China DDGS Dumping Probe Surprises US

Cindy Zimmerman

The announcement this week out of Beijing that China’s Ministry of Commerce has launched an anti-dumping probe into the ethanol co-product distillers dried grains (DDGS) from the US came as a surprise to the U.S. Grains Council (USGC).

“The U.S. Grains Council has a 25 year history of market development and capacity building programs in China and values the U.S./China market and trade relationship,” said USGC President and CEO Tom Dorr in a statement today. “China’s investigation of U.S. DDGS imports is surprising and could be disruptive to trade. China’s unusual market and supply volatility over the last two years has resulted in new global trade flows. As trade flows change, it should perhaps not be surprising there would be an adjustment period in response to unprecedented demand.”

It was only a few weeks ago that U.S. corn growers were in China on a USGC-sponsored trade mission to promote both corn and DDGS for livestock feed in that country. According to a post about the mission on the USGC blog The Grain Board, “Many of the feed companies that the delegation met with are increasing their DDGS use in their livestock feed rations. They stated they would continue to import, dependent on price. DDGS is easily imported into China, yet it is a feed ingredient that requires a “per plant registration” which is difficult to deal with at the port.”

China is the number one market for DDGS and is expected to import nearly three million metric tons this year, up more than 500 percent compared to a year ago. It is estimated that China produces about 3.5 million tons of DDGS domestically each year.

According to a statement from the Chinese Ministry, they initially plan to look for any evidence of dumping of DDGS, both with and without solubles, between July 2009 and June 2010, but may go back as far as 2007. The investigation is expected to take 12 to 18 months to complete.

Distillers Grains, Ethanol, Ethanol News, International, USGC

Will Biogenic Emission Regulation Curb Biomass Growth?

Joanna Schroeder

According to the National Alliance of Forest Owners (NAFO), the inclusion of biomass emissions (biogenic carbon emissions) in the EPA’s Clean Air Act greenhouse gas permitting program hinders growth of renewable energy. However, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) is countering their argument saying that there is public data on investments in biomass showing that it is in fact growing. The irony is that both groups cite the same study from Forisk Consulting to support their claims although the study was in fact funded by NAFO.

In December 2010, Forisk Consulting released a study titled, “Economic and Regional Impact Analysis of the Treatment of Biomass Energy Under the EPA Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule.” According to NAFO, the study found that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Tailoring Rule’s current treatment of biomass energy emissions will put over 130 renewable energy projects “at risk” for cancellation or delays.

“The Tailoring Rule is a powerful deterrent to forest biomass energy investments and job opportunities,” NAFO President and CEO David P. Tenny said of the study’s findings. “We’re already seeing the economic impact of the Tailoring Rule, as renewable energy projects are delayed or stopped altogether due to regulatory uncertainty. Left unchanged, the Tailoring Rule threatens the long-term viability of the biomass energy sector which, in turn, undermines the renewable energy goals of the Administration and Congress.”

Back in September, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was considering equating biogenic carbon emissions with fossil fuel emissions under the Tailoring Rule, which requires the accounting and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions under the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2). Biogenic carbon emissions are those that are naturally created during the combustion and decay of woody biomass. In the past, the EPA has always considered them carbon neutral.

However, according to EDF calculations, existing and announced wood bioenergy projects increased during the past year by nearly 35 percent–from 112 projects to 151 projects–across 11 southern states alone: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. (Only data from the southern U.S. is publicly available for the past year). According the report, the total expected demand for wood biomass increased by 10 million green tons, a 76 percent hike in wood biomass demand across the region.

“The science clearly shows that not all sources of biomass are equal in terms of their climate change impacts,” said Will McDow, manager of EDF’s Southeast Center for Conservation Incentives, and a member of both the North Carolina Forestry Technical Advisory Committee and Forestry Council. “The industry has known that EPA was planning to include biogenic emissions in permitting requirements in some way since last spring, yet this fact clearly has not dampened investors’ enthusiasm for bioenergy in 2010.”

McDow concluded, “The stakes are too high for EPA to rush to judgment in making biomass emission rules because these biomass plants will produce greenhouse gas emissions for 20 to 30 years. EPA needs to take the time to get the accounting right for biomass emissions to spur the right investments and policies our nation needs to protect forest sector jobs and the natural resources we depend upon.”

biofuels, biomass, Environment

Solar Funnels Convert Sun into Hydrogen

Joanna Schroeder

According to a new article published by a team of researchers from CalTech and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology there may be a new way to harness the energy of solar even when the sun is not shining. Led by Sossina Haile, she along with her colleagues are looking at ways to produce hydrogen and syngasses by using solar funnels.

In an article, “High-Flux Solar-Driven Thermochemical Dissociation of CO2 and H2O Using Nonstoichiometric Ceria,” published in the December 24, 2010 edition of Science magazine, the research team has developed a device that is able concentrate solar radiation and heat it up to 1,600 degrees Celsius. In simple terms, the heat that results from this process is then used to split water or carbon dioxide into hydrogen.

As described in an article in Clean Energy Authority.com, the device consists of a quartz lens that focuses the solar radiation on a reaction chamber that is internally reflective and captures most of the photons that enter and converts them to heat. The device heats up at a rate of 140 degrees Celsius a minute until it reaches about 1,250 degrees Celsius, and stabilizing at more than 1,400 degrees Celsius. Through a two-step process, the device’s catalyst ceria (cerium dioxide) converts CO2 or water into its constituent elements.

Haile said in an interview, “Ceria is a metal oxide, what that material will do when heated is it will release oxygen.…It happens at high temperatures, when we cool it back down it wants to absorb oxygen.  “The ceria replaces the oxygen by stripping it from the supplied material, carbon dioxide or water, thereby creating carbon monoxide—used for syngas, or hydrogen—which can be used directly. Either resulting fuel could be used to store the sun’s energy for use in power generation.”

The funnels can be small, but they’re not nano-sized. “It’s like a sponge it’s porous and the gasses flow through it,” Haile said. But “it’s not nano because these temperatures are too high for nano-structures.”

According to Haile, the funnels are not efficient enough for commercial use and to date, only convert around 0.7 percent to 0.8 percent of the solar energy in the funnel into fuel. With further research she hopes this will improve dramatically.

“We calculated efficiency should be between 15 percent and 19 percent. We’re working with University of Minnesota on that. Right now it’s limited by the thermal design of the reactor. We need a better thermal design,” Haile concluded.

Hydrogen, Solar

Book Review – The Impending World Energy Mess

Joanna Schroeder

With only two days left in 2010, I thought “The Impending World Energy Mess” was only fitting for review as we head into 2011. It is also fitting for another reason, it ties nicely into the story I brought you earlier this week, $5 Gas Prices on the Horizon. The authors, Dr. Robert L Hirsch, Dr. Roger H. Bezdek, and Robert M. Wendling, bring you decades of experience in energy from economics to oil to technologies. In the book, they lay out their premise that the most serious energy mess facing the world today is the impending decline in world oil production. It just so happens that it is taking place at the same time energy use is all an all-time high and continues to grow.

The authors write, “The warming signs include the six-year long plateauing of world oil production, the escalation of oil prices, and the analyses of a number of highly trained professionals and competent organizations.”

They authors don’t use the term “peak oil” because world oil production, they say, has been and is likely to stay on the current fluctuating world oil production plateau for a few more years before the onset of production decline.

So what’s the problem you ask? We have hoards of alternatives? According to the authors, the realities of these alternatives are that they are “very costly and insufficient to satisfy our overall energy needs, let alone our liquid fuel needs.” The energy sources they discuss are numerous including biofuels, solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, hydrogen, electric vehicles, oil shale, coal to liquids, and more. But let’s delve into this deeper using biofuels, more specifically, corn ethanol as an example.Read More

biofuels, book reviews, Natural Gas, Oil, Solar, Wind

New Yeast Strain Could Help Cellulosic Ethanol Production

Cindy Zimmerman

A collaborative effort has produced a yeast strain that speeds up the process of making ethanol from cellulosic materials.

Researchers at the University of Illinois, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California at Berkeley, Seoul National University and the oil company BP worked together to develop the newly engineered yeast strain that can simultaneously consume two types of sugar from plants to produce ethanol.

The sugars are glucose, a six-carbon sugar that is relatively easy to ferment; and xylose, a five-carbon sugar that has been much more difficult to utilize in ethanol production. The new strain, made by combining, optimizing and adding to earlier advances, reduces or eliminates several major inefficiencies associated with current biofuel production methods.

“Xylose is a wood sugar, a five-carbon sugar that is very abundant in lignocellulosic biomass but not in our food,” said Yong-Su Jin, a professor of food science and human nutrition at Illinois and a principal investigator on the study. “Most yeast cannot ferment xylose.” A big part of the problem with yeasts altered to take up xylose is that they will suck up all the glucose in a mixture before they will touch the xylose, Jin said. A glucose transporter on the surface of the yeast prefers to bind to glucose. “It’s like giving meat and broccoli to my kids,” he said. “They usually eat the meat first and the broccoli later.”

The research objective was to develop a way for the yeast to quickly and efficiently consume both types of sugar at once, a process called co-fermentation. According to the researchers, the new yeast strain simultaneously converts cellobiose (a precursor of glucose) and xylose to ethanol just as quickly as it can ferment either sugar alone. They say it is at least 20 percent more efficient at converting xylose to ethanol than other strains, making it “the best xylose-fermenting strain” reported in any study.

Read more from the University of Illinois here.

Cellulosic, Ethanol, Ethanol News, Research, University

POET Designs New Ethanol Co-Product Loader

Cindy Zimmerman

New equipment designed by POET has made loading distillers’ grains (DDGS) safer, faster, easier and ultimately more profitable for the company’s ethanol plants.

It’s called the Load Toad™ and it was designed to allow rail cars to be packed more densely by forcing DDGS to the sides of the rail car, a process that is usually done by hand with a shovel. By distributing the DDGS load more evenly and efficiently, POET plants have been able to pack 3%-5% more DDGS into each car.

“The Load Toad not only allows us to put more DDGS in a railcar, which increases our production efficiency, but this device also allows the commodities team to more safely load a railcar,” said Dave Hudak, general manager at POET Biorefining – Alexandria (Ind.). “We no longer have to shovel any product nor stand on the top of the car to load it. The potential for a back injury has been eliminated.”

Commodities Assistant Ryan Schroeder from POET Biorefining – Leipsic in Ohio developed the first prototype of the Load Toad as a solution to a common loading problem that led to cone-shaped pileups in the rail cars. These pileups dramatically lowered efficiency in each rail car and created a great deal physical work for staff. “It felt good knowing that not just our plant would benefit, but the commodities people at all the POET plants would benefit,” Schroeder said. The Load Toad is currently being used at POET plants, but the company is exploring opportunities to market the technology to other ethanol producers in the future.

Here’s a video of the Load Toad in action from the POET website.

Distillers Grains, POET, Video

Ag Has Work To Do To Improve Public Image

Chuck Zimmerman

It looks like agriculture has a ways to go to change public perceptions according to our latest ZimmPoll. In answer to the question, “Do you think the general consumer perception of agriculture changed in 2010?” 43% say “No it didn’t really change,” while 30% say “Yes, it got worse,” and 27% said “Yes, it improved.” Where do you fall in those categories? That’s 73% of our respondents who think it didn’t change or got worse. Sounds like we really do need some campaigns to reach out to consumers doesn’t it?

The new poll is now live and the question is, “What do you think will have the biggest influence on ag in 2011?” There are no doubt many factors that will have an influence. We’ve picked a couple. When I post the results next week you can add any others you’d like to the discussion.

Remember, you can submit your questions for us to pose and add your feedback anytime by using the comment feature.

ZimmPoll is sponsored by Rhea+Kaiser, a full-service advertising/public relations agency.

ZimmPoll

Agrisys Building Big Algae-to-Biofuels Facility

John Davis

A Florida company is building the world’s first large-scale, vertically integrated algae-to-biofuels facility.

This article from Florida Trend, which goes in depth on that state’s algae-biofuels industry, says Orlando businessman Nick VandenBrekel’s Agrisys will be growing algae to turn into jet fuel and biodiesel, as well as omega-3 “fish oil.”

Scaled up, VandenBrekel envisions a host of 1,000-to-20,000-acre farms across the Southeast where algal fuel is grown, processed and used locally, from community gas stations to diesel fleets such as school buses. Success, he says, would create no less than a “rebirth of American agriculture.”

Like Agrisys, a troop of other Florida companies — including PetroAlgae of Melbourne; Algenol of Bonita Springs; AquaFiber of Orlando; and Algae Aviation Fuel of Sarasota — sees the same promise in algae as a source of biofuel. Algae grows faster than any other potential crop, reaching maturity in less than 24 hours. As it grows, it devours CO2, generating oxygen as a byproduct. Most important for its potential as fuel, algae produce lipids, which store energy as fat.

The Florida firms all boast unique algae strains or proprietary processes they say can make fuel.

Agrisys, for example, has developed or licensed technology for growing and processing its algae in partnership with a research institute called CEHMM and a private technology firm called ARA, both in New Mexico. VandenBrekel says researchers there have been able to squeeze 125 gallons of oil daily from 1,000 gallons of algae-water mix piped from five acres of ponds.

The article goes on to say the biggest issue is making these operations profitable. Maybe they should listen to our latest Domestic Fuel Cast and see if some of that technology would help.

algae, biofuels

Soybeans Gain from Biodiesel Incentive Renewal

John Davis

The main feedstock for biodiesel in the U.S., not surprisingly, has gotten a boost from the renewal of the federal $1-a-gallon biodiesel tax incentive.

The Inside Futures website says contracts for January soybeans have hit a new high for the year at nearly $14 a bushel … and could go over that mark:

The soy complex has been led by the Soy Oil which also made a new high for the year. From a technical standpoint this is rather bullish, however it is important to note that we are experiencing thin holiday trade and with less then normal volume technical indicators may be less reliable. Either way, the new highs could suggest that we could now continue to move higher with sights set on 14.000.

Fundamentally the Soybean market got a major boost when Congress approved a $1.00 per gallon tax credit for Biodiesel. This is significant because this had expired a year ago and had put a major damper on Biodiesel demand. The Soybeans have a tight balance sheet, which could potentially get tighter.

The site does note that trading has been light during this holiday week.

Biodiesel, Soybeans

So. Sioux City Approves $25 Mil Bond for Biodiesel Plant

John Davis

A new biodiesel plant in South Sioux City, NE is getting a boost from that city’s council.

The Sioux City (IA) Journal reports city officials have OK’ed issuing $25 million in revenue bonds to help fund a proposed biodiesel plant:

City Manager Lance Hedquist said the South Sioux City Council approved issuing the bonds for Nature’s BioReserves at Monday night’s council meeting. However, he said the city will have no obligation for payment of the bonds.

The city held a public hearing prior to approving the bonds.

Nature’s BioReserves is planning a 60-million-gallon-per-year biodiesel fuel plant that will make biodiesel out of beef tallow from Beef Products Inc. The proposed plant will be constructed on the north side of BPI.

Construction is to start this summer and be completed sometime in the fall of 2012.

Biodiesel