Free Republic

A Colorado resident was sentenced to 83 months in prison on Friday for his role in a biodiesel tax credit fraud scheme, announced Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard E. Zuckerman of the Justice Department’s Tax Division. According to court documents and statements made in court, Matthew Taylor and his coconspirators defrauded the United States by filing false claims for tax credits under a federal program that encourages production and use of renewable fuels. They created a fake company, Shintan Inc. (Shintan), that purported to be in the business of creating renewable fuels. From 2010 to 2013, the coconspirators then...

Germany's air fleet was grounded this week after "too much biodiesel" fuel found its ways into the gas tanks, according to German reports saying the Luftwaffe cannot safely fly with such a mixture. Germany's Tornado fleet of war planes was reportedly grounded after an unsafe mixture including too much biodiesel was used to fuel the planes, requiring the fleet to be grounded and their fuel tanks flushed. "The tolerance values are minimally exceeded," Colonel Kristof Conrath of the Tactical Air Force Squadron 51 was quoted as saying in media reports. "It's not that the aircraft would fall from the sky....

This year, trucks and other heavy-duty motors in America will burn some 3 billion gallons of diesel fuel that was made from soybean oil. They're doing it, though, not because it's cheaper or better, but because they're required to, by law. The law is the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. For some, especially Midwestern farmers, it's the key to creating clean energy from American soil and sun. For others — like many economists — it's a wasteful misuse of resources.

Washington State University researchers have found a way to make jet fuel from a common black fungus found in decaying leaves, soil and rotting fruit. The researchers hope the process leads to economically viable production of aviation biofuels in the next five years. The researchers used Aspergillus carbonarius ITEM 5010 to create hydrocarbons, the chief component of petroleum, similar to those in aviation fuels. Led by Birgitte Ahring, director and Battelle distinguished professor of the Bioproducts, Sciences and Engineering Laboratory at WSU Tri-cities, the researchers published their work in the April edition of Fungal Biology. The fungus produced the most...

After reaching record levels in 2013, United States imports of biomass-based diesel fuel (both biodiesel and renewable diesel) fell 36%, to 333 million gallons in 2014. Uncertainty surrounding future Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) targets and the absence of a late-year influx of volumes from Argentina were two main factors in this decline. The strongest drivers of the resurgence in U.S. biomass-based diesel demand since 2012 have been increasing RFS targets and the on-again, off-again biodiesel tax credit. Biodiesel and renewable diesel are valuable because they qualify for the two major renewable fuel programs in the United States: the RFS applied...

Well, who woulda’ thunk it? The Environmental Protection Agency finally decided to acknowledge the incompatibility of the Renewable Fuel Standard with both America’s declining gasoline consumption and the environmental degradation caused by the production of corn ethanol, thereby obliterating the entirely government-imposed “market” for biofuels — and what do you suppose happens? Via The Hill: Almost eight in 10 biodiesel producers in the United States have cut back production this year due to uncertainty over federal policies that encourage making the fuels, the National Biodiesel Board (NBB) said.The report released Wednesday was based on a survey the NBB conducted. In...

Ft. Worth, TX - In darkened alleyways, a slimy cat-and-mouse game is playing out across America. Men in trucks are fighting over a dirty and sometimes foul-smelling substance that restaurants once paid to get hauled off. Now it can be worth thousands per truckload. Liquid gold, some in the trade call it. It's grease - used kitchen cooking oil from deep fryers at KFC and the seasoned saucepans of the fanciest French restaurant. The increasingly consolidated industry, ranging from mom and pop operations to publicly traded giants, is marked by cutthroat competition to claim restaurant accounts. And all of them...

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.

The $1 trillion farm bill will serve as the first test of how deeply the shutdown fight has damaged relations in Washington. Congress has made the legislation its first order of business as it pivots away from the battles over government funding and the debt ceiling. The leaders of the agriculture committees in Congress and K Street lobbyists are eager to put the finishing touches on the bill, which could get wrapped into a year-end budget deal that replaces automatic sequestration cuts. But some fear Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who has vowed to complete the legislation, might be too wounded...

Could global warming be a boon to farmers? A recent study found that rising carbon dioxide concentrations bestow an additional $11.6 trillion in benefits from crop production between now and 2050. The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change found that while many studies focus on the costs of rising carbon emissions, few studies focused on whether or not more carbon in the atmosphere could be beneficial to society. In fact, the Obama administration recently raised its social-cost-of-carbon estimate from $21 per metric ton to $35 per metric ton to the ire of global warming skeptics and...

The American Petroleum Institute notified the US Environmental Protection Agency that it might sue if the federal environmental regulator fails to issue biomass-based diesel and renewable fuel requirements for 2014 on time. The federal Clean Air Act requires EPA set biomass-based diesel quotas no later than 14 months before the requirement would apply, Harry M. Ng, API’s vice-president and general counsel, said in an Oct. 17 letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy. The statutory deadline for EPA to set that deadline for 2014 was Nov. 1, 2012, he noted.The CAA also mandates EPA set renewable fuel standards for the following...

Questions to those freepers who have produced a batch of biodiesl. I'm looking for those who have real world experience on a small scale, making and running biodiesel

The mystery of the trainload of biodiesel that crossed back and forth across the Sarnia-Port Huron border without ever unloading its cargo, as reported by CBC News, has been solved.

A long-abandoned fermentation process once used to turn starch into explosives can be used to produce renewable diesel fuel to replace the fossil fuels now used in transportation, University of California, Berkeley, scientists have discovered. Campus chemists and chemical engineers teamed up to produce diesel fuel from the products of a bacterial fermentation discovered nearly 100 years ago by the first president of Israel, chemist Chaim Weizmann. The retooled process produces a mix of products that contain more energy per gallon than ethanol that is used today in transportation fuels and could be commercialized within 5-10 years. While the fuel's...

Volvo Trucks unveiled last week its plans to launch a 13-liter heavy-duty natural gas engine featuring Westport high pressure direct injection (HPDI) technology. The engine, marketed under the “Blue Power” designation, is scheduled to launch for the North American market in 2014. The engine’s advanced high pressure diesel ignition technology will provide significant fuel efficiency gains compared with current natural gas products. Combined with the company’s previously announced offering of compressed natural gas (CNG)-powered Volvo VNM and VNL model daycabs, the new engine will provide customers with a complete range of natural gas-powered transportation solutions. Volvo is also testing another...

University of Queensland researchers have planted five hectares of Pongamia trees at Hope Vale, north Queensland in a bid to create a commercially viable plantation for sustainable regional development and biofuel production in northern Australia. In conjunction with Cape York's traditional land owners and partners, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Integrative Legume Research (CILR) is aiming to plant a further 3000 hectares within the first three years of the partnership, which will ultimately yield an estimated 10 to 15 million litres of biofuel. The seeds from the oil-rich Pongamia pinnata (also called Millettia) tree provide a sustainable solution to...

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...

Slick-fingered Bay Area thieves are stealing restaurants' used kitchen grease, a product that six years ago was so worthless that some restaurant owners would illegally dump it down the drain instead of paying for proper disposal. The leftover cooking oil, yellow grease, is the easiest material to turn into biodiesel. And as the alternative fuel's popularity has increased, so has its selling price, making it a target for thieves willing to go through the trouble of pumping or siphoning the grease out of storage barrels. "It's liquid gold," said Daniel Rugg, director of engineering at the Four Seasons hotel in...

A class of chemical compounds best known today for fragrance and flavor may one day provide the clean, green and renewable fuel with which truck and auto drivers fill their tanks. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria to generate significant quantities of methyl ketone compounds from glucose. In subsequent tests, these methyl ketones yielded high cetane numbers – a diesel fuel rating comparable to the octane number for gasoline – making them strong candidates for the production of advanced biofuels. “Our findings add to the list of naturally...

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...