Free Republic

Arnold Klann had spent two decades on his planet-friendly enterprise: making transportation fuel from plant waste. But two years ago, the CEO and President of Irvine-based BlueFire Renewables recalled, “We were thinking of shutting down the business.” Grants from the U.S. Department of Energy had dried up, as private banks, tightening credit in the wake of the financial crisis, refused to match government funds. Now, it seems, China is coming to the rescue. BlueFire announced Thursday that The Export-Import Bank of China has issued a letter of intent to provide a $270 million loan to build BlueFire’s first commercial plant,...

Kior, Inc., the Houston-area biofuels maker that hoped to tap new technology to produce clean energy, filed for bankruptcy Sunday. The company listed $58.3 million in assets along with $261.3 million debts in its filing in the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware, where the company is incorporated. The company was at one-time considered a leader in the development of what’s known as cellulosic fuel — gasoline and diesel that is made from inedible plant material like woodchips and grass clippings. Though other biofuels are made from plants — ethanol, for example, is made from corn or sugarcane — cellulosic fuels...

At the risk of inviting all the usual charges of being politically incorrect, I once again put before you the strange practice of burning food for fuel. The video at the bottom of the post details some of the human costs associated with the increasing use of corn, grains, and other crops for fuel.There is a tendency for environmentalists of our time to think very narrowly about their issues. It is a praiseworthy thing to seek to reduce pollutants and other things that have negative environmental impacts. The Catechism summons us to good stewardship of the earth, the environment, and...

U.S. aerospace giant Boeing says it is working with South African Airways and a Dutch biofuel company to make jet fuel from tobacco seeds. The Dutch firm, SkyNRG, is boosting its production in South Africa of a hybrid, nicotine-free, tobacco crop called Solaris with “biofuel production expected… in the next few years,” the three companies said in a statement. “Initially, oil from the plant’s seeds will be converted into jet fuel. In coming years, Boeing expects emerging technologies to increase South Africa’s aviation biofuel production from the rest of the plant,” added the firms. Aviation biofuel, made from renewable resources...

Following a meeting with President Barack Obama's top energy adviser, Minnesota Senator Al Franken on Thursday said he believes the Environmental Protection Agency will raise its biofuels blending targets when it finalizes the 2014 Renewable Fuel Standard. "We are hoping for and we definitely believe we're going to get higher numbers than in the preliminary rule, and we hope they're significantly higher," Franken said on a conference call with reporters. Franken and eight other Democratic senators met with Obama adviser John Podesta to discuss the biodiesel mandate within the 2014 RFS, though Franken said ethanol issues came up, as well....

EU ministers have agreed to 7% cap on the use of food-based biofuels in transport fuel. The agreement comes after a long-standing controversy, with biofuels being criticized for adding to environmental problems. The so-called "first generation" biofuels are made from crops such as maize, beetroot, or rapeseed. They were initially backed by the EU as a way to tackle climate change and reduce EU dependence on imported oil and gas. However, research has since shown that biofuels do more environmental harm than good. Making fuel out of crops has been criticized for displacing other crops and forcing the clearing of...

Domestic consumption of liquid ethanol this year has been 26% lower than for the same period in 2008. Forty-one of the country’s roughly 400 sugar-cane ethanol plants have closed over that time. The price of pure ethanol at the pump is so high that in most states it is cheaper to fill up flexible-fuel cars with petrol blends that contain about 20% ethanol... It began with the 2008 economic crisis, which staunched new investments in the sector just as it was expanding rapidly, and deep in debt. Rather than developing new plantations, the industry fell back on harvesting cane from...

Hydrogen and natural gas are among the alternative fuels starting to get more attention as car companies work to reduce emissions. But Audi is exploring yet another option that you may not have heard much about yet: e-fuels.

Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are pioneering a process that produces oil from algae in just one hour. Wet algae goes in, heat and pressure is applied, and crude oil comes out. From the PNNL itself: “It’s a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher,” said [Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research]. “In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We’re just doing it much, much faster.” The...

Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.(snip) In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae. With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel...

A former top White House official and the head of President Obama’s personal advocacy group is joining the board of a green energy company backed by a major Democratic donor that recently received millions in federal contracts. LanzaTech announced Wednesday that Jim Messina, Obama’s former deputy chief of staff, reelection campaign manager, and the head of his retooled campaign apparatus Organizing for Action was appointed to the company’s board of directors. “Jim’s proven ability to merge technology, messaging, and communications in support of ideas that transcend ‘business as usual’ will help us continue our mission of reshaping how our world...

Getting rid of biofuel programs would cut Europe’s food costs in half by 2020, and lower global food prices by 15 percent. That’s according to a new report, commissioned by the EU’s own Joint Research Center (JRC), released ahead of a critical European Parliament vote on Wednesday to cap biofuels’ contributions to the EU’s 2020 green targets. Current EU targets have more than half of the continent’s vegetable oils going towards biodiesel production in 2020. The new paper points out that global food prices are “strongly driven” by their end use. As Euractiv puts it, “[w]hen more soy and palm oil...

The more vegetable oil used for biofuel production, the less there is for food use. The report lays out forecast consequences for three proposed EU restrictions on the use of crop-based fuels.

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.