1st Demonstration-scale Cellulosic Ethanol Plant Opens in U.S.

A 1.4 million gallon demonstration-scale plant will use waste biomass to make biofuel.

A biorefinery built to produce 1.4 million gallons of ethanol a year from cellulosic biomass will open tomorrow in Jennings, LA. Built by Verenium, based in Cambridge, MA, the plant will make ethanol from agricultural waste left over from processing sugarcane.

The new Verenium plant is the first demonstration-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in the United States. It will be used to try out variations on the company's technology and is designed to run continuously. Verenium wants to demonstrate that it can create ethanol for $2 a gallon, which it hopes will make the fuel competitive with other types of ethanol and gasoline. Next year, the company plans to begin construction on commercial plants that will each produce about 20 to 30 million gallons of ethanol a year.

Until now, technology for converting nonfood feedstocks into ethanol has been limited to the lab and to small-scale pilot plants that can produce thousands of gallons of ethanol a year. Since these don't operate continuously, they don't give an accurate idea of how much it will ultimately cost to produce cellulosic ethanol in a commercial-scale facility.

Almost all ethanol biofuel in the United States is currently made from corn kernels. But the need for cellulosic feedstocks of ethanol has been underscored recently as food prices worldwide have risen sharply, in part because of the use of corn as a source of biofuels. At the same time, the rising cost of corn and gas have begun to make cellulosic ethanol more commercially attractive, says Wallace Tyner, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University. A new Renewable Fuels Standard, part of an energy bill that became law late last year, mandates the use of 100 million gallons of cellulosic biofuels by 2010, and 16 billion by 2022.

So far, however, there are no commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants in operation in the United States, although a number of facilities are scheduled to start production in the next few years. The Department of Energy is currently funding more than a dozen companies that will be building demonstration- and commercial-scale plants. One of these, Range Fuels, based in Broomfield, CO, plans to open a commercial-scale plant next year. It will have the capacity to produce 20 million gallons of ethanol and methanol a year.

Verenium will use a combination of acid pretreatments, enzymes, and two types of bacteria to make ethanol from the plant matter--called bagasse--that's left over from processing sugarcane to make sugar. It will also process what's called energy cane, a relative of sugarcane that's lower in sugar and higher in fiber. The high fiber content allows the plants to grow taller, increasing yield from a given plot of land.

Cane bagasse largely consists of bundles of cellulose that are surrounded by hemicellulose. Cellulose is made of long chains of glucose, a six-carbon sugar of the type usually fermented to make ethanol from sources such as corn. Hemicellulose, however, is made of five-carbon sugars, which typically can't be fermented using the same organisms as glucose. One of the things that makes Verenium's process novel, says John Malloy, the company's executive vice president, is its ability to ferment sugars from both cellulose and hemicellulose.

The process begins when the cane is ground up and cooked under high pressure with a mild acid to hydrolyze the hemicellulose and separate it from the cellulose. The five-carbon sugars in hemicellulose are then fermented using genetically modified E. coli. The cellulose is broken down with enzymes and fermented with another type of bacteria called Klebsiella oxytoca. This bacteria does double duty, since it also produces enzymes that break down cellulose, reducing the amount of enzymes from outside sources by 50 percent. The dilute ethanol produced from fermentation of both types of sugar is then distilled to make fuel.

In addition to opening the demonstration plant, Verenium is also starting to grow energy cane and to work with local farmers to ensure a steady stream of material for its planned commercial plants. Short term, the company says that it can rely on leftover bagasse from sugar production, but eventually it will draw on energy cane grown specifically to make ethanol. Provisions in the Farm Bill, which was recently passed by the United States Congress, will help by providing farmers with incentives to plant energy crops, says Carlos Riva, Verenium's CEO. The incentives are important because it takes two to three years for energy cane, a perennial plant, to become established and reach ideal production levels. As a result, farmers will need to start planting the crops next year, before commercial plants are built and there is a market for these crops.

The opening of the demonstration plant, and the current construction of a number of other demonstration- and commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plants, marks a turning point for the industry, Riva says. The development of improved enzymes and fermentation organisms means that no further scientific breakthroughs are needed to make cellulosic ethanol commercially successful, he says. "There's been a tremendous amount of background work in science and technology development," he says. "We've learned so much about the process that the really important thing now is to start to deploy the technology at a commercial scale."

Source - Technology Review

Photo Credit: Shelly Harrison Photography

100 MPG - CalCars and the beauty of high-mileage ideas

By Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks Special to the Apollo News Service

To see the future of the American automobile, take a spin down to Corte Madera, California, and introduce yourself to the CalCars boys.

This group of rebels met one sunny day in April 2004 in the garage of a typical condominium ten miles north of the Golden Gate, determined to roll out a car that could be “fueled” by plugging it into a wall at night with a standard extension cord and run on gas when needed. It was a Toyota Prius when they started and a symbol of an American revolution in automobiles when they finished.

The group was led by Felix Kramer, an entrepreneur who had an idea as big as his mustache. In 2003, after selling his Internet start-up, he cast about for his next adventure and landed on an audacious quest: to revolutionize the auto industry.

He knew that gas-powered, internal combustion cars were destroying the atmosphere and deepening our addiction to oil, and that things had to change. He stumbled on the work of Andy Frank at the University of California at Davis and Bob Graham at the Electric Power Research Institute. They are brilliant inventors who had radically re-thought how to power a car and created a blueprint for the first hybrid you could charge on the grid. Kramer decided to build a mass market for this change.

“Our whole auto configuration was decided by just a very few people, a handful of big auto company execs and the government. They had fouled up,” he said. “It was time to expand the number of Americans who had a hand in this future. So I decided to build a large group of folks who would demand the production of a clean, efficient car. To do that, I knew we had to first build such a car. So that’s exactly what we did.”

A multi-talented group of innovators answered Kramer's Internet call. They met in a garage owned by one of the new members of the team. Then they put the Internet to work to generate “open source” ideas they could incorporate into the design. Two years and a thousand feet of wire later they had converted a 2004 Prius into a car capable of driving on nothing but electricity from the garage wall jack for its first twenty-five miles each day. Kramer's plug-in may be the first car ever built “over the Internet.”

Secret SwitchIt was not an easy project. They succeeded only after discovering a secret switch that had literally been hidden in the American version of the Prius hybrid, which allowed the car to run in an all-electric mode, never relying on the gasoline engine. That discovery triggered Felix’s revelation that if he could boost the battery capacity, he could create a hybrid with monstrous mileage. So they went to work with a collection of tools, $700 worth of old nickel hydride batteries, and a growing collection of car enthusiasts who hovered around the garage at all hours.

When they finally drove their number out of the driveway and down the street in September 2004, Kramer felt justifiable pride. “All kinds of people want this kind of car: people like generals who care about security; environmentalists who care about the planet; and municipalities who care about cost.

“But it seems the last people in the world to ‘get it’ are the big car companies,” Kramer added. “Now that our CalCars cars are on the road, and these cars are being built in various places around the country, our vision is going to force changes. That is now happening.”

Plug-in, Second GenerationIt sure is. Kramer now has been tooling around California for 15,000 happy miles in his second-generation plug-in. It uses lithium ion batteries, gets a hundred miles per gallon of gas, and costs one cent a mile to run. Compare that to nine cents a mile to fuel a typical car with just gas. It is a miser of a car.

Kramer owns the first plug-in hybrid ever commercially sold in America. Plug-in hybrids are not yet rolling off assembly lines, but custom conversions like Kramer’s — built by EnergyCS, a small start-up in California that is beginning to make plug-in conversions available to the public — are being sought by an ever-growing market. Many more will follow.

Kramer takes joy in the car’s simplicity. He plugs a 19-inch cord in the rear bumper into a standard extension cord in his garage at night. Tooling around town, he is in all-electric mode for the first twenty-five quiet miles, covering the majority of his commutes gasoline free. He delights when he goes into forums of energy experts and shows them the little cord he uses.

“This is all the infrastructure we need to remake our car world,” he says. “We don’t have to build huge infrastructure for hydrogen. We can just ship clean electricity over the wires.”

What’s more, Kramer can smile as he drives, because with every mile he is saving CO2 emissions. He says, “When the car is in all-electric mode, it is putting out 60 percent less CO2 than a normal gas car, even taking into consideration all the CO2 coming out of the stacks of the plants that generate the electricity. Even if we never improve our electrical grid a bit, and even if people drive way more than the batteries can hold, some studies have shown this car can reduce CO2 by 36 percent. This is the best thing on the global warming front going.”

As an added bonus, Kramer’s wonder car has an attribute no mortal and few machines can claim—it gets better with age. “The electrical grid feeding my car is going to get cleaner over time,” he explains. “Instead of burning coal that releases carbon, we will be relying more and more on wind power, solar power, and geothermal. So the fuel—electricity—driving my car is going to get cleaner every year. How many cars do you know that get better the longer they are on the road?”

What About Detroit?Can Detroit deliver anything comparable?

We asked Tom and Ray Magliozzi, better known as Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, stars of the nationally syndicated radio talk show Car Talk. Their opinions are not exactly nuanced: “For thirty years now the companies have put everything they had into more power instead of more efficiency.”

Ray, who has a degree from MIT—as does Tom—and now runs Ray’s Garage in Cambridge, Massachusetts, elaborates: “The technology has been incredible, but it’s all about power. If the companies had put into efficiency what they have put into power, we would be driving cars getting sixty miles per gallon now. They have done fuel injection and computer-controlled engines but have not put those gains into efficiency. Any high schooler could have done better if they had wanted to.”

Indeed, Detroit cannot lead the way into the future by tinkering at the margins of its old business model. Nor can it get away with disingenuous promises of cleaner cars and ad campaigns that show gas-guzzling SUVs bringing us closer to nature. It will have to adopt the same spirit of innovation as Felix Kramer and his plug-in crew.

With General Motors now poised to release the plug-in hybrid electric Volt, it just might be that the revolution Kramer sought to provoke is starting to take hold. Only time will tell if the big three are ready to get serious about radical new designs that break our addiction to oil. But the technology is fast approaching that can help US auto companies make the leap beyond the small efficiency gains that have dominated recent fights, and finally launch us into a future of clean and efficient energy.

A National Security BenefitWhen plug-in technology is combined with a flex-fuel engine that can burn gas or biofuels, it can actually get vastly higher mileage per gallon of gas. Even without using biofuels, it reduces our dependence on foreign fuel, because 97 percent of the electricity it consumes is produced from domestic energy sources. Kramer’s car is virtually free of Saudi Arabian influence.

Excitement for hybrids is not confined to the road. Utilities salivate over the prospect of turning the storage capacity of plug-in batteries into an adjunct to the electrical grid. Power plants may soon be able to feed their juice into our car batteries at night when demand is lowest, using base electric load more efficiently and storing energy in our cars while they are parked for use during the day. In this way, our cars may one day serve to level out electrical supply and demand on the grid as we slumber.

Roger Duncan, vice president of Austin Energy, a Texas utility, is working to make plug-ins a regular feature of the grid. He has organized a massive national grassroots initiative called Plug-In Partners, which has demonstrated the demand for these cars with pledges from literally hundreds of cities, businesses, and non-profits from Chicago to Phoenix, from California Edison to the U.S. PIRGs (Public Interest Research Groups). Chicago is retrofitting 850 plug-in hybrids, and New York State is converting the 600 hybrids in its fleet to plug-ins.2 Several companies are already converting hybrids for commercial sale using the ideas of these pioneers.

A garage gave birth to Hewlett-Packard and the electronic age, not to mention rock and roll and the modern entertainment industry. A garage may also have given birth to the future of personal transportation and the age of the plug-in car.

Grass Makes Better Ethanol than Corn Does

Farmers in Nebraska and the Dakotas brought the U.S. closer to becoming a biofuel economy, planting huge tracts of land for the first time with switchgrass—a native North American perennial grass (Panicum virgatum) that often grows on the borders of cropland naturally—and proving that it can deliver more than five times more energy than it takes to grow it.

Working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the farmers tracked the seed used to establish the plant, fertilizer used to boost its growth, fuel used to farm it, overall rainfall and the amount of grass ultimately harvested for five years on fields ranging from seven to 23 acres in size (three to nine hectares).

Once established, the fields yielded from 5.2 to 11.1 metric tons of grass bales per hectare, depending on rainfall, says USDA plant scientist Ken Vogel. "It fluctuates with the timing of the precipitation,'' he says. "Switchgrass needs most of its moisture in spring and midsummer. If you get fall rains, it's not going to do that year's crops much good."

But yields from a grass that only needs to be planted once would deliver an average of 13.1 megajoules of energy as ethanol for every megajoule of petroleum consumed—in the form of nitrogen fertilizers or diesel for tractors—growing them. "It's a prediction because right now there are no biorefineries built that handle cellulosic material" like that which switchgrass provides, Vogel notes. "We're pretty confident the ethanol yield is pretty close." This means that switchgrass ethanol delivers 540 percent of the energy used to produce it, compared with just roughly 25 percent more energy returned by corn-based ethanol according to the most optimistic studies.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is partially funding the construction of six such cellulosic biorefineries, estimated to cost a total of $1.2 billion. The first to be built will be the Range Fuels Biorefinery in Soperton, Ga., which will process wood waste from the timber industry into biofuels and chemicals. The DOE is providing an initial $50 million to start construction.

"Cost competitive, energy responsible cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass or from forestry waste like sawdust and wood chips requires a more complex refining process but it's worth the investment," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said at the Range Fuels facility groundbreaking in November. "Cellulosic ethanol contains more net energy and emits significantly fewer greenhouse gases than ethanol made from corn."

In fact, Vogel and his team report this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that switchgrass will store enough carbon in its relatively permanent root system to offset 94 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted both to cultivate it and from the derived ethanol burned by vehicles. Of course, this estimate also relies on using the leftover parts of the grass itself as fuel for the biorefinery. "The lignin in the plant cell walls can be burned," Vogel says.

The use of native prairie grasses is meant to avoid some of the other risks associated with biofuels such as reduced diversity of local animal life and displacing food crops with fuel crops. "This is an energy crop that can be grown on marginal land," Vogel argues, such as the more than 35 million acres (14.2 million hectares) of marginal land that farmers are currently paid not to plant under the terms of USDA's Conservation Reserve Program.

But even a native prairie grass needs a helping hand from scientists and farmers to deliver the yields necessary to help ethanol become a viable alternative to petroleum-derived gasoline, Vogel argues. "To really maximize their yield potential, you need to provide nitrogen fertilization," he says, as well as improved breeding techniques and genetic strains. "Low input systems are just not going to be able to get the energy per acre needed to provide feed, fuel and fiber."

To the source

Algae Emerges as a Potential Fuel Source

Roger Ruan of the University of Minnesota says algae is a far more efficient fuel crop than corn.

ST. PAUL, Dec. 1 (AP) — The 16 big flasks of bubbling bright green liquids in Roger Ruan’s laboratory at the University of Minnesota are part of a new boom in renewable energy research.
Driven by renewed investment as oil prices push $100 a barrel, Dr. Ruan and scores of scientists around the world are racing to turn algae into a commercially viable energy source.

Some algae is as much as 50 percent oil that can be converted into biodiesel or jet fuel. The biggest challenge is cutting the cost of production, which by one Defense Department estimate is running more than $20 a gallon.

“If you can get algae oils down below $2 a gallon, then you’ll be where you need to be,” said Jennifer Holmgren, director of the renewable fuels unit of UOP, an energy subsidiary of Honeywell International. “And there’s a lot of people who think you can.”

Researchers are trying to figure out how to grow enough of the right strains of algae and how to extract the oil most efficiently. Over the past two years they have received more money from governments, the Pentagon, big oil companies, utilities and venture capital firms.

The federal government halted its main algae research program nearly a decade ago, but technology has advanced and oil prices have climbed since then, and an Energy Department laboratory announced in late October that it was partnering with Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, in the hunt for better strains of algae.

“It’s not backyard inventors at this point at all,” said George Douglas, a spokesman for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an arm of the Energy Department. “It’s folks with experience to move it forward.”

A New Zealand company demonstrated a Range Rover powered by an algae biodiesel blend last year, but experts say algae will not be commercially viable for many years. Dr. Ruan said demonstration plants could be built within a few years.

Converting algae oil into biodiesel uses the same process that turns vegetable oils into biodiesel. But the cost of producing algae oil is hard to pin down because nobody is running the process start to finish other than in a laboratory, Mr. Douglas said.

If the price of production can be reduced, the advantages of algae include the fact that it grows much faster and in less space than conventional energy crops. An acre of corn can produce about 20 gallons of oil per year, Dr. Ruan said, compared with a possible 15,000 gallons of oil per acre of algae.

An algae farm could be located almost anywhere. It would not require converting cropland from food production to energy production. It could use sea water and could consume pollutants from sewage and power plants.

The Pentagon’s research arm, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is financing research into producing jet fuel from plants, including algae. The agency is already working with the Honeywell subsidiary, General Electric and the University of North Dakota. In November, it requested additional research proposals.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: December 2, 2007

Oil from Wood - Startup Kior has developed a process for creating "biocrude" directly from biomass.

Dutch biofuels startup Bioecon and Khosla Ventures have launched a joint venture called Kior, which will commercialize Bioecon's process for converting agricultural waste directly into "biocrude," a mixture of small hydrocarbon molecules that can be processed into fuels such as gasoline or diesel in existing oil refineries. The process, Kior claims, boasts numerous advantages over other methods of producing biofuels: it could prove relatively cheap, relies on a nontoxic catalyst, taps into the present fuel-refining and transportation infrastructure, and produces clean-burning fuels that can be used in existing engines.

Biofuels are widely seen as a key stepping-stone on the path from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, particularly for transportation. Their use could also reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. But ethanol, the most widely produced biofuel, contains little energy compared with gasoline or diesel. And a great deal of energy goes into its production: growing the grain from which it is fermented, distilling it, and transporting it. Many biofuels boosters have pinned their hopes on finding ways to produce ethanol from cellulose, the tough polymer that makes up much of plant stems and wood. In practice, though, cellulose must be broken down into simple sugars before it can be fermented into ethanol or converted into synthetic gas and turned into fuels. Despite three decades of research, these remain difficult, expensive, and energy-intensive processes that are not yet commercially viable. Additionally, recent research shows that ethanol, which is highly volatile, may actually exacerbate smog problems when it evaporates directly into the air instead of burning in vehicle engines.

The way to make cellulosic biofuels viable, says Bioecon's founder, Paul O'Connor, is to use catalysts to convert biomass into a hydrocarbon biocrude that can be processed into gasoline and diesel in existing petroleum refineries. After decades developing catalysts for the petroleum industry, O'Connor started Bioecon in early 2006 to develop methods for converting biomass directly into biofuels. His first success is a catalytic process that can convert cellulosic biomass into short-chain hydrocarbons about six to thirteen carbon atoms long. Khosla Ventures agreed to provide an undisclosed amount of series A funding to spinoff Kior in order to commercialize the process. Vinod Khosla, founder of the venture fund, believes that converting biomass into liquid transportation fuels is key to decreasing greenhouse-gas emissions and compensating for dwindling petroleum reserves. Khosla is funding a number of biofuels startups with competing technologies and says that Kior's approach is unique. "They have some very clever proprietary catalytic approaches that are pretty compelling," he says. "They can produce relatively cheap crude oil--that's attractive."

The most effective method of converting biomass into fuel is to subject it to high temperatures and high pressure to produce synthetic gas, or syngas. In the presence of a catalyst, the syngas reacts to produce fuels such as ethanol or methanol (used as an additive in biodiesel). But this is a costly process, and catalysts able to withstand the high temperature of the syngas are expensive and frequently toxic.

Attempts to produce fuel by directly exposing agricultural cellulose to a catalyst have had little success because most of the cellulose is trapped inside plant stems and stalks. O'Connor says that while the Bioecon researchers are developing new catalysts, their "biomass cracking" process is the real breakthrough. Using proprietary methods, they have been able to insert a catalyst inside the structure of the biomass, improving the contact between the materials and increasing the efficiency of the process. While O'Connor won't go into details, he says that the most basic version of the technique might involve impregnating the biomass with a solution containing the catalyst; the catalyst would then be recrystallized. "What we're doing now is improving the method to make it easier and cheaper," O'Connor says.

Such a method would eliminate the need for the superhigh temperatures and toxic catalysts used in other thermochemical methods for cellulosic-biofuel production. While O'Connor says that he is still improving Kior's catalyst, his first versions are different kinds of modified clays, which are both cheap and environmentally friendly. The product is high quality as well, containing less acid, oxygen, and water. These characteristics make it suitable for burning as heating oil or for use in petroleum refineries, which can use existing processes and equipment to convert it into the longer hydrocarbon chains of gasoline and diesel fuel.

Bioecon has produced lab-scale quantities of its biocrude, a few grams at a time, from materials such as wood shavings, sugarcane waste, and various grasses. While the input material affects the yield somewhat, O'Connor says that the output is "all very similar, so we do not have a real preference." This means that the process can work around the world, with whatever biomass is locally available, almost year-round.

Kior is already in talks with at least two oil companies to establish partnerships to further develop the technology. It is starting a pilot plant with one company that should produce around 20 kilograms of biocrude a day within six to twelve months, says Kior CEO Rob van der Meij. If all goes well, the process could scale up to production of hundreds of kilos per day by 2009, and refined versions of Kior's biocrude might be blended into gasoline or diesel by 2010. In addition to being renewable, these fuels would have lower sulfur and nitrogen content, which should decrease smog in cities such as Los Angeles and Houston.

Because of its ability to slide into the existing petroleum refining and delivery infrastructure, the technology has a huge cost advantage, says O'Connor. It could also be adopted much more rapidly, according to Khosla. "If you can do a solution that's compatible with the oil companies and their current refineries, it becomes much easier for them to get comfortable with it," he says. "Getting them into the game would be a big addition."

Steve Deutch, a senior research scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, says that the little information Kior has released about its process is plausible enough, but that until the details are available, the company's claims are "not really possible to evaluate." The main challenge for Kior, or anyone working on cellulosic fuels, Deutch says, is to develop a process simple enough to bring close to the sources of biomass--farms. "Collecting biomass and getting enough of it in one place to make a difference is a problem in the biomass world," Deutch says. "Trucking costs can become exorbitant. You want to preprocess it at the farm and then ship a high-density, high-energy intermediate to processing plants."

Bio-fuel Expert and Ethanol ‘God-Father’ to Speak at Renewable Energy Conferences and Seminars

The International Institute for Sustainable Agriculture announced today that its founder and current Executive Director, David Blume has been asked to appear on radio, TV, and as a lead speaker for a number of renewable energy symposiums in the coming two months. Blume is globally acknowledged as the “god-father” of ethanol and is a leading advocate and expert on renewable solutions to the global need for inexpensive, non- polluting, and sustainable energy and food sources.

Blume’s coming talks provide unrivaled insight into the practicality of transforming US energy production and use to a totally sustainable model. Blume presents myth-busting facts, scientific data, and proven methodologies that give audiences a revolutionary first-person look at truly sustainable solutions to global warming, GreenHouse Gas emissions, food resource issues as well as provide them with a road-map to a new post-oil economy.

As part of his coming in-person appearances, Blume will be a featured guest on the Thom Hartmann Radio Program. Now in its fifth year of national syndication and heard globally on XM and Sirius satellite radio, Hartmann’s program is carried in 7 of the nation’s top 10 media markets and 14 of the top 25 markets. Hartmann is also a featured commentator in the new Leonardo DiCaprio environmental documentary The 11th Hour.

Hartmann calls Blume’s work “brilliant!” and his soon to be released book “Alcohol Can Be A Gas,” “a must read for every American.” Blume has spent years battling with big oil interests and has dedicated his life to providing a practical and truly renewable solution to the world’s quest for inexpensive, non-polluting and sustainable energy and food sources.

Larry Mitchell, Chief Executive Officer of the American Corn Growers Association recently said, “I have personally worked in the renewable energy sector in one form or another for close to four decades and I recommend David Blume’s “Alcohol Can Be a Gas” as the most comprehensive and understandable book on renewable fuels I have ever read on the subject.”

Blume’s renewable energy talks address the current oligarchy misinformation campaign and misstated concepts including:

Myth: Food vs. Fuel – Does ethanol demand compete with food production?

Fact: Only 5 % of all US farmland is used for growing corn and only 28% of the crop’s starch is used for fuel production leaving all the protein and fat as a higher quality animal feed than the original corn. Ethanol demand required an additional 11.3 million acres of corn this year to avoid affecting the food supply but farmers grew 14.6 million acres.

Contrary to widely reported stories in the press ethanol demand has had NO EFFECT on the price of corn or availability for human or animal food. In fact there will be a massive surplus of corn this year. Increased corn and food prices are due to higher petroleum costs for transportation, fossil fuel based fertilizer and processing energy.

Myth: Alcohol Can’t Run Our Cars — It would be too expensive to retool all the cars on the road to run on an alcohol fuel mix

Fact: Any and all fuel injected cars (the predominant engine produced since 1980) can run on a 50% blend of alcohol and gas with no modification (and most newer cars will run on an 85-100% alcohol with inexpensive modifications)

Myth: It would be too expensive to ramp up industry to produce ethanol/alcohol

Fact: The US has spent $500 billion (USD) on the Iraq war as of this year, 500 billion gallons per year is the total global fuel consumption, and $500 billion (USD) would build a global, renewable, greenhouse effect reversing, ethanol fuel industry that would replace all gasoline and diesel fuel planet-wide permanently.

Blume was recently a featured speaker at the Mid-West Renewable Energy Fair in Wisconsin, and SolFest in Hopland, CA. His coming appearances include a featured guest appearance on Thom Hartmann’s Air America Program in October, Santa Cruz Community TV’s EcoReview September 25, speaking at Portland State University October 6, at the Peak Oil sponsored forum in Salem, OR, October 7, at the Retzer Nature Center near Milwaukee, WI, on Oct. 20, at the University of Illinois Chicago campus on Oct. 27 and at the Green Careers Conference at U.C. Berkeley on Nov 17.

About David Blume:

For more information about the International Institute for Sustainable Agriculture or author, lecturer David Blume, his coming “Alcohol Can Be A Gas” book release and current speaking engagement schedule please visit: http://www.permaculture.com/

Source of this excerpt post: www.earthtalk.org

Favorable winds fueling sharp rise in renewable-energy stocks

By Steven Mufson The Washington Post

The planet isn't the only thing heating up because of climate change. Some renewable-energy stocks have been pretty hot too.

Shares of Vestas Wind Systems, the world's biggest maker of wind turbines, have doubled in the past year, despite the market's latest turmoil. The Danish company is ramping up production in its two biggest markets, China and the U.S., and expects sales to rise 17 percent this year. It recently announced that profit jumped fivefold in the most recent quarter.

Vestas might seem a perfect place to invest for an era of global climate change. The fortunes of many firms are tied to changes in the Earth's temperatures and to the evolving legislative climate, and that can present an array of investment opportunities, as well as pitfalls. There are builders of nuclear power plants, traditional utilities, wind turbine-makers, solar companies and biofuel firms.

"This is not a social or moral issue only. It's an investment issue," said Edward Kerschner, chief investment strategist at Citigroup Inc. "Whether or not you believe in climate change is not germane to how you invest your money."

But before jumping in, investors would be wise to carefully study the companies involved. Vestas, for example, faces hurdles. Wind turbines use hundreds of parts that are in limited supply, raising the specter of bottlenecks despite strong demand. The company also depends in large measure on continued government subsidies. And it faces stiff competition as companies such as General Electric Co. and Siemens AG expand and take aim at Vestas' market-leading position.

Investors also need to pay close attention to action in Congress. The final details of climate-change legislation, such as whether to auction or distribute carbon-dioxide emission allowances, could turn some companies from losers to winners, or vice versa.

One thing a lot of analysts agree on: Some kind of regulation or tax for emissions is coming, and that could affect the fortunes of several companies, including Lake Forest-based Tenneco Inc. and Chicago-based Exelon Corp.

Though not the most potent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide is the most common, accounting for 77 percent of the gases. And because carbon dioxide is produced by the most common forms of energy use -- coal, oil and natural gas -- that could alter a wide range of behavior and investments.

*Transportation. California and Florida plan to require the carbon content of tailpipe emissions to drop by at least 10 percent by 2020. That won't help just Toyota Motor Corp. and its hybrid vehicles, but Tenneco, which supplies emission-reduction technologies for diesel-fueled engines, could benefit, Citigroup said.

Tenneco has jumped 25 percent since the start of the year. Diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines and, as a result, diesel-powered vehicles emit 10 percent to 30 percent less carbon dioxide than gasoline-fueled ones.

Anticipating a rise in diesel market share, Marathon Oil Corp. is investing in its largest U.S. refinery to be able to produce equal quantities of gasoline and diesel. Marathon is up 13 percent since the start of the year. Diesel car sales will climb to about 750,000 this year, but sales of gas-electric hybrid vehicles are growing faster and pose competition for carbon-conscious consumers.

*Coal. If Congress and the White House agree on legislation that puts a price on carbon-dioxide emissions, utilities that have a lot of nuclear power capacity, such as Exelon, could benefit from being able to sell carbon-free electricity. Others, such as American Electric Power Co., whose coal-fired plants are leading emitters of carbon dioxide, could face new costs.

A cap-and-trade system would set a national ceiling on emissions and issue allowances for that amount. Companies with extra allowances could sell them to those falling short.

Any company that figures out the best method of separating carbon dioxide from coal-plant emissions and burying it safely underground stands to make lots of money. There are three unproven, and costly, technologies now, pioneered by the likes of GE, Siemens, Babcock & Wilcox and Alstom.

Meanwhile, the coal rush has shown some signs of slowing. Several plants have been blocked by lawsuits, soaring construction costs and regulatory delays. Citigroup recently downgraded coal stocks.

*Biofuel. Federal regulations requiring growing use of ethanol by gasoline refiners have boosted the fortunes of countless ethanol producers. Ethanol production in January averaged 375,000 barrels a day, up 30 percent from the year before. Legislation approved by the Senate would require that use to rise to 2.3 million barrels a day over the next 15 years, half of it corn-based and half using other plants, such as wood chips or switch grass, as feedstocks.

Corn-based ethanol saves little energy compared with petroleum because of the energy that goes into growing and distilling corn. Cellulosic ethanol, or sugar-based ethanol, has a better balance between energy and carbon and would fare better than corn-based rivals under legislation that placed a value and price on carbon emissions.

So far, however, all the major U.S. ethanol producers, led by Decatur-based Archer Daniels Midland Co. and Verasun Energy Corp., use corn. Profits at those firms have been squeezed by high corn prices.

*Solar power. This is much more expensive than other forms of power generation, but it would become more competitive if lawmakers tax or price carbon-dioxide emissions."Electricity prices could go up 50 percent over the next 10 years. Then solar will be cheaper than the grid," said Jesse Pichel, a senior analyst at Piper Jaffray, who expects rising oil and coal prices and falling solar costs as companies innovate the way semiconductor chip firms did. For now, solar relies heavily on government subsidies.

Shares of Suntech Power Holdings Co, a Chinese maker of photovoltaic cells used in solar panels, were up as much as 35 percent in the past year before sliding during the market turbulence this month. The company's output has surged, however, making it the world's fourth-biggest manufacturer of solar cells in 2006. Next year's Summer Olympics in Beijing could prove to be a showcase for Suntech's products.

Although the problem of polysilicon shortages and a sevenfold price increase over five years is squeezing profits at Suntech and its competitors, it has proved a boon to companies that turn sand into polysilicon. Among those companies are a unit of Dow Corning and MEMC Electronic Materials Inc., based in St. Peters, Mo. The polysilicon industry is expected to more than double production by 2010.

*Nuclear power. Advocates for nuclear power believe their time has come. The Bush administration has been pushing for a nuclear power revival, and the Energy Policy Act of 2005 contains powerful financial incentives, especially for the first half-dozen plants.

If lawmakers make companies pay for carbon emissions, nuclear would get another boost. So far, 17 companies are weighing license applications for more than 30 plants, and other plants are being built abroad. The main companies in the nuclear-power construction business are a unit of GE, Areva of France, a unit of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and the Westinghouse Electric unit of Toshiba.

In anticipation of a nuclear resurgence, uranium prices have soared, brightening the fortunes of firms such as Cameco Corp. of Saskatchewan, the world's largest uranium producer. Uranium prices rose to $136 a ton in mid-July from $11 a pound in June 2003, though they have fallen to $105 per ton.*Natural gas. Carbon dioxide emissions from natural gas are far lower than those of other fossil fuels. That should keep demand strong for domestic natural gas producers and importers of liquefied natural gas.

Costly LNG projects mostly involve big utilities and major oil and gas multinational firms. Sempra Energy and Cheniere Energy are active in new LNG terminals in the U.S. Exxon Mobil is helping Qatar expand its LNG export sector. In a recent climate change report, Citigroup noted that every 1 billion gallons of additional ethanol production would require 28 billion cubic feet of natural gas to fire the ethanol distilleries.

*Wind. There is a giant backlog of orders for wind turbines. Most manufacturers have enough orders to keep busy through 2009. Gearboxes, blades, castings and bearings are all in short supply. Technology has more than doubled the power output from each turbine, with size growing from about 10 yards in diameter in the 1970s to more than 80 yards today. The biggest turbinemakers are Vestas Wind Systems, Spain's Gamesa, GE and Siemens.

Developers of wind farms also could benefit. Citigroup pointed to Babcock & Brown Wind Partners Group, an Australian company, which has an interest in 33 wind farms, many in the U.S.

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DOE Announces up to $33.8 Million for Cellulosic Biofuels Development

On August 27, DOE announced a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA), providing as much as $33.8 million to support research into enzymes to convert cellulosic biomass into biofuels

DOE announced on August 27th a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) offering up to $33.8 million to support the development of enzymes for converting cellulosic biomass into biofuels. Cellulosic biomass includes a variety of non-food plant materials, such as agricultural wastes, sawdust, paper pulp, and switchgrass. Enzymes can be used in biorefineries to more efficiently break down cellulosic biomass into simple sugars, which can then be fermented into biofuels such as ethanol. Enzymes developed under the FOA must prove durable and effective in the conditions at which biorefineries would operate.

Funding will total nearly $68 million, with 50% of the cost shared by industry. Letters of intent are due on September 10, 2007, and completed applications are due on October 30, 2007. Projects are expected to begin in fiscal year 2008 and continue through fiscal year 2011. See the DOE press release and the complete FOA.

Algae - The Holy Grail of Biodiesel - May Soon Be Reality

The biodiesel community has always been marked by spirited enthusiasm, a clear sense of mission, and the dream that biodiesel could one day play a significant role in our energy future. That dream may soon be a reality. Researchers at Utah State University say that farming algae, with reported oil yields of 10,000 gallons per acre, could become an economically feasible biodiesel feedstock by the end of the decade.

This is the Holy Grail of biodiesel: an oil source that could make a serious dent in our fossil fuel consumption. Our most productive feedstock today, the oil palm, doesn't even come close with
yields of 635 gallons/acre, and is followed distantly by the U.S. standard, soy, at 48 gallons of oil/acre.

Producing biodiesel from algae isn't a new concept, and it's easy to see why: algae grow voraciously (measured by the day), algae can proliferate in heinous growing conditions (saltwater or extreme temperatures), and certain species contain up to 60% oil (by weight).

Put quite simply, microalgae are remarkable and efficient biological factories capable of taking a waste (zero-energy) form of carbon (CO2) and converting it into a high density liquid form of energy (natural oil). This ability has been the foundation of the research program funded by the Office Fuels Development."

Between 1978 and 1996, the Department of Energy (DOE) funded research into technologies that could have significant impacts on the consumption of fossil fuels. The focus of this research became the Aquatic Species Program (ASP), which investigated renewable fuel production (biodiesel) from high-oil algae species, fed by the waste CO2 from coal-fired plants. Researchers whittled down over 3,000 strains of microorganisms into the most productive 300, and constructed 1000 sq. meter test ponds outside of Roswell, NM. The ponds were set up as sort of algae 'race-tracks', where algae were circulated around shallow, oval-shaped ponds as carbon dioxide bubbled through the mixture. Results were successful and encouraging, but the program fizzled out after almost 2 decades (a lot of which had to do with a budget crunch and allocating more resources to researching ethanol). Researchers noted that one obstacle to large-scale algae production may be the high cost, which was estimated to be double the price of diesel at the time. (I wonder what they would say now.)

Utah State may finally take this research to the next level. Scientists there plan to produce algae in a grid of indoor bioreactors, with light captured by parabolic dishes on the roof and fed inside via fiber-optic cables. Put several thousand of these bioreactors together and you have an algae farm:

The solar bioreactor utilizes single cell algae, nature’s most efficient means to convert sunshine to biomass, which contain up to 60% oil by weight.[4] To minimize land and water resources, an enclosed bioreactor is used to grow algae on proprietary vertical membranes that resemble library newspaper racks. Harvesting of algae is achieved by periodically flushing water down the membrane from holes in the top ‘rack’. Mature algae are dislodged and collected in a bottom trough while immature algae cling to the membrane and continue to grow. Sunlight is collected and distributed to vertical panels that are sandwiched in close proximity between the growth membranes, much like alternating plates in a car battery. Oil extracted from mature algae can be converted to biodiesel using well established technologies."

The program has been funded by $6 million in seed money from the Utah Science and Technology Research Initiative, and plans on building the first commercial plant in Utah. USU researchers say algae-biodiesel could become economically feasible by 2009.

Needless to say, this is an exciting project that I will be watching closely.


By Clayton Bodie Cornell