Free Republic

THERE is an indisputable elegance to the idea of transforming garbage into fuel, of turning icky, smelly detritus into something valuable. But big drawbacks have prevented the wholesale adoption of trash-to-gas technology in the United States: incineration is polluting, and the capital costs of new plants are enormous. Gasification systems can expend a tremendous amount of energy to produce a tiny amount of electricity. Up to this point, it hasn’t seemed worth the trouble. Mike Hart thinks that he has solved those problems. In a former Air Force hangar outside Sacramento, his company, Sierra Energy, has spent the last several...

The Environmental Protection Agency will require oil refiners to blend 16.55 billion gallons of renewable fuels into the nation’s gasoline supply this year as part of its efforts to spur new fuel technology and decrease fossil fuel dependence. Nearly eight months past the legal due date, the EPA announced its yearly blending targets under the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) on Tuesday. Renewable fuel associations applauded the announcement, but the oil and gas industry criticized the agency for continuing to push a “broken” system. The EPA’s blending requirements include 6 million gallons of the cellulosic biofuel, which is made from woodchips....

Facility Offers Promise of Producing Fuel Out of Everything From Grass to Garbage A Florida plant started commercial-scale production of advanced ethanol, its owners said Wednesday, marking the first time a U.S. facility has made large quantities of the fuel from the inedible parts of plants. The news was a milestone for the renewable fuels industry, which has been dogged by criticism that its current method of making fuel from corn or sugar diverts those crops from the food chain and raises food prices. If INEOS Bio can sustain production at the Florida plant, it would offer the promise of...

This is Christian Derntl in the bio-lab.Lignocellulosic waste such as sawdust or straw can be used to produce biofuel – but only if the long cellulose and xylan chains can be successfully broken down into smaller sugar molecules. To do this, fungi are used which, by means of a specific chemical signal, can be made to produce the necessary enzymes. Because this procedure is, however, very expensive, Vienna University of Technology has been investigating the molecular switch that regulates enzyme production in the fungus. As a result, it is now possible to manufacture genetically modified fungi that produce the necessary...

To the federal government, ethanol only counts as a conventional biofuel if it is produced from switchgrass, corn starch or some other easily replenished materials. But Texas Rep. Pete Olson wants to change that. On Tuesday, the Houston-area Republican is introducing legislation that would allow ethanol produced from natural gas to compete with corn-based ethanol under the federal renewable fuels standard, an eight-year-old mandate that forces refiners to blend an increasing amount of alternatives into petroleum-based fuels. Technically, the measure would create a new “domestic alternative fuel” category under the RFS, under which the natural-gas based product would qualify. Olson...

Companies have put biofuels on the back burner to aim for higher margin chemicals, as Emma Davies finds out Tom Welton gives the wooden desk in his office a sharp rap with his knuckles. ‘That’s the sound of lignin,’ he says, grinning. ‘Have you seen its structure? It’s beautiful, full of aromatics, lovely compounds that make you think: I could make something useful from this.’Welton, who is head of chemistry at Imperial College London, UK, views lignin – the ‘really hard stuff’ that protects plants from biological attack – as a valuable source of renewable speciality chemicals. His group has...

President Obama today will urge Congress to establish a research fund for transportation and fuel alternatives, called an Energy Security Trust, according to White House officials. The president will tour and give remarks at Argonne National Laboratory just outside of Chicago, a Department of Energy facility for scientific research that specializes in advanced battery production. He will propose setting aside $2 billion over the next 10 years for an Energy Security Trust, which aims to support research and development for electric vehicles, domestic biofuels, fuel cells and U.S.-produced natural gas.

Scientists have developed a way to grow iron-oxidizing bacteria using electricity instead of iron, an advance that will allow them to better study the organisms and could one day be used to turn electricity into fuel. The study will be published on January 29 in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology. The method, called electrochemical cultivation, supplies these bacteria with a steady supply of electrons that the bacteria use to respire, or "breathe". It opens the possibility that one day electricity generated from renewable sources like wind or solar could be funneled to iron oxidizing...

The ethanol mandate continues to do more harm than good — inflicting environmental damage, raising food prices, and distorting energy markets. Two recent developments warrant a reexamination of the fuel ethanol issue.First, on August 20, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a call for comments on suspending the renewable fuel standard (RFS), sometimes known as the ethanol mandate:EPA is seeking comment on letters requesting a waiver of the renewable fuel standard and matters relevant to EPA’s consideration of those requests. Governors of the states of Arkansas and North Carolina submitted separate requests for a waiver. Section 211(o)(7)(A) of the...

The head of a top fuel industry group wants Congress to take action that he says would protect consumers by keeping a more corrosive blend of gasoline off the market. American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) President Charles Drevna told The Hill on Monday that a U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia decision last week will put consumers at risk. The court upheld Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules that let gas stations offer fuel with a higher ethanol content. Auto companies say the higher-blend ethanol fuel is more destructive to engines and is not covered by many...

Air Force spends $59 per gallon on biofuel 12 June 2012 If you were mad about $4 per gallon of gas, think about this: the Air Force is spending $59 per gallon on "green biofuel" that supposedly has to compete with traditional petroleum jet fuel. ­The U.S. Navy’s Great Green Fleet demonstration taking place this week, using biofuels at an alarming $26 per gallon, will flaunt the Pentagon’s wasteful spending and is already angering some U.S. lawmakers. But a lesser-known Air Force demonstration cost the government more than twice as much for biofuels. Purchasing 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel from...

In an effort to make good on President Barack Obama’s commitment to “green energy,” the United States Air Force spent $639,000 on 11,000 gallons of alcohol-to-jet fuel from Gevo Inc., a Colorado biofuels company, at $59 a gallon. The cost of petroleum is presently $3.60 a gallon. Similarly, in preparation for last week's "Green Fleet Demonstration,” the U.S. Navy purchased $12 million in biofuels to prove that a carrier strike group could be run on biofuels for the day. It’s all part of the Obama Administration’s decision last year to direct the Navy, Agriculture department, and the Energy department to...

Renewable power generation is expected to continue its rapid growth over the next five years, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that acknowledges the coming-of-age of the renewable energy sector. The report says that despite economic uncertainties in many countries, global power generation from hydropower, solar, wind, and other renewable sources is projected to increase by more than 40% to almost six 400 terawatt hours (TWh)—or roughly one-and-a-half times current electricity production in the US. The study marks the first time the IEA has devoted a medium-term report to renewable power sources, a recognition of...

The head of the Institute for Energy Research today beseeched congressional leaders to investigate Navy Secretary Ray Mabus’ decision to conduct test exercises using expensive alternative fuels this summer. Thomas Pyle, president of the industry-funded IER, said the move shows “the Obama administration is squandering limited national defense dollars on a political agenda.” “With huge reductions in resources for national defense already under way, wasting taxpayer money on biofuels costing ten times as much as conventional fuels makes no sense,” Pyle said in a letter to the heads of the House and Senate oversight and defense committees. Pyle’s letter comes...

Navy’s green fleet runs into fiscal storm Demo still on for next month, includes San Diego ship Republicans in Congress are blocking the Navy’s march toward a future in which jets and ships run on biofuels, saying the “green” most in question is whether the United States has the money, with a shrinking military budget, to invest in a pricey fuel experiment. The Navy will demonstrate its “great green fleet” concept next month, a toe in the water toward easing the country away from dependence on unfriendly foreign oil. But opposition in Congress could push the effort onto the rocks...

Is there something fishy about algae? Is it the revolutionary new fuel source opportunity the Obama administration represents it to be? Last February, in a University of Miami campaign speech intended to pacify prospective pump price-panicked patrons, the president said: "We're making new investments in the development of gasoline and diesel and jet fuel that's actually made from a plant-like substance, algae...You've got a lot of algae out there, right? If we can figure out how to make energy out of that, we'll be doing all right. Believe it or not, we could replace up to 17% of the oil...

NASA is clearly looking far into the future for a way to handle both human waste and a need for fuel on either long space flights or when attempting to colonize another planet. To that end, they’ve assigned life support engineer Jonathan Trent the task of coming up with a way to use algae to solve both problems at once. His solution is to use plastic bags floating in seawater as small bioreactors, containing wastewater, sunlight and carbon dioxide to grow algae that can be used as a means to create biofuel. The whole thing is called Offshore Membrane Enclosures...

Copper -- the stuff of pennies and tea kettles -- is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy. When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage, copper acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with carbon dioxide that reduces the greenhouse gas to methane or methanol. Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into...

As the U.S. transitions out of a petroleum economy, oil-rich Texas is emerging as something of a surprise leader in biofuel research. If the country’s quintessential oil state sees promise in biofuels, that stands as a powerful indicator that the national market is ready, too, even in the case of algae biofuel, which has been greeted with derision in some circles. One main driver of Texas’s vanguard position in the biofuel field has been Texas A&M University, the premier public education and research institution. The school’s AgriLife department has firmly established itself in the forefront of algae biofuel development despite...

Greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels such as palm oil, soybean and rapeseed are higher than those for fossil fuels when the effects of Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) are counted, according to leaked EU data seen by EurActiv. The default values assigned to the biofuels compare to those from Canada’s oil sands—also known as tar sands—according to the figures, which should be released along with long-awaited legislative proposals on biofuels in the spring. A spokesperson for the European Commission said she could “not comment on leaked documents, such as impact assessments, which have not been published.” But industry and civil...