A much-anticipated vote on whether to allow a 320-million-gallon-a-year biodiesel plant to go into a site along the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia hit a delay on Tuesday evening.
This story in the Virginian-Pilot says the South Norfolk city council wants to consider the issue a little longer:
City Council members said they hope more time will resolve questions about the developer and promises made about new technology, low emissions levels and financial contributions to the surrounding community.
Councilwoman Rebecca Adams made the motion. Smiling Earth Energy LLC wants to build the plant.
“I just feel like we need to have all that under control,” Adams said.
The vote followed nearly two hours of discussion.
The mayor says he’s disappointed in the delay and wants a decision one way or the other soon.
The delay came just a day after Smiling Earth Energy officials held their first news conference on the issue since proposing the plant six months ago.
My underlying point is that by the same method of accounting gasoline takes more energy to produce than it contains, which is to say that if you count the energy that is necessary to build the drilling equipment to get it out of the ground, and the pumping energy to squeeze the last drops of oil from a well whose pressure has fallen so low that it no longer flows without assistance, and the energy to heat the steam to encourage heavy oil to flow into the tapped pool by heating it in the rock formations. This is the kind of energy accounting that if it came out that it really was more efficient to produce ethanol, the author of the “study” would “discover” a line item to pay for the revisions to textbooks to educate the next generation on the evils of fossil fuels in the first place, and on and on until the scales tilted in the desired direction. The real point of the energy input to any liquid fuel is the need to make the fuel suitable for the purpose for which we intend it, which in this case means a portable form of energy that is compatible with internal combustion engines that already exist in the majority of our vehicles. All these calculations that suggest it takes more fossil fuels to create a gallon of ethanol ignore the possibility that the ethanol producers might actually be environmentally conscious. They might be using biodiesel in the tractors and combines in the farm fields. They may be using crop rotation to minimize the need for fertilizers (if any) and pesticides that may be needed on their particular fields (which is only to say, somewhat more so than “average”, which is usually the number statistical studies rely upon).
With those sorts of concerns in mind, BNSF was among the hosts for a seven-city training tour for emergency responders that pulled into Lincoln for Thursday and Friday sessions along the tracks just west of the Haymarket.
Iowa Governor Chet Culver has made a trip to Europe to address wind energy issues at several events in Germany, Denmark, and Spain, delivering major speeches at the American Wind Energy Association Panel and the Husum Wind Conference – the largest wind trade show in Europe.
In an effort to quell some of the rumors that they might back out of building the nation’s largest biodiesel plant, senior managers for Smiling Earth Energy held a press conference today on a dock overlooking the Elizabeth River’s Southern Branch… the future site of a 320-million-gallon-a-year biodiesel refinery.
Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine has released his plan for how Virginia will become more energy independent and practice better energy conservation… and at the top of the list seems to be the promise of more ethanol and biodiesel production.
The latest knock against ethanol claims the green fuel was fueling a spike in wheat prices as more growers were switching to corn acres to provide the feedstock for ethanol. But USDA’s Chief Economist Keith Collins says it just isn’t so. 
California-based grocery store giant Safeway is converting 23 of its stores to run on solar power. 
California Congressman Jerry McNerney joined Safeway officials on a tour of the Dublin store’s rooftop solar panel array. The unit is currently generating electricity to power the 55,000-square-foot retail facility.
The shingles might be black, but a leader in the commercial roofing business in California and Arizona is going green… by using bidiesel for its entire fleet of trucks in California.