NEC 2027

Veterans Enter Fight for RFS

Joanna Schroeder

Two new organizations have entered the fight for the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) today as concerns about the future of the RFS deepen with the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed 2014 renewable fuels volumes going south. VoteVets.org and Americans United for Change held a press teleconference to announce their participation in the counteroffensive against what they are calling, “Big Oil’s lies about the renewable fuel industry’s remarkable record of creating nearly 400,000 American jobs that can’t be VV-AUFC logosoutsourced, revitalizing rural communities, innovating next-generation renewable energy, and making us safer by reducing reliance on oil from unstable foreign regions and regimes that hate us.”

On the call were Jon Soltz, Co-Founder and Chairman of the 360,000+ supporter veterans group, VoteVets.org; Brad Woodhouse, President, Americans United for Change; and Myrna Heddinger, Mayor of Emmetsburg, IA the site of a current POET ethanol plant and the location of Project LIBERTY, a commercial scale cellulosic biorefinery under construction by POET-DSM and expected to go into production my mid-year 2014.

Woodhouse announced a joint campaign between Americans United for Change and VoteVets.org to, “join the fight against big oil and standing up for common sense, bipartisan policies that are helping America become more energy independent.” He noted that the RFS has cut America’s dangerous dependence on foreign oil and because of this bipartisan law, the U.S. now gets 10 percent of its energy from clean renewable sources.

“For the last several months, the oil industry has been waging a misleading and self serving scare campaign against this policy,” Woodhouse added. He said their campaign will be focused on key markets and consists of advertising as well as grassroots and grasstop efforts.

Soltz, who is a veteran, served in Kosovo in 2000 and has done two tours in Iraq. he stressed that the country’s dependence on foreign oil is putting American soldier’s lives at risk. He said that people need to understand that, “If you go after ethanol, potentially you’re funding people who kill our troops. There is no question about it, oil is a blood diamond inside the Middle East that has cost us thousand of lives.”

In addition, Mayor Heddinger stressed the importance of what the ethanol industry has done for the economic revitalization of their community and surrounding towns. When asked what would happen if the ethanol industry were to collapse, she said she doesn’t even want to think of that because she said that if consumers understand the economic, energy security and environmental value of ethanol and other biofuels, the industry will continue to grow.

Listen to the press call here: Veterans Enter Fight for RFS

Audio, biofuels, Ethanol, RFS

BioEnergy Bytes

Joanna Schroeder

  • BioEnergyBytesDFBioPower Operations Corporation, announced today that its wholly-owned subsidiary, Global Energy Crops Corporation has entered into a 50-50 joint venture agreement with Alternative Green Today, LLC to license the Joint Venture’s Intellectual Property for the production of cellulosic biofuels. Targeted companies will include oil companies, sugar companies and all other producers of ethanol and transportation fuels. Global Energy will manage the joint venture.
  • Waukon Feed Ranch in Waukon, Iowa today announced it will begin offering E15 to 2001 and newer vehicles, making it Iowa’s ninth registered E15 retailer. Waukon Feed Ranch is located in Northeast Iowa at 615 Old Highway 9 in Waukon. In addition to E15, Waukon Feed Ranch features a blender pump and offers consumers E85 and other mid-level ethanol blends, as well as biodiesel.
  • According to a new consumer survey from Navigant Research, favorability ratings for alternative fuel vehicles remain high, with all three types of vehicles (hybrid, electric, and natural gas) above the 50 percent mark for favorability. Consumer awareness of specific models, however, is still relatively low: 44 percent of the respondents are familiar with the Chevrolet Volt, but less than one-third are familiar with the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Model S, Ford’s C-Max Energi and BMW’s i3. The survey results are summarized in a free white paper, which is available for download on the Navigant Research website.
  • In Washington, the Department of Energy has launched a new mobile app to help drivers find ethanol, biodiesel, CNG, LPG, and quick-charging EV stations. The app, compiled by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, shows the location of more than 15,000 alternative fueling stations across the nation. The Alternative Fueling Station Locator App, now available through Apple’s App Store, allows iPhone users to select an alternative fuel and find the 20 closest stations within a 30-mile radius. Users can view the locations on a map or as a list containing station addresses, phone numbers and hours of operation.
Bioenergy Bytes

Report: EV Charging Won’t Overload Grid

Joanna Schroeder

According to a recent PSR Analytics report that measured Summer 2013 vehicle charging in the nation’s highest residential concentration of electric cars, electric vehicle (EV) owners are charging their cars much less during hot summer afternoons than most behavioral models predict. The analysis, conduced by Pecan Street Research Institute, found that not only is charging behavior is much more diverse than has been predicted, but represents a much more manageable energy load and may be highly elastic to time-of-use pricing and similar tools.

If such findings are confirmed by other research, it could significantly increase utility industry estimates on the number of EVs the electric grid could handle without triggering disruptions or requiring major system upgrades.

PSR-EV-Report-Distribution-Graph-1024x332Pecan Street’s EV research trial in Austin, Texas has what appears to be the highest U.S. concentration of electric vehicles, including over 50 in a single half-square mile neighborhood. The institute’s data-intensive research trials (currently in three states) has produced the world’s largest research database of residential energy use according to the company.

“EVs represent the largest new electric load to appear in homes in a generation,” said the report’s lead author, Pecan Street CEO Brewster McCracken. “We still have a lot of consumer research ahead of us, but these findings suggest that this new load is not only manageable, but movable.”

Summer afternoon charging has emerged as a point of focus for utilities, particularly for those serving large cities where clusters of EVs have started to appear in some neighborhoods. The concern among utilities is that homeowners with EVs will all charge upon arriving home in the afternoon, and that such charging would occur during the peak demand hours on summer afternoons. During those periods, electric grids in many parts of the world are stressed due primarily to air conditioning loads coming on as people arrive home.Read More

Alternative Vehicles, Electric Vehicles, Electricity

Project Aims to Convert Natural Gas to Butanol

Joanna Schroeder

From microbe to fuel_large

Using enzyme engineering and other capabilities, Sandia National Laboratories will work to engineer pathways from methanotroph organisms into another microbial host that can generate butanol. Butanol has long been considered one of the best biofuel options for transportation energy. (Photo by Dino Vournas)

A new project spearheaded by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are using their expertise in protein expression, enzyme engineering and high-throughput assays to develop biocatalyst technologies that can convert natural gas to liquid fuel or methane to butanol for transportation. The $34 million project by the Advanced Research Project Agency Energy (ARPA-E) is one of a set of 15 Reducing Emissions using Methanotrophic Organisms for Transportation Energy or REMOTE, projects. Sandia is a part of a two-year award led by MOgene Green Chemicals, a wholly owned subsidiary of St. Louis-based MOgene, LC.

The broad goal of REMOTE is to have another source of energy in the U.S. that doesn’t have to be imported and could lead to lower carbon monoxide emissions than conventional fossil fuels.

Methanotrophs are microbes that can metabolize methane. Sandia’s Blake Simmons, manager of the labs’ biofuels and biomaterial science and technology group, calls this microbe the “poster child” of organisms that are capable of metabolizing and converting methane. The goal of the project is to engineer pathways from these organisms into another microbial host that can generate butanol. Butanol can be used as a fuel in an internal combustion engine and, along with ethanol, has long been considered one of the best biofuel options for transportation energy.

“The need for hydrocarbons that are nonpetroleum in origin is still growing, including applications such as aviation and diesel engines,” said Simmons. “But in its natural state, you’re not going to readily burn natural gas in those types of engines, and the same goes for some combustion engines.” Natural gas, he explained, requires a special modification to be used effectively as a liquid fuel in vehicles, much like biomass needs to be converted before it can be used as a drop-in fuel.

“With biomass, we are essentially taking something that exists in nature and converting it into a low-cost, low-carbon, domestically-sourced fuel. With this project, we’re using natural gas as the input rather than biomass,” Simmons continued. Natural gas extracted from the ground is not renewable, he pointed out, but it is playing an increasingly important role for the Department of Energy and the nation’s energy supply.

Simmons said MOgene brings a great deal of organism expertise to the table, while Sandia offers enzyme engineering and other capabilities.

Using organisms to convert natural gas into liquid transportation fuels isn’t a new objective for the research community, Simmons said. “There have been plenty of investigations into this in the past, since there are plenty of organisms in nature that thrive and survive and multiply off of natural gas metabolism. The problem, though, is that they exist in unique, tailored environments and are typically very slow at what they do.”Read More

Alternative energy, biobutanol, Natural Gas, Research

EPA Proposal Pulls the Rug on Advanced Biofuels

Joanna Schroeder

Advanced-Biofuels-Association-LogoAccording to the Michael McAdams, president of the Advanced Biofuels Association, if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sticks with the 2.2 billion gallons in the final rule, the agency will pull the rug out from underneath the growing advanced biofuel industry.

This was in response to the EPA’s proposed 2014 fuel for the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) that proposed the target for advanced biofuels at 2.2 billion gallons with a range from as low as 2 billion gallons and as high as 2.51 billion gallons. The 2.2 billion gallon target represents a 20 percent cut from the 2013 level and a disheartening 1.55 billion gallon reduction from the volume as outlined by statue.

“Innovative companies have responded to the challenge of producing cleaner, low-carbon fuels by investing a collective $14 billion in the development of advanced and cellulosic biofuels. However, today’s proposal reveals that EPA might still deliver a devastating blow to this nascent sector and a victory for the oil industry by cutting the volume requirements for advanced biofuels. Such a move will chill future investments necessary to produce large-scale quantities of renewable fuels that cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50 percent compared to gasoline,” said McAdams.

McAdams explained that RFS compliance is tracked by assigning renewable identification numbers (or RINs) to each ethanol-equivalent gallon of biofuel. “ABFA conservatively estimates that our industry will generate at least 3.5 billion RINs in 2013 that qualify as advanced biofuels, exceeding this year’s target of 2.75 billion advanced RINs by at least 750 million gallons. To continue to support new advanced biofuel production, EPA should set the 2014 advanced biofuel target at 3.75 billion gallons as contemplated by statute. This target can be met and exceeded by current production plus carry-over RINs.”

Anything less than requiring 3.75 billion gallons from advanced biofuels in 2014, he noted, would be a step backwards from the Obama administration’s commitment to address climate change. He also stressed that ensuring the success of the advanced biofuels industry is his top concern and as such will actively engage in the comment period.

As McAdams pointed out, companies still in the development and construction phases will also be significantly affected. James Moe, Chairman of the Board for POET-DSM POET DSM logoAdvanced Biofuels, whose cellulosic ethanol plant is under construction and set to begin full operations by mid-year 2014 noted that next year, for the first time in history, the U.S. will produce meaningful volumes of cellulosic ethanol.

“With a number of new plants coming online including POET-DSM’s Project LIBERTY, we can finally say that commercial cellulosic ethanol production has arrived,” he said.Read More

advanced biofuels, AEC, Cellulosic, Ethanol News, POET, RFS

New Jersey Advances Biodiesel Heating Oil Bill

John Davis

amodeoA bill to make biodiesel part of all heating oil used in New Jersey advanced in the New Jersey legislature. NJPoliticker.com reports the “Bio-based Heating Oil Act,” sponsored by Assembly Deputy Republican Leader John Amodeo, moved out of the Assembly Telecommunications and Utilities Committee.

“By transitioning to bio-based heating oil, we will be producing an efficient, environmentally safe energy source from waste products including inedible animal fats and recycled restaurant grease, and using it to economically heat our homes and businesses,” said Amodeo, R-Atlantic.

A-3161 sets a graduated compliance schedule, requiring all heating oil sold in the state to include 3 percent biodiesel, eventually increasing to 5 percent from July 1, 2014 and thereafter. Biodiesel is biodegradable and produces less air pollutants than petroleum-based diesel.

“By adding a percentage of domestically produced and renewable biodiesel to our heating oil, we will substantially reduce greenhouse gases, and slash household emissions of carbon dioxide by 1.5 million tons per year, according to some experts. More importantly, we can achieve this without expensive investment in infrastructure or increased fuel costs,” Amodeo stated.

Research has actually shown that 20 percent biodiesel blends increase the performance of heating systems.

Miscellaneous

DOE Grant Funds Mechanics’ Biodiesel Training

John Davis

iowabiodieselboardDiesel mechanics in the Midwest are getting some valuable training on how to work on engines using biodiesel. The Iowa Biodiesel Board (IBB) points out the training was held at the group’s headquarters thanks to a U.S. Department of Energy grant for the Biodiesel for Diesel Technicians program, a long-term investment in ensuring consumer confidence in domestically produced biodiesel.

“Educating diesel technicians on biodiesel is mission-critical to biodiesel becoming fully entrenched in our domestic fuel supply,” said Randy Olson, executive director of IBB. “We’ve learned from other industries that having the mechanic on board makes a huge difference in consumer acceptance of a newer fuel.”

The National Biodiesel Board, in partnership with IBB, developed the diesel technician program to prepare diesel technicians to better advise customers and other technicians about impacts of using biodiesel and blends in different equipment.

Topics covered in the trainings include:

Biodiesel’s benefits
Fuel quality
Vehicle maintenance
Engine and fleet performance
Exhaust after-treatment with biodiesel

“These instructors will take new knowledge of biodiesel back to their schools, where they then have the opportunity to educate hundreds of mechanics over time,” said Stephanie Weisenbach, Iowa’s Clean Cities Coordinator. “We’re proud to be a part of this effort, which is a great fit with the Clean Cities mission of reducing petroleum consumption in transportation.”

The Biodiesel for Diesel Technicians program has been around since 2009, and this particular session trained mechanics from Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska. The program is Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) accredited.

Biodiesel, Government

Solar Thermal Capacity Set to Double

Joanna Schroeder

According to a recent Today in Energy published by the U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) with the expectations that several large, new solar thermal power plants will come online by the end of 2013, solar thermal generating capacity in the U.S. will more than double. The projects feature different solar thermal technologies and storage options. For example, Abengoa’s Solana plant, which came on line in October 2013, is a 250-megawatt (MW) parabolic trough plant in Gila Bend, Arizona with integrated thermal storage. BrightSource’s Ivanpah, expected Ivanpah Photo US DOEto enter service by the end of 2013, is a 391-MW power tower plant in California’s Mojave Desert and does not include storage.

Solana and Ivanpah are much larger than solar thermal plants that have previously entered service in the U.S. Previously, a few smaller-scale and demonstration solar thermal projects have entered service with the only other dedicated solar thermal plants larger than 10 MW in the U.S. being the series of Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS) plants built in California in the 1980s and early 1990s and the Nevada Solar One parabolic trough project completed in 2007.

EIA projections for total solar thermal capacity additions in 2013 and 2014 include six projects for a total of 1,257 MW, with more expected in 2015 and 2016. However, while these solar thermal capacity additions are significant for the technology, they represent only 4% of total expected capacity additions for 2013 and 2014. Solar thermal capacity additions also continue to be outpaced by solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity additions, even though solar PV has only meaningfully entered the utility-scale market in the past few years.

All five of the major solar thermal projects, including Solana and Ivanpah, that are scheduled to come on line in 2013 and 2014 were awarded loans through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program. Solana received a federal loan guarantee for $1.45 billion of the approximately $2 billion cost of the project, according to the parent company, Abengoa. BrightSource Energy reports a $1.6 billion federal loan guarantee on the approximately $2.2 billion Ivanpah project.

Electricity, Renewable Energy, Solar

BioEnergy Bytes

Joanna Schroeder

  • BioEnergyBytesDFAmyris, Inc. has announced that Paulo Diniz, currently President of Amyris Brasil, will become Amyris’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO) on an interim basis following the decision of its current CFO, Steve Mills, to step down for personal reasons. Diniz will assume the new responsibilities by December 15, 2013, at which time Mills will transition to an advisory role with the Company. Amyris has begun an executive search to evaluate potential internal and external candidates to permanently fill the position.
  • LDK Solar Co., Ltd. has announced the appointment of Dr. Shi Chen to its board of directors. Dr. Chen will serve as a non-executive director.
  • A new plastic to oil company, Poly2Petro, has begun operations according to CEO Steven Mills. The newly established corporation plans to build and expand plastic to oil conversion facilities containing a unique system that can process co-mingled or contaminated plastic waste that no other technology can currently accomplish.
  • SunEdison has launched the SunEdison Solar Water Pump, a high performance solar PV-based water pump specially designed for agriculture. The Solar Water Pump will address a significant market, and help increase crop yield by delivering reliable irrigation without dependence on expensive diesel fuel or intermittent electrical power supply.
Bioenergy Bytes

Cellic Ctec Enzyme Featured in Cellulosic Plant

Joanna Schroeder

It was only a few weeks ago that one of the largest, if not the largest commercial scale advanced biofuel facility in the world using enzymatic technology marked the official opening in Crescentino, Italy. The project partners included global companies Beta Renewables and Novozymes.

Crescentino Fast FactsThe biorefinery features Novozymes Cellic® CTec enzymes, a technology developed and refined specifically for the cellulosic ethanol industry. The multi-feedstock facility uses wheat straw, rice straw and arundo donax to produce ethanol.

To learn more about Cellic and how the enzyme technology was refined for this project, I spoke with Jason Blake, Director, Biomass Conversion with Novozymes who explained that the genesis for the project began several years back. The relationship with Beta Renewables was one of collaboration that began in the lab and in the pilot facility in looking at making a commercially viable project for Beta Renewables.

Through the efforts the team has been looking at technologies and developments to optimize the process technology and optimize the enzyme technology to help them become a commercially viable player in the market. In addition, with co-marketing plans in place, the two companies plan on bringing the technologies to market to help the advanced biofuels industry grow.

So why are enzymes so important in the ethanol production process? “Enzymes are unique in the process. They play a part not just in the hydrolysis piece they can unlock opportunities along the process technology value chain, explained Blake.”

Enzymes, he explained have been able to reduce the cost of capital at the front end. “Through the development of the enzymes and increasing the performance, we’re able to reduce the enzyme dosage and reduce the hydrolysis time and increase the sugar conversions which thereby open up opportunities to invest money in other areas,” he said.

Blake also explained that the enzyme technology is optimized for each plant’s technology and feedstock allowing the company’s research and development to extend well into the future of the industry.

For more information about the collaboration between Novozymes and Beta Renewables and to learn more about the philosophy and research and development efforts of Novozymes, listen to my in-depth interview with Jason Blake. Novozymes Cellic Ctec Enzyme Featured in Cellulosic Plant

advanced biofuels, Audio, Cellulosic, enzymes, Ethanol, Novozymes