General Motors recently held a briefing in California on cellulose to ethanol production in North America. One of the companies that presented was BlueFire Ethanol of Irvine, CA.
BlueFire president and CEO Arnold Klann talked about the company’s Concentrated Acid Hydrolysis process known as the “Arkenol Process” which converts cellulosic, or “green” waste materials to ethanol. His presentation is featured here on the GMnext blog in a post by contributor Matt Kelly.
One of the nation’s largest ethanol producers has announced a revenue increase of nearly 500 percent over last year.
VeraSun Energy Corporation on Monday reported its financial results for the three months ending June 30, which increased revenues by 499% over the second quarter of 2007, to $1.015 billion, and generated earnings of $.15 per diluted share, driven by higher ethanol volume sold and an increase in average ethanol price.
During the quarter, VeraSun completed the merger with US BioEnergy effective April 1, adding five facilities and 420 million gallons to operations. The company also completed construction at its Hankinson, North Dakota; Welcome, Minnesota; and Hartley, Iowa biorefineries, with a combined capacity of 330 million gallons per year. Upon completion of two additional ethanol production facilities in Dyersville, Iowa and Janesville, Minnesota, the company expects to have a capacity of 1.64 billion gallons of ethanol through 16 production facilities by the end of 2008.
General Electric has teamed up with Spanish energy company Acciona to build a wind farm in the Dakotas that will power 60,000 homes.
This Reuters story says the $381 million wind farm will crank out 180-megawatts of electricity:
GE Energy Financial Services is investing $141 million in the Tatanka Wind Farm, which spans 14,000 acres along the border of North Dakota and South Dakota. Wachovia Investment Holdings LLC also provided financing for the project, which went online last month.
The farm is owned and operated by Acciona Energy North America. It is the first U.S. wind farm built entirely by Acciona, the companies said.
Acciano officials say the project will provide power throughout the Midwest.
A year-long test of biodiesel in city buses in St. Louis, MO has shown that the green fuel is comparable in fuel economy to the cleanest version its petroleum counterpart, while being much more reliable with fewer maintenance issues.
This story posted on CanadianDriver.com says the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study showed B20 biodiesel was within two percent of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) in fuel economy:
The evaluation was undertaken on buses in the St. Louis, Missouri Metro fleet and was conducted by NREL and the National Biodiesel Board. The study is the first B20 in-fleet study using buses equipped with EGR valves, and the first to compare B20 to ULSD. It involved 15 40-foot model-year 2002 transit buses with Cummins engines; eight operated exclusively on B20 and seven on petroleum USLD. The groups operated from different depots at St. Louis Metro, but the routes were matched for duty cycle parity.
Average fuel economy over the 12-month period for the ULSD buses was 3.58 mpg US (65.7 L/100 km), while average economy for the B20 buses was 3.52 mpg US (66.8 L/100 km).
The study also found that the biodiesel-fueled buses went longer between road calls (2,375 miles for the ULSD and 2,627 miles for the B20 groups)… an indication of biodiesel’s reliability… and the biodiesel fuel systems and engines went longer between road calls: 8,211 for B20 and 6,924 for ULSD.
Two weeks and more than 4,000 miles after they left San Francisco, CA, a CNN producer and his web developer colleague have rolled into CNN headquarters in Atlanta, GA… finishing up their cross-country, biodiesel-fueled road trip.
Along the way, the pair sent in reports from the road detailing their trials and triumphs of taking a 1978 International Harvester Scout across the nation, while learning a little more about the biofuels business. This is their final entry on the blog:
Well… here we are. We made it back to Atlanta in (mostly) one piece after a two-week journey I’ll never forget. This morning my colleague Brian Hardy and I did a little recap video interview with CNN.com Live which you can see here. We also have an iPhone review (it never left my side) that we’ll put up a little later.
Four-thousand miles later — and many gallons of bio and regular diesel — I would call this road trip a success. It wasn’t perfect — but we talked to a lot of people, saw a lot of things and learned a good deal about biodiesel fuel and long-distance travel.
Now, it can be debated how much good they really did for the image of biodiesel, driving an old vehicle without making the proper preparations for this long of a trip. My understanding is they had trouble finding biodiesel… until our friends at the National Biodiesel Board provided them with a listing of biodiesel stations that were along the way.
I agree that they could have focused more on the positive aspects of biodiesel… instead of the emphasis on their old truck. But they did prove to the novices who tuned in and logged on to their adventure that biodiesel is a viable fuel.
U.S. Senator Tom Harkin is supportive of alternative fuels and would like to push for mandated flexible fuel vehicle production. He asks, “Why do we run cars on gasoline?”
According to the Iowa Independent, the Senator said he plans to introduce legislation that would require all vehicles produced in the U.S. run as flexible fuel.
Brazil has made flex-fuel cars a key part of its energy strategy, Harkin noted. “We could do the same thing here in two years,” Harkin said. “In two years we could mandate that every car sold in America be flex fuel. That would do more in two years to bring down the price of gasoline than any other single thing we could do.”
Harkin said more oil drilling is not a long-term answer — and he thinks most Americans understand this. He noted that President Bush centered a State of the Union speech around the nation’s addiction to oil and its need to break it.
“If you’re addicted to oil it would seem to me the last thing you’d want to do is go out and start drilling for more oil,” Harkin said. “That’s just feeding your addiction.”
Republican presidential candidate John McCain visited the Iowa State Fair Friday, shook a lot of hands, but probably didn’t make a lot of friends in corn country when he clearly stated his opposition to subsidizing ethanol production.
“My friends, we will disagree on a specific issue and that’s healthy,” McCain said during a Des Moines Register forum address at the fairgrounds. “I believe in renewable fuels. I don’t believe in ethanol subsidies, but I believe in renewable fuels.”
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey and Iowa Farm Bureau Federation President Craig Lang stood beside McCain during his speech and applauded as McCain discussed his views on energy policy, despite the candidates remarks about ethanol in the nation’s top producing state.
McCain touted his “Lexington Project” strategy to achieve energy independence. “It’s got to be wind, tide, solar, nuclear,” he said of his plan, which also includes support for cellulosic ethanol and increasing the number of flex-fuel vehicles on the road.
Mississippi State University (MSU) will be holding a Biofuels Conference on August 14 and 15 at McCool Hall on the campus of MSU. The conference will be presented by MSU’s Department of Chemical Engineering, Industrial Outreach Service, and the Sustainable Energy Research Center.
On day 1 (August 14, 2008) of the conference, international experts in the biofuels area will provide information on feedstock availability and cost, as well as the challenges that need to be overcome to sustainably convert these feedstocks into biofuels. At the end of the day, the audience should have the tools to understand the rate of progress of the biofuels industry, and the need to integrate the agriculture, transportation, and chemical sectors to displace large quantities of petroleum from the market. On Day 2 (August 15, 2008), the conference will highlight the state and regional efforts to increase the availability of biofuels. State leaders will inform on specific projects and strategies to reduce petroleum dependency in the region and assist on the establishment and operation of biofuels industries.
A complete agenda can be found by clicking here. To register, click here.
As ethanol industry leaders meet in the Midwest next week, biofuels will be the focus of another conference in Georgia at the same time.
The third annual Southeast Bioenergy Conference will be held August 12th-14th at the UGA Tifton Campus Conference Center. Keynote speaker for the event is Ron Fagen, president and CEO of Fagen, Inc, one of the world’s foremost ethanol plant design-builders. Other speakers include Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue and Gale Buchanan, USDA’s Under Secretary for Research, Education, & Economics.
The conference will focus on the potential for the southeast to be a leader in biofuels production.
An update on POET’s cellulosic ethanol Project Liberty is on the agenda for next week’s American Coalition for Ethanol conference in Omaha.
Larry Ward, Vice President of Project Development for POET, will provide the update during the general session on Wednesday afternoon. Range Fuels and ICM will also update the session on their own cellulosic projects.
Project LIBERTY, the transformation of a 50 MGPY grain-to-ethanol plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa into an integrated corn-to-ethanol and cellulose-to-ethanol biorefinery, is jointly funded by POET and the United States Department of Energy. Once complete, the facility will produce 125 million gallons of ethanol per year, of which 25 million gallons will be from the cellulose in corn fiber and corn cobs.
