According to the Governors’ Biofuels Coalition (GBC), Nebraska’s ethanol industry has nearly recovered from the economic doldrums it faced last year and is back near full production capacity.
An important indicator that the ethanol industry is recovering, Todd Sneller said of the Nebraska Ethanol Board, is the “modest job increase” they saw in the ethanol industry while reviewing state ethanol data comparing 2008 to 2009.
“While overall it may only be a couple of dozen jobs on a statewide basis, it is an important signal because we were in a period of real economic turmoil in the ethanol sector, but yet we didn’t see layoffs in those plants, even the ones that went through bankruptcies, and in a couple of cases we saw companies use this time to modify their plants to create addition production capabilities, such as corn oil extraction,” Sneller said.
According to Sneller, during the last three to four months plants have been starting to operate much closer to their operational rate of capacity, so if they were operating at 70 percent to 80 percent of capacity, they are now operating “much closer to 100 percent of capacity.”
U.S. ethanol production is on the rise with the news that the industry has set new production records. According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), American ethanol facilities produced 694,000 barrels per day (b/d) in June 2009. That is up 109,000 b/d from a year ago.
Everywhere you go at the 2009 Farm Progress Show in Decatur, Illinois this week, people are talking about ethanol.
Saying it is on a path less taken, a Houston, Texas company is looking for alternatives to alternative energy.
A new, eight-million-gallon-a-year biodiesel plant in Washington state has come on line with the opening of the facility’s canola crusher, joining its biodiesel brewer that began refining last November.
Legislation that increases the amount of biodiesel state and local governments in Illinois must use has been signed into law by Gov. Pat Quinn. 
AE Biofuels, Inc., a global vertically integrated biofuels company, and Pearson Fuels, an alternative fuels provider, have been awarded $6.9 million by the US Department of Energy to build 55 E85 fueling facilities in the state of California. The alternative fueling sites will be built within the next 42 months. 
Mike Lewis of Pearson Fuels said, “I am excited to see that we are now in a stronger position to bring alternative fuel infrastructure to the hundreds of thousands of flexible fuel vehicles already on the California roads while measurably reducing the State`s dependence on foreign oil imports.” Pearson Fuels already has 13 E85 stations within California. He claims that construction of the projects should begin by the end of 2009. 
U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) will play host to a pair of EPA officials at an Iowa biodiesel plant this coming Thursday at 3 pm. Let’s hope he can use the opportunity to teach them the REAL math behind the amount of corn and soybeans it takes to make ethanol and biodiesel.
The new boats will eventually replace the existing 20-year-old U.S. Navy-operated tour boats that shuttle visitors to and from the USS Arizona Memorial as part of the National Park Service’s (NPS) World War II Valor in the Pacific National Monument tours.
The news that Ford has developed a new diesel engine… code-named Scorpion… to put in its 2011 F-Series Super Duty diesel pickups will be fully compatible with a 20 percent biodiesel blend (B20) (see