subtracting byproducts from the inputs to form a new “input” definition that obviously inflates the “return” = output/”input”. Wouldn’t it be nice if our investment returns...

Middletown — They come in tanker trucks, mostly at night, to steal the liquid still smelling of fried chicken, tacos and egg rolls. Used cooking oil is as good as gold these days, a consequence of rising crude oil prices and demand for biodiesel. That's put companies that collect the used material from restaurants on guard, industry officials said. "Sometimes, they're very brazen; they'll come in the early morning or the afternoon and stick a hose in the container and siphon it out," said Jack LaBerta, account manager for Darling International, a national renderer with a plant in Newark, N.J....

A Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University research team has developed a process that removes a key obstacle to producing low-cost, renewable biofuels from bacteria. The team has reprogrammed photosynthetic microbes to secrete high-energy fats, making byproduct recovery and conversion to biofuels easier and potentially more commercially viable. "The real costs involved in any biofuel production are harvesting the goodies and turning them into fuel," said Roy Curtiss, of the Institute's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology and professor in the School of Life Sciences. "This whole system that we have developed is a means to a green recovery of...

Are we going a bit far with using Lipo-Diesel? In a Traffic Jam? A top Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon says he used fat he removed from patients in liposuction operations to power his 'green' 4x4 car. U.S. authorities have launched an inquiry into claims made by Dr Alan Bittner that the fat he had sucked out of patients in liposuction operations was turned into biodiesel. Bittner wrote on his website: 'The vast majority of my patients request that I use their fat for fuel -- and I have more fat than I can use. 'Not only do they get to...

Waste is a terrible thing to waste. That's the mantra guiding an Ohio State University researcher and a bioenergy entrepreneur in the development of a brand-new, renewable source of polyurethane foam that's expected to create up to 30 jobs in Mansfield, in the next two years. The product (known as a bio-polyol) is made from crude glycerin, a byproduct of biodiesel production that has so little commercial value it's practically considered waste. Mixed with other biomass -- through a patent-pending process developed by Yebo Li, a biosystems engineer with the university's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster --...

Joule Unlimited has invented a genetically-engineered organism that it says simply secretes diesel fuel or ethanol wherever it finds sunlight, water and carbon dioxide. The Cambridge, Mass.-based company says it can manipulate the organism to produce the renewable fuels on demand at unprecedented rates, and can do it in facilities large and small at costs comparable to the cheapest fossil fuels. Joule's process directly yields hydrocarbons that are fungible with existing diesel infrastructure, unlike the biodiesel product that is produced from algal oil. Highlights include: Based on empirical measurements, Joule can directly produce 15,000 gallons of diesel per acre annually,...

Algae biodiesel has looked so promising (as in 100 times more fuel than corn or soy) that the U.S. Department of Energy gave $9 million to Cellana, a joint research venture between Shell Oil and HR Biopetroleum, specifically to look into the alternative energy source's prospects. It seems, however, that those prospects were no longer attractive to Shell, which has announced it will no longer pursue algae biodiesel, because it feels it doesn't have sufficient commercial viability. Partner HR Biopetroleum has stated it cannot continue the project on its own as Shell pursues other biofuel initiatives with other companies.

Renewable fuels developer Joule Unlimited Inc. said John Podesta, a veteran of two White House administrations, has joined its board of directors. Podesta was previously White House chief of staff under President Clinton, and more recently served as co-chair of President Obama’s transition. He is currently president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, a think tank he founded in 2003. “I have seen and heard many proposals by renewable energy companies, and can unequivocally say that Joule has a technology and a system unlike any other, with industrial viability and a clear path to market within the next...

By a vote of 277 to 148, the U.S. House of Representatives extended tax cuts, continued unemployment benefits and brought the year-long struggle of the biodiesel tax credit to a positive end. The biodiesel tax credit is back. On Friday, Dec. 17, President Barack Obama held a press conference to officially sign H.R. 4853, the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010, into law, and with his signature, the biodiesel and renewable diesel tax credit marred in the political process for all of 2010 will be retroactively reinstated through 2011. As expected, the National Biodiesel Board...

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Rentech, Inc. (NYSE AMEX: RTK) today announced that its synthetic RenDiesel® will fuel two Audi A3 TDIs during a four day, 1,000 mile journey beginning October 18th. The Audi A3 TDI® is Green Car Journal’s 2010 Green Car of the Year®. The clean diesel journey by Green Car Journal editors and invited VIPs is part of the magazine’s Green Car of the Year Tour™, which this year focuses on the important role advanced clean diesel vehicles play in efficiency and CO2 reduction as well as the importance of sustainable non-petroleum fuels in America’s future. [...] The event...

The biodiesel tax credit will have to wait once again. Congress passed the small business bill shortly after returning from recess, but it did not include the extension as it previously had. Before the August recess, an earlier version of the bill contained the biodiesel tax extension proposed by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and was also approved by both the Democrats and the Republicans, but in a move to keep the bill alive, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., stripped all amendments attached to the bill. Upon return from recess, Reid issued a procedure known as an “amendment tree,” which prevents an...

NORTH BERGEN, N.J. (WPIX) — New Jersey police busted two men Monday as they were attempting to siphon 700 gallons of used cooking oil from two storage tanks behind a local fast food restaurant in broad daylight. The suspects, Youngil Kim, 48, and Byung Ho Choi, 55, both of Queens were caught in the act behind a Five Guys Burgers and Fries restaurant located at 2100 88th Street just before 9 a.m., police said. Detective Lt. Frank Cannella said the men drove up to the fast food restaurant in a canary yellow van, equipped with a hose that was attached...

Instead of a wholesale switch to electric cars, with all their inherent range and charging problems, a seemingly easier way to wean ourselves off gasoline is to find alternate fuel that could be used in slightly modified internal-combustion engines. Unfortunately, there are some very real reasons—never mind what conspiracy theorists might tell you about oil companies and corrupt government officials—why most alternative fuels are not ready for prime time yet. Here’s a look at the current status and near-term future outlook of the major alternatives to gasoline. Modern turbo-diesels get about 30 percent better fuel economy than their gasoline counterparts,...

National Biodiesel Board Chief Says Action Needed Now to Save Industry LAS VEGAS, NV: Joe Jobe, CEO of the National Biodiesel Board (NBB), today renewed his call for Congress to put Americans back to work immediately by retroactively reinstating the expired biodiesel tax incentive. The industry is barely operating and at risk of total collapse without it, he warned. “Congress and the Administration have said they are dedicated to a ‘jobs’ agenda – their first step should be to reinstate the biodiesel tax incentive,” Jobe told energy leaders at the Alternative Fuels and Vehicles Institute national conference in Las Vegas....

ABOARD THE HEARTLAND FLYER — Amtrak and transportation officials from Oklahoma and Texas have started a yearlong test to see whether beef-based biodiesel can efficiently run The Heartland Flyer passenger train between Oklahoma City and Fort Worth. Texas cattle are supplying 20 percent of the fuel for the 3,200-horsepower engine, the rest is regular No. 2 diesel.

Some interesting tidbits are coming out of the American Chemical Society conference in San Francisco this week. First we heard about a product made from renewable materials that could substitute a large portion of the crude oil currently used to make tires. And now comes word from a scientist at the University of Orleans in France that he has constructed a compact, relatively inexpensive, low tech plasma gasifier that can take all sorts of waste materials and turn them into a variety of different drop-in fuels, including diesel, gasoline and kerosene. The plasma gasifier is based on what is known...

We know how to convert biomass to biodiesel, but the economics of doing so makes many prevailing methods of doing so expensive and unfeasible, keeping an alternative-fueled future just out of reach. But a collaboration between the DOE and private firm LS9 has found a way to coax a strain of E. coli bacteria to produce biodiesel from biomass without further chemical processes, a breakthrough that could pave the way for cheaper, more abundant biofuels. The sugars dwelling in cellulosic biomass are the target of many alternative fuel schemes, but they can be difficult to get to and even more...