Free Republic

A breakthrough moment for sustainable aviation fuel / Depositphotos A simple, cheap pretreatment promises to radically cut the price of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) made from waste wood biomass – potentially making it cost-competitive with fossil-based jet fuel, while cutting down emissions by up to 80%. SAF isn't a perfect green solution to aviation – indeed, no perfect solution exists at this point. Running SAF instead of jet fuel still produces carbon dioxide – but it's a higher-purity fuel, producing up to 3% more energy while burning cleaner, with heavily reduced sulfur and particulate emissions. It eliminates the entire emissions...

According to the Rachel Carson Institute, Enviva alone — which currently owns and operates seven plants in the southeastern United States — is responsible for clearcutting 50 acres of southern forestland every day, much of it a mix of hardwoods critical for wildlife habitat and absorbing the carbon dioxide rapidly warming the planet.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler recently announced the city’s taxpayers will be paying a whopping $460 million to buy a biomass power plant in East Texas, a plant Austinites had already coughed up $128 million to build and were paying $54 million every year to operate. Even after all that cash over the span of six years, the plant produced energy for only two months. The story began in 2008, when Roger Duncan, then-Austin Energy’s general manager, sketched out a plan to help achieve Austin City Council’s renewable energy goals. He wanted local citizens to pony up the cash to build...

BIOMASS: ANOTHER “GREEN” FRAUD I would have said that nothing could exceed the folly of wind and solar energy, but biomass may come close. This Vox article is headlined: “Europe’s renewable energy policy is built on burning American trees.” You no doubt have heard of “biomass,” but likely don’t know what it actually means. As the headline suggests, it mostly means American trees. In the lowland forests of the American southeast, loblolly pines and cypress trees are grabbing carbon dioxide from the air right now. Using power from the sun, they release the oxygen and bind the carbon, building trunks,...

Something stinks in Warren County, Ohio. A massive truckload of manure was dumped outside the Democratic headquarters in Warren County, and office personnel are furious. [snip] Bethe Goldenfield, chairperson of the Warren County Democratic Party, unleashed a volcanic tirade on Facebook, writing: “What reasonable person thinks this is OK???? I won’t be responding to anyone who thinks this is acceptable behavior. It is ILLEGAL!” Security cameras recorded a truck dumping off a huge pile of manure outside the office at 12:03 a.m. on October 29. Police are investigating the incident, WLWT reported.

While at best, Clinton’s clean cookstove campaign seems slimy, and may be illegal, one might cast a blind eye if the program achieved its aggrandizing goals. Hillary Clinton’s “trustworthiness” problem is fed by a long history of “varying credibility,” as a recent Politico story delineated, including cattle-futures trading, law firm billing records, muddled sniper fire recollections and e-mail use. While providing pertinent points, the Politico list is just a sampling. One missing item on the “mistrust” litany is a project she reportedly cooked up as Secretary of State, but that was shaped by her family foundation. State Department staff sent...

If you’re like most Americans, you’re enjoying the fact that it costs a lot less to fill up your car’s gas tank these days. If you’re a fan of big government, you may feel a bit ambivalent, though. Why? Because one of the biggest drivers behind the drop in gas prices is the rise in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) here at home. While the government is busy micromanaging the energy industry — trying to saddle it with more regulations while showering favors on so-called “green” companies — the free market is showing how to actually get things done....

We would like to take this time to announce the many programs that Macomb Community College has to offer! The idea of providing energy sources outside of electricity, and in the theme of a doomsday, emergency scenario, the many programs, areas of study, and implementation of new technologies at MCC are worth exploring! First and foremost, the Renewable Energy Certificate program and courses available through Macomb Community College are instrumental in building the foundation for a career in the field of Renewable Energy. Within the scope of preparing for natural disasters or widespread electrical failures, renewable and alternative energies are...

Power stations that burn biomass are worse for the environment than those that burn coal, new analysis suggests. According to David MacKay, the government’s chief scientific advisor on energy, burning wood imported from North America in British power stations produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal.As previously reported on Breitbart London, American scientists wrote a letter to the British government in May to protest the policy of subsidising power firms to import wooden pellets from the U.S. They said that this was anything but carbon neutral as the forests from which the pellets are taken act as a “carbon sink”, taking carbon dioxide...

As Sen. Mark Begich (D., Alaska) seeks to shore up his energy policy credentials, a now-bankrupt green energy company to which he steered federal subsidies could cloud his message. Begich received campaign contributions from a lobbyist for an Alaska geothermal plant after helping the company obtain federal financing. The company is now bankrupt, but Begich continues touting his support for alternative energy. The senator, who is facing reelection in November, will address the Alaska Wood Energy Conference on Wednesday. The conference brings together leaders in the state’s biomass industry. He has also promoted fossil fuel development, including effort to open areas of...

OSLO (Reuters) - A little-known technology that may be able to take the equivalent of China's greenhouse gas emissions out of the carbon cycle could be the radical policy shift needed to slow climate change this century, a draft U.N. report shows. Using the technology, power plants would burn biomass - wood, wood pellets, or plant waste like from sugar cane - to generate electricity while the carbon dioxide in the biomass is extracted, piped away and buried deep underground. Among techniques, a chemical process can strip carbon dioxide from the flue gases from combustion. The process - called bio-energy...

Facility Offers Promise of Producing Fuel Out of Everything From Grass to Garbage A Florida plant started commercial-scale production of advanced ethanol, its owners said Wednesday, marking the first time a U.S. facility has made large quantities of the fuel from the inedible parts of plants. The news was a milestone for the renewable fuels industry, which has been dogged by criticism that its current method of making fuel from corn or sugar diverts those crops from the food chain and raises food prices. If INEOS Bio can sustain production at the Florida plant, it would offer the promise of...

Companies have put biofuels on the back burner to aim for higher margin chemicals, as Emma Davies finds out Tom Welton gives the wooden desk in his office a sharp rap with his knuckles. ‘That’s the sound of lignin,’ he says, grinning. ‘Have you seen its structure? It’s beautiful, full of aromatics, lovely compounds that make you think: I could make something useful from this.’Welton, who is head of chemistry at Imperial College London, UK, views lignin – the ‘really hard stuff’ that protects plants from biological attack – as a valuable source of renewable speciality chemicals. His group has...

Big Island Carbon LLC, which spent some $50 million to build a biomass plant to turn Hawaii-grown macadamia nut shells into granulated activated carbon, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The company, which has not started commercial operations at the Kawaihae plant, has laid off all 25 employees, including CEO Rick Vidgen, who was let go on Oct. 9 along with Chief Operating Officer Fred Baker and Controller Gerald Gruber, according to documents filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware, where the bankruptcy was filed on Nov. 5. Vidgen declined to comment on the bankruptcy filing. Big Island Carbon...

Biomass and biofuels groups warn that the loss of $800 million in guaranteed federal support would stall progress in developing the fuel source and cause job losses in rural communities that can least afford it. The industry claims interest groups such as fossil fuel producers and livestock owners have hijacked the process as the House Agriculture Committee begins a markup of the bill this week. “What is probably more broadly at play is a concerted effort by livestock groups, oil groups and some in the environmental community to denigrate biofuel production,” said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the Renewable Fuels...

What would you do if gangs of robbers roamed your neighborhood at night, breaking into your neighbors' houses and stealing their family jewels and life savings? You would arm yourself to defend your property. Or you would move to a safer neighborhood. But if the robbers formed gangs called Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, or the Natural Resources Defense Fund, and assaulted your standard of living, the Che Guevara Democrats expect you to greet them with open arms, and gleefully turn over bushels of your cash, until your life savings is gone, and your standard of living has been reduced to...

A team of chemical engineers led by Paul J. Dauenhauer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered a new, high-yield method of producing the key ingredient used to make plastic bottles from biomass. The process is inexpensive and currently creates the chemical p-xylene with an efficient yield of 75-percent, using most of the biomass feedstock, Dauenhauer says. The research is published in the journal ACS Catalysis. Dauenhauer, an assistant professor of chemical engineering at UMass Amherst, says the new discovery shows that there is an efficient, renewable way to produce a chemical that has immediate and recognizable use for...

When environmental organizations pushed Washington voters to approve their renewable energy Initiative 937, they touted biomass energy — incinerated wood waste — as one of their preferred alternatives to fossil fuel. They reasoned that biomass energy plants would help clear forests of flammable wood debris from dead and diseased timber, put idled loggers and millworkers back to work and produce cleaner, more affordable energy. But since voters narrowly approved the initiative in 2006, many of those same activists are battling against biomass projects.

Iowa State University's Robert C. Brown keeps a small vial of brown, sweet-smelling liquid on his office table. "It looks like something you could pour on your pancakes," he said. "In many respects, it is similar to molasses." Brown, in fact, calls it "pyrolytic molasses." That's because it was produced by the fast pyrolysis of biomass such as corn stalks or wood chips. Fast pyrolysis involves quickly heating the biomass without oxygen to produce liquid or gas products. "We think this is a new way to make inexpensive sugars from biomass," said Brown, an Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering,...

If you drew a straight line between the Obama White House, Harvard and Martha’s Vineyard, you’d apparently find no real economists judging by the effluvia created through progressive economics in this country. But would it be too much to ask if we could have a few people who could just add, subtract, multiply and divide? What exactly is an Ivy League degree worth if you can’t do lower mathematics? I guess a lot less than Sarah Palin and a University of Idaho bachelor’s degree is worth. Go U of I Vandals! In a quest for a few more “green” jobs...