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Under the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA), the EPA is required to make a determination by November 30 of each year about the projected volume of cellulosic ethanol that will be available in the next calendar year. If the projected volume is less than volume mandated by the 2007 EISA, the EPA is required to lower the mandated volume in that year to the projected volume. Therefore, in the coming days, the EPA has to assess the situation. The legal mandate for cellulosic fuel use in 2010 is 100 million gallons. The Biotechnology Industry Organization, however, is privately...

Although Valero Energy Corp.'s refining business has been pummeled this year, there's a bright spot on the company's balance sheet that comes from a surprising source: ethanol. Valero is making money with the corn-based fuel just six months after buying seven corn ethanol plants from bankrupt VeraSun Energy for $477 million. Although Valero's ethanol business is small when compared with its vast refining operations, “the business has worked out for us very well,” Valero CEO Bill Klesse told analysts during the company's earnings conference call late last month. “We feel very strongly that ethanol is going to be part of...

Donning FDR's cape, Eisenhower's stripes and JFK's boat shoes, President Obama observed in Florida on Tuesday that his "clean energy economy" will require "mobilization" on the order of fighting World War II, building the interstate highway system and going to the moon. Of course, the only "mobilization" going on at the moment is on behalf of ethanol, whose many political dispensations the biofuels lobby is finding new ways to preserve even as the evidence of its destructiveness piles up. The latest embarrassment arrives via the peer-reviewed journal Science, not known for its right-wing inclinations. A new paper calls attention to...

The Agri-Food investment story has been unfolding for more than three years, and has another ten or so years to go. For that reason, investors still have plenty of time to uncover the opportunities for profits in a world soon to be far more hungry. Agri-Food cannot be produced in factories with lower marginal costs for new production. Unlike consumer electronics, marginal production will have a higher cost. For centuries mankind has sought to satisfy hunger. Only in the second half of the 19th century did food become more plentiful with improved availability. Yet even after that period food was...

Energy Policy: The heavily subsidized ethanol industry is the latest to seek a federal bailout. If there is any industry that deserves to go bankrupt, it's this one. Time has come to stop putting food in our gas tanks.The bailout-seeking domestic auto industry has been criticized as being unproductive and inefficient. It hasn't been helped by mandated fuel economy standards that have done little to reduce our dependence on foreign energy or help the environment. Now the fuel we have been mandated to put in our cars, equally unproductive and inefficient, is also seeking a bailout. Ethanol never made much...

Christmas in October for Ethanol Traders and analysts are paying attention to the ethanol industry's renewed life and has resulted in a boost to the corn market, according to the Wall Street Journal. Profit markets are wider to the delight of ethanol producers who have operated in the red in recent years. In fact just last week, advancing energy prices pushed ethanol margins up a dollar per bushel, almost doubled margins from the week before. Ethanol plants are procuring more corn in order to ramp up production in order to pay down their debt. The renewed and optimistic predictions for...

The outlook for waste-ethanol is looking up New research from Louisiana Tech University allows cellulose-digesting enzymes like cellulase, pictured here, to be immobilized, reducing enzyme loss and the cost of enzymatic cellulosic ethanol. (Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)Cellulosic ethanol is an exciting technology which promises to convert the abundant sources of organic waste worldwide (kitchen waste, yard waste, paper industry waste, etc.) into green alternative fuel.  Unlike traditional ethanol, it won't use food crops or raise food prices.  In addition, environmental impact studies have indicated that while traditional ethanol releases more greenhouse gases than burning fossil fuels, cellulosic ethanol could...

PIKEVILLE — Touting Pike County as a leader in not only coal but greener energy technology, businessmen and local officials made presentations to the General Assembly's joint committee on energy Wednesday. The county seeks state money to develop an ethanol plant on its landfill site, county leaders have attended national meetings about wind power, and officials pushed to ensure the courthouse being built in Pikeville will be the state's first to meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards, Judge-Executive Wayne T. Rutherford said.

Longview Lawn and Garden mechanic Jason Beasley said there's something distinctly different about gas blended with ethanol, and you can see that difference in as little as two weeks."The shelf life is reduced dramatically," Beasley said, referring to how long ethanol lasts before it can no longer fuel small engines. He said it doesn't prevent him from using ethanol. He just knows he can't store the fuel. Jimmy Isaac/News-Journal Photo (ENLARGE) Tricia Edson of Longview pumps gas Wednesday evening at Skinner's Grocery and Market. She said she and her husband buy ethanol-free gas to avoid damage to their vehicles and...

Makers of Ethanol Ponder Alternative By RUSSELL GOLD Some ethanol makers, battered by unpredictable profit margins and criticism that production of the corn-based fuel drives up food prices, are being presented with a way out: making biobutanol. Biofuels entrepreneurs are hoping to snap up idled and financially distressed ethanol plants and convert them to make biobutanol, another plant-based fuel that can be blended into gasoline or used to make plastic products such as water bottles. Denver-based Gevo Inc., a privately held biofuels start-up, is expected to say Wednesday that it is lining up financing to acquire and retrofit as many...

Excess ethanol blamed in breakdown of police cars Baltimore expects to be able to recover expenses By Justin Fenton | The Baltimore Sun September 23, 2009 City officials say an unusually high concentration of ethanol in the city's gasoline supply contributed to the breakdown of more than 70 police cars over the weekend, most of which had been repaired and returned to service Tuesday. More than 200 police cars fueled up at a 24-hour, city-run gas pump by the Fallsway before cars started showing problems, and nearly one-third of the Police Department's patrol contingent was sidelined with engine trouble.

Ethanol group pushing for country-of-origin labels September 24, 2009 By The Associated Press HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — Ethanol producers are pushing a proposal to mandate country-of-origin labeling on gasoline pumps so consumers know exactly where their fuel comes from. But the nation's refiners say the plan is unworkable. Growth Energy, an industry group representing about 50 ethanol companies across the nation, launched an effort to increase ethanol consumption in the country.

Pollution regulators sue Neb. ethanol plant owner September 24, 2009 By The Associated Press OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Federal regulators say an ethanol plant near Sutherland has violated pollution rules by emitting too much carbon dioxide and failing to obtain proper permits for an expansion project. The Environmental Protection Agency filed a lawsuit against Midwest Renewable Energy LLC seeking civil penalties and fines. Company officials declined to comment because they had not seen the lawsuit.

At a time when the trade is questioning USDA’s 2009/10 prospective demand for US corn, especially in the feed use column, it is refreshing to note the continued upward demand for corn for ethanol. According to the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, the United States is expected to manufacture 12 billion gallons of ethanol for calendar year 2010, or 14.3% more than a year earlier requirement of 10.5 billion gallons in calendar year 2009. As you are able to view the trend increase for corn use for ethanol continues to be impressive vs feed use and equally important...

People over 60 who consume moderate amounts of alcohol have a reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, according to a large review of studies. The analysis, which appeared in the July issue of The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, reviewed 15 studies that together followed more than 28,000 subjects for at least two years. All the studies controlled for age, sex, smoking and other factors. The studies variously defined light to moderate drinking as 1 to 28 drinks per week. Compared with abstainers, male drinkers reduced their risk for dementia by 45 percent, and women by 27 percent...

Georgia’s only corn ethanol plant could be running out of gas. First United Ethanol LLC has limited liquidity and could slip into the arms of bankruptcy protection, the company warns in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Get ready for the sugar shock. Raw sugar futures have almost doubled this year amid fears of a shortage, which could lead to slightly higher prices for candy but also a spike in the price of ethanol. Much of the rise in sugar prices has come in just the past few weeks as drier-than-normal weather in India, the world's largest consumer, threatens to leave production there far short of demand... The bigger impact may be felt at the gas pump, where the sugar shortfall is likely to drive up the cost of ethanol, increasingly used as a substitute for gasoline....

Stimulus: Brazil, a leader in the use of biofuels such as ethanol and in the face of falling oil prices, still plans to spend huge sums to expand its offshore oil resources. Drilling rigs are infrastructure too.With oil prices scraping the bottom of the barrel, pun intended, there wouldn't appear to be much incentive to pursue the development of new oil resources. And in tough economic times worldwide, the necessary investment required would appear to be prohibitive. As the U.S. seeks to get its economy going by building roads, bridges and bicycle paths, Brazil has decided to create jobs and...

Abstract: Prior studies have estimated that a liter of bioethanol requires 263−784 L of water from corn farm to fuel pump, but these estimates have failed to account for the widely varied regional irrigation practices. By using regional time-series agricultural and ethanol production data in the U.S., this paper estimates the state-level field-to-pump water requirement of bioethanol across the nation. The results indicate that bioethanol’s water requirements can range from 5 to 2138 L per liter of ethanol depending on regional irrigation practices. The results also show that as the ethanol industry expands to areas that apply more irrigated water...

One of the persistent, shallow global food myths is that the world could feed more people if we gave up eating meat. Ezra Klein wrote another misguided column about this--"The Meat of the Problem"--in the Washington Post of July 29. Klein cites as his authority a naive "study" by the kids at Carnegie-Mellon University. Klein asserts, "It is more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people." No, Mr. Klein,...

Gov. Tim Pawlenty took a break from his emerging national campaign schedule Thursday to talk ethanol, agriculture and crack Ole and Lena jokes to farmers under a big top at Farmfest. With a down-home message tailored to his rural audience, Pawlenty extolled the economic benefits of Minnesota-produced alternative energy and decried the expense of government-funded social welfare programs. "We've got to build more transmission lines," Pawlenty said, referring to transmitting electric power from wind turbines, whose towers are popping up in western Minnesota. "We got to get that stuff built." He defended corn-based ethanol, a fuel promoted and subsidized by...

The law of unintended consequences, like the laws of physics, will catch up with you every timeI am not against health care reform or whatever they're calling it nowadays. We could use some tort reform and insurance deregulation. I am against clueless crusaders trying to save the world by building monstrosities with my money. Having hope in our politicians is like having hope that those one-thousand monkeys pounding away on a thousand typewriters will eventually produce the great American novel.Consider what our government has accomplished, or should I say destroyed, so far.Starve People, Feed Cars!What a great idea ethanol is!...

The law of unintended consequences, like the laws of physics, will catch up with you every timeI am not against health care reform or whatever they're calling it nowadays. We could use some tort reform and insurance deregulation. I am against clueless crusaders trying to save the world by building monstrosities with my money. Having hope in our politicians is like having hope that those one-thousand monkeys pounding away on a thousand typewriters will eventually produce the great American novel.Consider what our government has accomplished, or should I say destroyed, so far.Starve People, Feed Cars!What a great idea ethanol is!...

Energy Policy: California regulators are ready to conclude that corn ethanol cannot help the state fight global warming. It seems they've discovered putting food in our cars would destroy the earth in order to save it. California regulators have apparently discovered it ain't easy being green. The California Air Resources Board began two days of hearings in Sacramento on Thursday on a proposed Low Carbon Fuel Standard which considers the carbon intensity of fuels during a given fuel's entire life cycle. The California Environmental Protection Agency apparently has concluded that corn ethanol would not help the state implement Executive Order...

Minnesota has been an unofficial testing ground for using ethanol to fuel vehicles, but after years of steady increases, interest appears to be waning. Despite a push from the governor and an increase in the number of so-called flexible-fuel vehicles on the road — which can run on either gasoline or a mostly ethanol blend — sales of E85 have dipped in recent months, beyond the normal decline in winter months. In February, sales of E85, a cleaner-burning fuel consisting of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, hit their lowest mark since 2006, according to a new report by...

The Obama Administration is pushing a big expansion in ethanol, including a mandate to increase the share of the corn-based fuel required in gasoline to 15% from 10%. Apparently no one in the Administration has read a pair of new studies, one from its own EPA, that expose ethanol as a bad deal for consumers with little environmental benefit. The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and an ad valorem tariff of four to seven cents a...

Two federal studies add up the corn fuel's exorbitant cost. The Obama Administration is pushing a big expansion in ethanol, including a mandate to increase the share of the corn-based fuel required in gasoline to 15% from 10%. Apparently no one in the Administration has read a pair of new studies, one from its own EPA, that expose ethanol as a bad deal for consumers with little environmental benefit. The biofuels industry already receives a 45 cent tax credit for every gallon of ethanol produced, or about $3 billion a year. Meanwhile, import tariffs of 54 cents a gallon and...

So says the Ford Motor Company, which on 19 May revealed test results on a novel ethanol-assisted engine. Called a direct-injection ethanol engine, the unit runs primarily on petrol. When it needs to deliver maximum power -- to climb a hill or overtake, for example -- the engine management computer adds a little ethanol to the fuel injected into the combustion chambers. This arrangement allows the engine to operate at a much higher compression ratio -- a measure of the amount by which the fuel-air mixture is compressed before being ignited -- than normal. As a result, an average car...

Imagine using a dump site to produce a fuel resource. Due to a novel technology developed by a company called BlueFire Ethanol, the cellulosic ethanol within municipal and other waste products could be transformed into an alternative fuel resource. The company has patented a process dubbed “Arkenol” that currently stands as the sole viable cellulose-to-ethanol technique. According to BlueFire, production could be implemented with ethanol coming from wood wastes, urban trash (post-sorted municipal solid waste), rice and wheat straws, and other agricultural residues. BlueFire estimates a production of 3.7 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year from its first cellulosic...

Energy crop company Ceres has announced that switchgrass can produce substantially more biomass than previously reported and that average yields often used by academics and policymakers to forecast bioenergy economics and environmental benefits may, in fact, be far too conservative. The company reported that yield results from its nation-wide network of field trials showed that average biomass yields among switchgrass seed varieties tested last season were as much as 50% more than the government's projected yields for 2022. Proprietary varieties sold under the company's Blade Energy Crops brand were consistently the highest yielding varieties across multiple trial locations, with average...

Ordinary light bulbs are supposed to disappear in the next few years as exotic new lighting technologies become common. Much of our electricity will be generated by wind and sun. Car fuel will be extracted from trees and grass. So lawmakers have mandated. Now President Obama has proposed a new energy initiative, one of the most ambitious in decades, that would require the average car to get 40 percent more miles on each gallon. At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. But as the ups and downs of the nation’s energy policy have demonstrated over the last 35 years,...

There have been three major ethanol producers that have declared bankruptcy in the past 6 months (VeraSun, Panda Energy and White Energy) as well as several smaller ones. The problem is the high cost of manufacture, especially high corn prices.... The pressure is on Congress to force distributors to blend to 15% to solve the problem government caused in the first place. Lost in all of this, is it would void the warranties of millions of cars in the US. But the problem is far worse for the marine industry. Even 10% ethanol is causing severe problems to fuel systems....

The government said last week that wholesale prices for food spiked in April — the biggest monthly jump in more than a year. Beef, pork, vegetables, fruit, eggs all rose in price. Some economists saw the increases as good news: it eased their fears of a deflationary spiral. But do American consumers, now experts in penny-pinching, have to worry about higher prices down the line? Or do last month’s figures simply represent normal volatility, with price ups and downs essentially even for the year or even down? What factors put pressure on food costs?

The corn ethanol scam is back and if you are driving an older-model vehicle, you should prepare for the worst. An ethanol lobbying group has petitioned the EPA to raise the ethanol content of gasoline to 15 per cent - - which will reduce fuel mileage and may damage older vehicles.

Repeating past mistakes has long been a part of Washington's energy policy, but Congress used to wait a while before making the same blunder again. Not anymore. New legislation requiring wind energy closely resembles the ethanol mandate that sparked a backlash just last year. For many years, wind has benefited from generous tax credits and subsidies, but it still provides less than 2 percent of the nation's electricity. By comparison, coal supplies around 50 percent (and with considerably fewer federal incentives). Natural gas and nuclear, meanwhile, account for about 20 percent each. No wonder wind supporters want a federal mandate...

THE Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to make an important and far-reaching decision this year that will affect more than 500 million gasoline engines powering everything from large pickups to family cars to lawn mowers: whether to grant the ethanol industry’s request to raise the maximum amount of ethanol that can be added to gasoline. ... Specifically, ethanol producers are asking that the maximum ethanol content in the most common blend of gasoline be increased from 10 percent — a limit set about three decades ago — to as much as 15 percent. The blend the industry hopes will become...

Crops give more kilometres per hectare if used to power electric vehicles.Electric cars powered by biomass could be greener than cars that run on biofuel.Punchstock / Cultura Vehicles propelled by biomass-fired electricity would travel farther on a given crop and produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than vehicles powered by ethanol, researchers report today.Burning biomass to produce electricity is generally more efficient than converting it into ethanol. And electric vehicles — although often more expensive to make and maintain than many vehicles with internal combustion engines — are also more efficient at converting that energy into motion.In the current study, the researchers,...

Reporting from Washington -- The Obama administration on Tuesday proposed renewable-fuel standards that could reduce the $3 billion a year in federal tax breaks given to producers of corn-based ethanol. The move sets the stage for a major battle between Midwest grain producers and environmentalists who say the gasoline additive actually worsens global warming. For much of the last decade, federal officials have touted the potential of corn ethanol as a substitute for gasoline and a tool for reducing global warming and foreign oil dependence. However, environmentalists and others have questioned the wisdom of that support. A recent Congressional Budget...

WASHINGTON – The Environmental Protection Agency says that corn ethanol — as made today — has a worse impact on climate than gasoline when land use changes are considered. But EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said Tuesday that future improvements in production technologies are expected to make ethanol and other biofuels more climate friendly than gasoline. .. Some scientists say that by using more land to grow ethanol crops, there is an increase in greenhouse gases as vegetation that absorbs carbon is replaced.

Using a separate E85 direct injection boosting system combined with gasoline port fuel injection (PFI) makes the engine more efficient in its use of gasoline, and can be viewed as a more cost-effective alternative to a modern diesel, according to a Ford study presented by Robert Stein, currently of AVL, formerly of Ford, at the SAE 2009 World Congress.

As greenies nationwide continue their mental gymnastics searching for alternative energy sources, it seems the California EPA is falling out of love with ethanol: California regulators are ready to conclude that corn ethanol cannot help the state fight global warming. It seems they've discovered putting food in our cars would destroy the earth in order to save it. Once again the Law of Unintended Consequences is catching up to liberal orthodoxy, revealing another dead-end in the search for an alternative to drilling here and drilling now. Among other flaws belatedly discovered with by the state's Enthusiastic Prius Association are: *...

In September, ethanol giant VeraSun Energy opened a refinery on the outskirts of this eastern Iowa community. Among the largest biofuels facilities in the country, the Dyersville plant could process 39 million bushels of corn and produce 110 million gallons of ethanol annually. VeraSun boasted the plant could run 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the demand for home-grown energy. But the only thing happening 24-7 at the Dyersville plant these days is nothing at all. Its doors are shut and corn deliveries are turned away. Touring the facility recently, I saw dozens of rail cars...

Minnesota should get out of the business of subsidizing the state's ethanol industry, the Legislative Auditor's office said today. In a report on the sometimes-controversial program that pays producers of corn-based ethanol, the office found that the subsidy program fails to maximize the energy and environmental benefits of the fuel. The money, $93 million paid to producers over the past five years, could be better spent on other programs that do a better job of reaching those goals, it concluded. Plus, at a time of crushing state budget deficits, the $44 million expected to be spent on the program through...

It's corn planting time in the U.S. Plains, and that means Kansas corn farmer Merl "Buck" Rexford is worrying about the weather — and hoping there is enough water. Rexford plans to start seeding his 7,000 acres near Meade, Kansas, this week and he is relishing a recent heavy snow storm that dropped several inches of much-needed moisture. Like corn farmers throughout the United States, Rexford hopes to grow a healthy crop yielding more than 150 bushels an acre this year. Much of his crop will wind up at a nearby ethanol plant. And that puts the 65-year-old Rexford at...

At a time when water supplies are scarce in many areas of the United States, scientists in Minnesota are reporting that production of bioethanol — often regarded as the clean-burning energy source of the future — may consume up to three times more water than previously thought. Sangwon Suh and colleagues point out in the new study that annual bioethanol production in the U.S. is currently about 9 billion gallons and note that experts expect it to increase in the near future. The growing demand for bioethanol, particularly corn-based ethanol, has sparked significant concerns among researchers about its impact on...

WASHINGTON – The increased use of ethanol could cost the government up to $900 million for food stamps and child nutrition programs, a congressional report says. Higher use of the corn-based fuel additive accounted for about 10 percent to 15 percent of the rise in food prices between April 2007 and April 2008 .. The CBO said other factors, such as skyrocketing energy costs, had an even greater impact than ethanol on food prices during that period. .. Ethanol's impact on future food prices is uncertain, the report says, because an increased supply of corn has the potential to eventually...

One might imagine that the old adage about something too good to be true would have sunk in by now. But in the realm of biofuels, hope springs eternal. With more than $240 million in Department of Energy funding, six pilot projects using "cellulosic materials" to produce biofuels are under way. Despite the prospect of technical breakthroughs, none have produced biofuels on commercial terms. This is especially unsettling given the federal order to blend 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022, of which 21 billion are mandated to be cellulose-based. Advocates of making these fuels from anything and everything abound:...

US ethanol producer Aventine said Wednesday it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid poor margins and product oversupply. The Pekin, Illinois-based company warned last month it could go bankrupt and that it was in default on some fixed-rate notes. It has reached an agreement with note holders in order to stay in operation, Aventine said in a statement. Moody's Investors Service late Wednesday said it downgraded Aventine's corporate family rating to C from Ca and its probability of default rating to D from Ca after the bankruptcy filing. "The ratings will be withdrawn in the near future due...

Major Brazilian sugar and ethanol producers are intending to increase sugar production significantly this year on the back of stronger export prices for that product, trading sources said Monday. Although Brazilian ethanol production is generally expected to maintain a steady flow, some traders said stronger sugar prices could sway production levels, as producers favor sugar output. Brazil is expected to maximize sugar production, with the ratio to ethanol up around 5% or more, for an estimated production split for 2009-2010 of 44% sugar and 66% ethanol, traders said. "There will be less EU ethanol but there is more production capacity...

NAPLES, Fla. -- A Florida lawsuit against six oil companies that alleges negligence for failing to warn boat owners of potential harm from ethanol-blended gasoline, survived a motion to dismiss from the defendants, NaplesNews.com reported. ---snip--- The lawsuit claims the oil companies were negligent by not providing warnings to boat owners that ethanol additives can corrode fiberglass fuel tanks and require the tanks to be replaced, and secondly, that phased separation of ethanol from gasoline can cause engine damage. The goal with the class-action lawsuit is to reimburse the boat owners for repairs and to require a warning label on...