Burning Bio News

Midwest leaders in agribusiness, agricultural and biorenewable research and development, education and the ethanol industry announced Tuesday afternoon the formal organization of the American Ag & Energy Council or AAEC. –mj: It will be interesting to see how this integrates or competes with the 25x’25 organization which has a similar scope.

DTN reports that U.S. ethanol production for June fell by nearly 1 million barrels from the May level, while imports rose sharply, according to fresh data from the Energy Information Administration.

Albany, NY-based biodiesel producer, Innovation Fuels Inc. is investigating the potential to use pennycress as a biodiesel feedstock. Field pennycress is a winter annual weed, also known by farmers as stinkweed or frenchweed that grows widely across the Midwest. It is a member of the mustard family - carrying heart-shaped, flat seed packets that yield 36 percent oil when crushed. –mj again, as we race to capture as much solar energy as possible in plants, we continue to look toward plants and weeds that have a history of being nuisance species. This is not bad, but we need to go in to it with our eyes wide open.

Indeck Energy Services and Midwest Forest Products broke ground for the Indeck Ladysmith LLC 90,000 ton per year wood pellet plant in Ladysmith, WI.

Sequential Pacific Biodiesel opens its 5 million gallon per year biodiesel plant in Salem, OR.

Port Sutton EnviroFuels, FL, has shelved plans to build Florida’s first ethanol plant, blaming a “frivolous” lawsuit that delayed the project and cost the company its financing. GreenHunter Energy, a Texas company has stepped in to take over Port Sutton’s 22-acre lease and build a biodiesel plant instead.

In an effort to establish a standard for carbon footprint calculations, Carnegie Mellon University researchers are urging companies to embrace new methods. The wide variety of existing method produce a wide range of results. – mj This is not an endorsement. I do not know if the CM methods are an improvement. They may just broaden the range of results…

MI State U, East Lansing, is genetically enhancing rutabagas to produce oily tubors, and making progress. Using a root crop for oil allows a greater concentration of oil production per acre.

Durham, NC is going to sell methane generated at an abandoned, closed landfill, which continues to produce methane. Methane Power Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., and Mooresville, N.C., is going to buy it, use it to make electricity, and sell the power to Duke Energy.

The City of Thousand Oaks, CA, has saved $91,000 this year at its Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant through a program that uses solar power and cogeneration, said Chuck Rogers, the plant’s superintendent. Rogers’ goal is to save $200,000 during this budget year, which will end June 30.

Winona, MN is planning to install a digester at the City wastewater treatment plant. The process itself will also help heat the facility, cutting an approximate 1/3 of the natural gas cost at the plant.

A commercial-scale process to extract and reuse pure hydrogen from the hydrogen sulfide that naturally contaminates unrefined oil, is one step closer to reality through collaboration between the US DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory and Kingston Process Metallurgy Inc. (KPM) of Kingston, Ontario.

Rhode Island and Massachusetts have joined a new multistate lawsuit challenging the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s failure to regulate oil-refinery emissions. The plaintiffs, 12 states, DC and the City of New York, assert that, by failing to set limits on refineries’ emissions of greenhouse gases, the EPA is violating the federal Clean Air Act.

The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) seeks approval to conduct two new information collections, the 2008 On-Farm Renewable Energy Production Survey and the 2008 Organic Production and Marketing Survey. USDA is accepting comments until October 14, 2008.

Umit Ozkan, professor at The Ohio State University has developed a new catalyst to make hydrogen from ethanol with 90 percent yield, at a workable temperature, and using inexpensive ingredients.

Two “major” North American railroad companies want to “work formally” with a budding US company developing what will be the first ethanol-power/electric hybrid locomotive, an executive with Milford, Ohio-based AHL-TECH said. The “cleanest” multi-genset (generator sets) diesel locomotives have to reduce their NOx levels by more than 50 percent according to EPA standards, Mack said, “which at these low amounts is very difficult.”

An order by the VT Natural Resources Board to close the Karl Hammer’s Vermont Compost Co. had touched off considerable controversy. Advocates argued that the facility played a critical role in diverting compostable wastes from filling up landfills, and provided a source of high-quality compost that has become essential to area farms and growers. The State was attempting to implement a new law and did not know what to do with the composting facilitiy, so they decided it was out of compliance, and began to shut it down. Now they have reached an agreement.

EPA Air Emission Monitoring Rule vacated because it is ‘contrary to the statutory directive that each permit must include adequate monitoring requirements.’ The US Court of Appeals for the District Of Columbia Circuit has ruled in a suit brought by the Sierra Club that state and local authorities may supplement an inadequate monitoring requirement so that the requirement will assure compliance with the permit terms and conditions.

In experiments, sweet potatoes grown in Maryland and Alabama yielded two to three times as much carbohydrate for fuel ethanol production as field corn grown in those states, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists report.

VeraSun Energy Corp.started producing ethanol at it’s 110 million gallon ethanol plant near Hartley, Iowa. Initial production at the plant was to begin at the end of June, but the company delayed bringing it on line due to unfavorable market conditions.