As I posted earlier, RFA has a new logo. That prompted me to call on CEO Bob Dinneen, the Reverend of Renewable Fuels, to find out what the new look signifies for the organization. To start with, Bob says that RFA has doubled in staff size in the last 18 months with new staff in the area of marketing, technical resources and lobbying. He says that just as the industry has grown they’ve had to grow to continue to serve it. He says they have more than 100 years of ethanol experience represented on the staff.
Bob sees that the challenges faced by the industry have grown along with it. So he sees it as a dynamic industry and marketplace that RFA has had to adapt to. He sees improvements in the industry financially just as improvements are being seen in the economy in general but it is still “tough.”
Bob says the organization will be holding its annual meeting this week and members will be discussing priorities for RFA like the RFS2 and “helping EPA get it right” and next year’s sunset of the ethanol tax incentive. He believes the industry is up to the challenges though.
Listen to my interview with Bob below:
The Department of Energy (DOE) awarded 
According to Cary Sifferath, USGC Senior Director in China, drought conditions in China this year have led to high corn prices. “Those high prices have led to some opportunities for US feed grains products, specifically distillers dried grains (DDGS) products from the US ethanol industry,” Cary said. “We had roughly 8,000 metric tons of DDGS that was exported from the US into China and right now for 2009 we can easily predict 250,000 to 300,000 tons of distillers dried grains being imported by China’s feed and livestock industry, especially in the southern and coastal areas of China where DDGS has become a very competitive feed ingredient.”
The regulations require large emitters of heat-trapping emissions to begin collecting greenhouse gas (GHG) data under the new program which will cover approximately 85 percent of the nation’s GHG emissions and apply to roughly 10,000 facilities. Ethanol plants were on the list when it was first proposed in March. 
“If the products sold to consumers by Big Food are as half-baked as their ethanol claims, we have a life-threatening food safety crisis in America,” stated Brian Jennings, Executive Vice President of ACE. “Never before has more corn been used to make more ethanol, and yet retail food prices have fallen sharply this year.”
A group of farmer-owned ethanol plants in Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska have teamed up become the guardians of a 
The grant will allow Iowa State to establish a Wind Energy Manufacturing Laboratory on campus. The lab will feature the work of four faculty researchers: Matt Frank, Frank Peters and John Jackman, all associate professors of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, and Vinay Dayal, an associate professor of aerospace engineering. The grant will also support the research of five graduate students and several undergraduates.
• EPA’s GHG [Greenhouse Gas] methodology relies on outdated data that artificially penalizes U.S. biodiesel. GHG emission reductions associated with biodiesel produced from vegetable oils compared to petroleum will significantly exceed the 22 percent assumed by EPA in its proposed rule if the agency relies on scientifically valid analysis and practices. Even with EPA’s assumptions and methodology, correcting the outdated data pertaining to nitrogen fixation, energy balance and co-product allocations would give biodiesel produced from vegetable oil a 62 percent GHG reduction compared to baseline petroleum. When just some of the major flawed assumptions from EPA’s indirect analysis are corrected, the GHG emissions lifecycle reduction for biodiesel from vegetable oils is 99% percent lower than diesel fuel. This number includes penalties to biodiesel for international indirect land use change.