Category: Biofuels

« Lufthansa Group aircraft will fly from Oslo on biokerosene beginning in March; deal with Statoil | Main | Toyota introduces all-new Tacoma with new 3.5L non-hybrid Atkinson cycle engine » Scientists at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have developed an enzyme that can enable the conversion of biomass to sugars up to 14 times faster and more cheaply than competing catalysts in enzyme cocktails today. The enzyme called CelA, a cellulase from the bacterium Caldicellulosiruptor bescii , could thus could change the economics of biofuel conversion. In one scenario, the best commercially used enzyme converted sugars at a 30% extent in seven days. CelA converted to double that extent. And while it took the alternative enzyme seven days to achieve that conversion, CelA, with a small boost from an extra beta glucosidase, achieved double in just about two days. Among CelA’s many […]

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ENLARGE Falling profit margins for the $40 billion U.S. ethanol industry may cause some companies to scale back production in 2015. Bloomberg News Tumbling oil prices are bringing unwelcome tidings to one of the U.S. Farm Belt’s hottest industries. Ethanol makers are bracing for a drop in earnings as cheap crude pushes down the prices they fetch from refiners to blend the corn-based fuel additive into gasoline. Ethanol producers also face a recent jump in the price of corn, their main raw material. Falling profit margins for the $40 billion U.S. ethanol industry may cause some companies to scale back production in 2015, analysts and industry executives say. Still, many observers think ethanol demand may remain steady or even rise if cheap gasoline spurs U.S. motorists to drive more, tempering the hit to ethanol earnings. Crude-oil prices slid 20% in December to about $53 a barrel and fell 46% […]

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A spike in supplies has sent U.S. ethanol prices tumbling to four-year lows and curbed profits for an industry that had posted robust earnings for most of this year.  Ethanol Continue Reading

The yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae plays a central role in global biofuel production; currently, about 100 billion liters of ethanol are produced annually worldwide by fermentation of mainly sugarcane saccharose and corn starch by the yeast. There are also efforts underway to use the yeast with cellulosic biomass. Boosting the yield and lowering the cost of fermentative production of biofuel would not only result in a significant immediate financial impact to commercial ethanol operations, but also support cost reductions that would be helpful to advance other advanced biofuels using the same or a similar pathway. However, boosting production has been gated by two key conditions: the ability of the yeast to tolerate higher temperatures, and the ability of the yeast to survive high concentrations of ethanol. Now, two new separate studies report progress on each of those fronts; the findings could have a significant impact on industrial biofuel production. Both […]

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Source: U.S. Navy, used with permission Note: Above, clockwise from left: Fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO 187), aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN 68), destroyer USS Chung-Hoon (DDG 93), and cruiser USS Princeton (CG 59). Great Green Fleet demonstration, July 2012. Recently the Department of Defense (DoD) released its annual procurement for bulk fuels to be delivered to its facilities in the eastern and inland United States and Gulf Coast. For the first time, this procurement requests military-specification diesel fuel and jet fuel that are blended with biofuels. The biofuels components, however, are optional and will only be accepted if certain cost and performance requirements are met. A similar procurement for the Rocky Mountain and West Coast regions is expected to be released later this year. The U.S. Navy’s interest in biofuels is part of its goal to generate 50% of its energy from alternative sources by […]

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The U.S. Energy Department said it was spending $6.3 million on research aimed at generating a biofuel that could be cost competitive by 2017. SRI International of California and Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina received funding from the Energy Department for research and development projects meant to drive down the cost of producing gasoline, diesel and jet fuels from biomass. The funding is part of an effort to make biofuels competitive with regular fuels. The Energy Department said it wants to produce a drop-in biofuel that would cost about $3 per gallon by 2017. Data from 2011 show some biofuels were close to the point at which they’d be competitive with regular fuels. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the government is looking for ways to increase energy security and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by advancing a low-carbon economy. The transportation sector in the United States accounts for nearly 60 […]

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Ethanol declined to a six-week low after a government report showed production of the biofuel rose to a record. Futures fell after the Energy Information Administration said output rose 3 percent to 972,000 barrels a day last week, the most in four years of weekly data from the Energy Information Administration. Corn prices that have dropped 34 percent in the past year have helped reduce production costs for ethanol makers and allowed them to boost operations. One bushel of the grain makes at least 2.75 gallons of the renewable fuel. “People are looking to place gallons and get rid of supply that they may have laying around,” Mark Ruyack, a manager at StarFuels Inc., a Jupiter, Florida-based broker, said today in a telephone interview. Denatured ethanol for July delivery slumped 8.5 cents, or 4 percent, to settle at $2.057 a gallon on the Chicago Board of Trade, the lowest […]

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Six months ago the U.S. oil industry scored a surprise win against farm groups when the Obama administration proposed slashing the amount of ethanol refiners must blend into gasoline, a move that could save them billions of dollars. Stunned by the reversal, producers of the corn-based biofuel and their supporters are now fighting back ahead of a June deadline for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make a final decision on the cut. The clash has been portrayed as a battle between "Big Oil" and "Big Corn," two powerful and deep-pocketed lobbies. But a Reuters review of public records and interviews with lawmakers, lobbyists and executives reveals a more complex picture. A private equity firm and an airline helped convince the Obama administration to backtrack, at least temporarily, on a policy it has supported for years: requiring steadily-rising volumes of ethanol to be blended into […]

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Six months ago the U.S. oil industry scored a surprise win against farm groups when the Obama administration proposed slashing the amount of ethanol refiners must blend into gasoline, a move that could save them billions of dollars. Stunned by the reversal, producers of the corn-based biofuel and their supporters are now fighting back ahead of a June deadline for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to make a final decision on the cut. The clash has been portrayed as a battle between "Big Oil" and "Big Corn," two powerful and deep-pocketed lobbies. But a Reuters review of public records and interviews with lawmakers, lobbyists and executives reveals a more complex picture. A private equity firm and an airline helped convince the Obama administration to backtrack, at least temporarily, on a policy it has supported for years: requiring steadily-rising volumes of ethanol to be blended into […]

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GMT US biodiesel production fell to 70 million gallons in January, down 48% from December, Energy Information Administration data showed Wednesday. Production was up 6.1% compared with January 2013. Of the 530 million lb of feedstock used to produce US biodiesel in January, soybean oil’s share reached 45.47%, down 8.85 percentage points from December, the EIA said. Article continues below… Platts Biofuelscan is a daily report, covering the latest worldwide biofuel news and prices. It provides a daily summary of market events and developments, along with closing market price assessments from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Platts Biofuelscan includes prices assessmenst for ethanol, ETBE, renewal indentification number (RIN) biofuels (US market0 and biodiesel. It also includes graphs depicting historic and current trends for major assessments. Soybean oil remained the largest biodiesel feedstock, with 241 million lb consumed. The next three largest feedstocks were corn oil […]

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