In a Senate floor speech earlier this week, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), a long-time supporter of biofuels, said, “Over the next few weeks, I’m going to do everything I can to educate my colleagues and the public on the benefits of domestic biofuels.” Grassley is concerned about the movement in DC to end ethanol subsidies and incentives as well as …
Propel Fuels Hosts USDA’s Judith Canales
Propel Fuels hosted Judith Canales, Administrator for Rural Business and Cooperative Programs for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), yesterday at one of the fuel retailer’s stations in Oakland, California yesterday to promote the positive and economic and environmental impacts biofuels has on the US. Propel is the leading retailer in the US installing biofuel infrastructure for both ethanol and …
Monsanto & Sapphire to Colloborate on Algae
Agribusiness company Monsanto and algae company Sapphire Energy have announced a partnership to “discover” genes that could be applied to agriculture particularly in the areas of yield and stress. As Sapphire works to bring algal fuels to commercial scale, the company is searching for traits that make a particular strain of algae better suited for fuel or other biochemicals. In …
Maverick Biofuels Wins NSF Award
Maverick Biofuels has announced that it has been awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a reactor system for converting syngas into high-value products. The company is commercializing a technology to convert biomass to a mixed-alcohol biofuel that can be readily blended with gasoline as a drop-in fuel. The process utilizes …
Vilsack: US Farms Producing Enough for Food & Biofuels
The man in charge at the USDA says American farmers are producing enough to provide the food AND fuel, in particular ethanol and biodiesel, this country needs. During the recent Commodity Classic, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack took on the food vs. fuel debate head-on. “It is irritating to me that we have to read about this all the time, …
Vilsack to Sign Biofuels Agreement
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack will sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that will encourage development of bio-based products, including biodiesel and ethanol. This USDA release says Vilsack will sign the MOU with the 36-state Governors’ Biofuels Coalition, a group dedicated to providing leadership on ethanol and biodiesel policy development: “This agreement will strengthen public, private and academic partnerships that are …
USDA Considering Biofuel Crop Insurance Program
USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today that the USDA will soon be accepting proposals to study the feasibility of providing crop insurance to producers of biofuel feedstocks ranging from corn stover to straw to woody biomass. The feasibility studies will be funded by the Risk Management Agency (RMA) and will be combined with current studies underway for energy cane, switchgrass …
Future of Ethanol Tax Policy
The most important issue facing the ethanol industry this year on a policy level is the future of biofuels tax policy when the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC) expires at the end of this year. Several experts in tax policy and economics took the stage during the general session of the 2011 National Ethanol Conference Monday to tackle that …
2011 State of the Ethanol Industry
The Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) is celebrating 30 years of advocating for the ethanol industry, and while the industry has come a long way since that time, some things never change. Giving the “State of the Ethanol Industry” address to some 1300 attendees at the National Ethanol Conference, RFA president and CEO Bob Dinneen started off quoting the organization’s first …
USDA Matches Biofuels Facilities with Feedstocks
The USDA is working on matching the best places to build biofuel refineries with the areas that have the best feedstocks to produce the green fuels. This Agricultural Research Service article says they’ve been looking at the potential in the Pacific Northwest: [ARS] agronomist George Mueller-Warrant, plant physiologist Gary Banowetz, and hydrologist Jerry Whittaker calculated that the 6.2 million tons …