Being able to make biofuels cheaper, faster, and without the help of government subsidies seems to be the theme of some recent work by American researchers.
This story in the Des Moines Register highlights a couple of programs, in particular, one by an Iowa State professor who has teamed up with the private sector to find a way to make biodiesel more efficiently:
New ideas have found support through venture capital firms such as Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif. MDV licensed the biodiesel technology of ISU professor Victor Lin and created Catalin, a company that will build its pilot plant at the university’s Biomass Energy Conversion Facility in Nevada.
Erik Straser of MDV said Catalin’s new method can use cheap waste grease from restaurants and animal-processing plants as well as, or instead of, more expensive virgin plant oils. And it reduces the amount of water each plant has to use, he said.
The secret is in the “giant tea bag,” which is a solid reusable catalyst – something that triggers a chemical reaction.
“If you want to wash one gallon of biodiesel, you would need about four gallons of water. That’s a lot,” Lin said. He said adapting the catalyst to existing biodiesel plants should be a reasonably affordable option.
The new process could reduce the cost of making a gallon of biodiesel by 10 to 20 cents… that would make the fuel more profitable and possibly able to live without the 50 cent to $1 a gallon government subsidies.
The article goes on to talk about the competition heating up to build cellulosic ethanol plants and mentions the world’s first closed-loop ethanol plant that runs on the manure from the cows fed the distillers grain made from producing the ethanol that just opened in Nebraska (see my post on June 28th).
DuPont is dropping $58 million into a joint venture with British Petroleum (BP) and British Sugar to produce the biofuels, biobutanol and ethanol. Biobutanol is a renewable energy source similar to ethanol in that its is obtained by fermenting some of the same feedstocks, but biobutanol is closer to unleaded gasoline in energy content. It is also more compatible with existing pertoleum-based fuels pipeline systems.
To celebrate independence from foreign oil on Independence Day, MFA Oil Company – which currently sells E85 at more than 40 locations in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri – will be giving away a Ford F-150 FFV for the second year in a row. 
“Our goal is to help educate consumers so that E85 becomes their fuel of choice,” said Jerry Taylor, president of MFA Oil Company. “In doing so, we continue to demonstrate MFA Oil’s commitment to strengthening rural economies through support of the biofuel industry and by decreasing our dependence on foreign oil.” 
Roughly half of the cattle and hog operations in a 12-state region either fed ethanol co-products or considered feeding them to their livestock last year, according to a 
According to Dan Kerestes, chief of the USDA NASS Livestock Branch, USDA contacted some 94-hundred dairy cattle, cattle on feed, beef cattle and hog operations in 12 states. Kerestes says USDA didn’t have too many expectations going into the report – but he says the percentage of operations already feeding co-products was a surprise.
Great thing about going to meetings is getting to meet people you only know by email. I got to meet a couple of fellow bloggers at the Fuel Ethanol Workshop in St. Louis. 
I also met Nathan Schock with 
Thanks to the 
Many of the exhibitors at the 2007 Fuel Ethanol Workshop were offering new technology and equipment to make ethanol production better, faster, easier, more efficient – you name it. 
According to their website, BetaTec is the new application arm of the Barth-Haas Group. The Barth-Haas Group was founded in 1794 and is the oldest and largest hops company in the world. As part of the Barth-Haas Group, BetaTec draws on over 200 years of hop experience and our vertically integrated operations which include every aspect of hops…growing, harvesting, processing, marketing, distribution and sales. We know hops!
The growth of the ethanol industry was most obvious at the 2007 Fuel Ethanol Workshop last week in St. Louis on the expo floor. Some 700 exhibitors were there, an increase of 60 percent from last year alone. 
There’s a new player on the block in the alternative energy group sector: The American Biofuels Council.