Burning Bio News

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack released a report outlining both the current state of renewable transportation fuels efforts in America and a plan to develop regional strategies to increase the production, marketing and distribution of biofuels to 36 billion gallons of biofuel per year by 2022. USDA’s report identifies numerous biomass feedstocks to be utilized in developing biofuels and calls for the funding of further investments in research and development of: feedstock; sustainable production and management systems; efficient conversion technologies and high-value bioproducts, and decision support and policy analysis tools.

Virent Energy Systems Inc. of Madison has raised $46.4 million in its latest financing round. Royal Dutch Shell PLC has been a research partner with Virent for several years and now has taken an equity stake that gives Shell one of seven seats on the Madison-based biofuels firm’s board of directors. In March, the companies announced the start-up of the world’s first biogasoline production plant, which can generate more than 10,000 gallons per year of biogasoline. “A lot of the cynics out there say renewable fuels are always five years away. You can say now that they’re not even five years away,” said Jim Lane, editor of Biofuels Digest.

An alliance of industry, academic and government organizations, formed to commercialize technologies that will utilize concentrated solar energy to convert waste CO2 into diesel fuel. The solar reforming technology platform will be colocated next to industrial facilities that have waste CO2 streams such as coal power plants, natural gas processing facilities, ethanol plants, cement production facilities and other stationary sources of CO2. A solar reforming system is currently being demonstrated in Sacramento, CA, and demonstrations will continue both at Sandia’s facilities in New Mexico and at a power plant project site in Bakersfield, CA.

Rutgers University professor Clinton Andrews and colleagues ran the numbers on land required to implement a renewable energy strategy. They identified clear limits on some technologies, notably biofuels, but concluded that the bigger challenges to renewable energy and land relate to siting energy facilities, particularly transmission lines. –mj: This report contains some interesting information, but the extension of supplying 100 of world energy by individual technologies is puzzling. Presenting extraneous information just because it can be calculated clouds the discussion.

An Italian company is interested in operating a plant in Berkeley County (WV) that would convert municipal solid waste into fuel, officials said last week at the Berkeley County Commission’s regular meeting. The “biomass energy-conversion project” by Entsorga Italia S.p.A., based in Tortona, in northern Italy, and Chemtex USA, an affiliated company based in North Carolina, might be able to take advantage of $10 million in federal stimulus bonds. Entsorga’s proposed operation would convert municipal waste into fuel that would be sold to manufacturers that use an industrial furnace for production.

Frying oil from Illinois State University (Normal, IL) Campus Dining Services is being converted into fuel for campus fleet vehicles. The project started in 2007. Now, a couple of times a week, a team of undergraduate science students turn the waste oil into a 50-gallon batch of biodiesel. Environmental health majors collaborate on the project with the agriculture department, dining services and facilities management.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has awarded People, Prosperity and the Planet (P3) Awards for sustainability to each of two Clarkson University (NY) teams that participated in the Sixth Annual National Sustainable Design Expo on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The first Clarkson project, “Farm Waste to Energy: A Sustainable Solution for Small-Scale Farms,” optimizes viable anaerobic digester technology for diary farms in cold climates with 50 or fewer cows. The second team project, “Sustainable Year-Round Food Production in Cold Climates,” includes the design, feasibility, analysis, and impact assessment of a pilot controlled-environment, high rise farm. Each team will receive a $75,000 grant from the EPA to further develop their design, implement it in the field, or move it to the marketplace.

The Hoke County, NC, 60 million gallon per year, ethanol plant is expected to start producing its first batch of ethanol Saturday, May 1. Dave Walters, human resources manager at Clean Burn Fuels, said various construction and other delays pushed back the production start date by months.

U.S. farm groups and lawmakers must consider whether fundamental change is needed in farm subsidies that date from the Depression, said the head of the House Agriculture Committee on Wednesday after the opening work on the new farm bill, due in two years. – mj: The Farm Bill is the legislation that determines the ’subsidies’ that US farmers receive for their crops. It is always a lively debate and generally poorly understood. With the advent of biofuels and the wild economy, production agriculture is smack in the middle.

At a recent City Council Meeting in Carthage, MO, the reopening of an ‘odorless’ Renewable Environmental Solutions (RES) plant was discussed. Resident Tim Jeffries said he doesn’t have any faith that Renewable Environmental Solutions will follow through on promises to operate odor-free if and when it reopens. – mj: This facility is one where the first commercial-scale conversion technology projects that leading the curve in the Midwest. It was mired down with enormous start-up challenges, the largest of which was odor. If/when they are able to get the bugs worked out it will be an amazing technology.

Using productive farmland to grow crops for food instead of fuel is more energy efficient, Michigan State University scientists concluded, after poring over 17 years’ worth of data to help settle the food versus fuel debate. Other studies have looked at energy efficiencies for crops over shorter time periods, but this MSU study is the first to consider energy balances of an entire cropping system over many years. The results are published in the April 19 online issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology. – mj: This is an interesting academic analysis, but some of the popular press conclusions I have seen like growing corn for food (instead of fuel or feed) and growing alfalfa for fuel (instead of feed) are not consistent with the economics (supply and demand) for these products.

HCL CleanTech has selected Southern Research Institute in Durham, North Carolina as the hosting site and operator of its first pilot plant to produce low cost fermentable sugars, high-quality lignin and tall oils from North Carolina pine trees. HCL CleanTech’s use of concentrated hydrochloric acid (HCl) efficiently hydrolyzes cellulosic materials and allows a large variety of feedstocks to be used with minimal configuration. HCL CleanTech has developed other proprietary technologies to de-acidify lignin and separate tall oils – both high quality byproducts to the sugars.

Genetically engineered biotechnology is one of those issues that people love to hate. This article on the ecofriend site lists 12 genetic technologies that are earth friendly including pigs and cow that produce less toxic manure, bacterium that generate fuels and plastics, as well as viruses that produce batteries. It is a nice reminder that the world as we know it is completely changing.

Fuel start-up Cobalt Technologies has figured out a way to use trees poisoned and killed by pine beetles in Colorado to make biobutanol. Cobalt develops biofuels that can be mixed with gas, diesel, or jet fuel, as well as used to make plastics. “If we use only half of the 2.3 million acres currently affected in Colorado alone, we could produce over two billion gallons of biobutanol–enough to blend into all the gasoline used in Colorado for six years,” Rick Wilson, chief executive officer of Cobalt, said in a statement. Cobalt launched a pilot plant in California in Janurary.

On March 26, 2010, the U.S. EPA published the Renewable Fuel Standard Program (RFS2) Final Rule. The ‘rule’ has been circulating for several months, but it was only published in the Federal Register last week. RFS2 builds on the first RFS program, included in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. That required 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be blended into gasoline by 2012. For more information about the rule, visit http://www.epa.gov/otaq/fuels/renewablefuels/index.htm.

The EPA awarded $2.38 million to 34 enterprises under the Small Business Innovative Research program, including four awards for R&D firms working on tech related to biofuels. IntAct Laboratories of Cambridge, MA, won $46,770 to work on bio-electrochemical systems for treatment of wastewater from ethanol production. Bryan, TX-based, Lynntech, was awarded $70,000 to help the company develop a better heterogeneous catalyst for the transesterification of triglycerides to biodiesel. TDA Research of Wheat Ridge, CO, won a $70,000 award to research a thermochemical process for producing diesel fuel from biomass waste materials. And Eltron Research & Development of Boulder, CO, was awarded nearly $70,000, to work on a low-cost retrofit system for controlling emissions from off-road sources.

Construction crews began arriving on site in Aurora, NE this week with plans to complete construction of the 113-million gallon ethanol plant by Sept. 1. Aventine Renewable Energy emerged from bankruptcy in late February and recently announced plans to finish construction on plants in Aurora and Mt. Vernon, Ill., both of which stand at about 85 percent complete.

An early-stage company spun out of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, plans to commercialize a catalytic process for converting cellulosic biomass into five of the chemicals found in gasoline. Anellotech’s reactors perform a process called “catalytic pyrolysis,” which converts three of the structural molecules found in plants–two forms of cellulose and the woody molecule lignin–into fuels. Ground-up biomass is fed into a high-temperature reactor and blended with a catalyst.

Under the expanded Renewable Fuels Standard, or RFS2, all producers of ethanol regardless of feedstock will be required to register with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In an effort to help ethanol producers understand what they need to do, the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA) has created two documents intended to provide producers with information they need to comply: 1) a comprehensive 29-page summary that includes detailed explanations of the steps necessary to help guide both grain ethanol and cellulosic ethanol producers through the process, and 2), a shorter registration checklist that includes all the key steps and deadlines for ethanol producers to register and begin generating Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) necessary to track the required use of ethanol.

Laval University for the second year in a row won the grand prize in the “Prototype” category at the 2010 Shell Eco-marathon Americas this past weekend in Houston, Texas. The student-built, fuel-efficient vehicle achieved the farthest distance using the least amount of fuel with an astonishing 1,057.5 kilometres per litre, or 2,487.5 miles per gallon. In the “UrbanConcept” category, the team from Mater Dei High School in Evansville, IN also took the grand prize for the second year in a row by achieving 185.87 km/l or 437.2 mpg.