The red, white and blue God Bless America Biofuels USA banner has been waving at motorists on I-70 in Missouri for several weeks now. On Friday, the new biodiesel station at exit 175 in New Florence held its official grand opening, offering a variety of home grown choices for diesel vehicle drivers.
“We have ten pumps, three different flavors of biodiesel – B5, B20 and B99,” station owner Frank Imo told me when I stopped by on Friday afternoon on my way to St. Louis airport. “All of our fuel is 100% American, we have no foreign oil here. We make our biodiesel out of soybean oil, which helps the farmers and helps America – that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Imo is part of the Missouri-based family pizza chain Imo’s Pizza, which recycles most of its waste vegetable oil into biodiesel at the High Hill Biofuels, LLC plant in High Hill, Mo.
Working with Imo to promote Biofuels USA at the grand opening was St. Louis Clean Cities Executive Director Kevin Herdler. “Our whole mission is to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel and we do that with the American-made fuels – natural gas, propane, biodiesel, ethanol, electric, hydrogen,” he said. “All these fuels are good for the environment and they create jobs.”
Biofuels USA plans on adding E-85 (85 percent ethanol) next spring. Find out more about Biofuels USA on their website biofuelsusa.info.
Listen to my interview with Frank Imo and Kevin Herdler here: Biofuels USA
“Abengoa has been developing this technology for 10 years, and the project itself has been in the development stages for over 5 years,” said Manuel Sánchez, CEO of Abengoa. “In preparation for construction of the Hugoton project, the company has developed and perfected its proprietary technologies and produced cellulosic ethanol for thousands of hours from laboratory scale, to a biomass pilot plant facility in York, Nebraska, and ultimately from a demonstration scale facility in Salamanca, Spain. As a result, we are very pleased to finally achieve this financing milestone, and we thank the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office for their offer of a conditional commitment, that if realized will allow us to construct one of the first commercial scale biomass conversion plants in the world.”
As part of their ongoing ecological restoration work, The Earth Partners will work with farmers and conservation property landowners to grow and sustainably harvest biomass from land with invasive vegetation or land where restorative plant species are grown. POET will then evaluate the best use of the biomass to generate heat, power or for liquid fuel production.
The initial project will deliver Conservation Biomass to POET Biorefining – Chancellor, a 100 million-gallon-per-year grain ethanol plant in Chancellor, S.D. that burns wood waste and landfill gas in a solid fuel boiler to generate all of its process steam. Burning biomass at the plant to generate power will allow the partnership to test the commercial viability of the Conservation Biomass business model at scale. POET and The Earth Partners will continue to research the potential for utilizing Conservation Biomass sources like prairie grasses for cellulosic ethanol production.
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The guarantee will support construction of the 
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But the key going forward is going to be, can we create biofuels out of switchgrass and wood chips and other materials that right now are considered waste materials? And part of the reason that’s important is because, as I think most farmers here know, particularly if you’re in livestock farming, right now the costs of feed keep on going up and the costs of food as a consequence are also going up. Only about 4 percent of that is accounted for by corn being diverted into ethanol, but as you see more and more demand placed on our food supplies around the world — as folks in China and folks in India start wanting to eat more meat and commodity prices start going up, it’s going to be important for us to figure out how can we make biofuels out of things that don’t involve our food chain.
The 
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Once upon a time, an oil company used the slogan “Put a Tiger in Your Tank.” Someday, it could be “Put a Gator in Your Tank.”