As it stands right now, there are comparatively few places to purchase alternative fuels. As of 2005, there were approximately 168,987 gas stations in the United States; of those, just 2,200 sell E85 ethanol fuel.
No major oil outlets have fully embraced biofuels, although British Petroleum has just announced that it may begin commercial production of ethanol starting in 2010.
BP has partnered with Verenium to bring a commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol facility online next year to start bringing alternative fuels to a gas pump near you.
BP has big plans for biofuels and seems to be marching towards an alternative fuel future faster than many of its competitors. Verenium already has a demonstration plant in Louisiana capable of producing over a million gallons of cellulosic ethanol annually, and BP hopes to ramp production up. The Verenium process uses proprietary enzymes to break down grass feedstock and convert it to ethanol more efficiently.
On the heels of the opening of Coskata’s first flex ethanol facility capable of making ethanol from virtually any organic material, GM and Coskata have released a video (below) detailing the Coskata process. Unlike most promotional/informational videos that get dumped on the public, this one is actually rather informative.
Pennsylvania is beautiful this time of year, but I missed most of it since I made the 400+ mile drive mostly in the dark. It took eight hours of dodging speeding semi-trucks and going through many miles of tunnels, but I finally made it to the Westinghouse Plasma Center in Madison, PA. In case you’re asking, yes, the same Westinghouse that makes flat screen televisions (among other nifty tech stuff).
The Coskata semi-commercial flexible ethanol plant, dubbed “Lighthouse”, is located here. This facility is essentially a working scale model of a full size ethanol plant, and the processes and technology here can one day soon be scaled up to produce as much as a 100 million gallons of flex ethanol annually. The important word here is flexible, because unlike other ethanol products, the Coskata process can use just about any carbon matter to produce ethanol. This means the very garbage filling our dumps may one day instead fill our cars.
Earlier this year we caught up with Alan Novak, Director of Alternative Fuels for Emerson Process Management, to discuss last December’s BioEnergy Summit.
In that post we touched on how, depending on your perspective, biofuel and bioenergy production represent either unmitigated hype and controversy on the one hand, or the potential promise and hope for a sustainable clean energy future based, in part, on an abundant renewable fuel source on the other. Read the rest of this entry »
Today at Noon, a Shell service station in Ottawa, Ontario will quietly begin selling cellulosic ethanol blended into regular gasoline. The biofuel is made locally from wheat straw, and as far as we know is the first time cellulosic ethanol has been made publicly available.
The new fuel will only be available for one month, starting on June 10th, but it’s a major step forward for the production of advanced biofuels. All gasoline purchased at the Ottawa station will be a blend of 10% cellulosic ethanol and 90% gasoline (CE10). Read the rest of this entry »
Scientists know how to make fuel from prairie grasses growing on marginal land.
They know how to make fuel from fast growing trees with root systems that extend 25 feet into the ground, sequestering carbon emissions and enriching the soil. They even know how to make fuel from algae. They do all this in their labs every day. The problem is making cellulosic and algal fuel in large quantities at costs that compete with fuels from petroleum such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
This is my second article (previous article) from the 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals sponsored by NREL (also see the liveblogging from the event). 800 global bioscientists gathered in San Francisco to share their research and showcase their progress. Read the rest of this entry »
Vehicles fueled by biomass-fired electricity would travel 81% farther on a given crop and produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions than vehicles powered by ethanol, a new study finds.
In a new study published online yesterday in the journal Science, researchers led by Elliott Campbell of the University of California, Merced modeled entire fuel systems all the way from crop cultivation to vehicle propulsion, comparing cumulative greenhouse-gas emissions for both biofuels and bioelectricity. They found that the bioelectric pathway came out ahead of both corn ethanol and advanced cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass. Read the rest of this entry »
Mascoma says they’ve achieved a 60% reduction in cost for their consolidated bioprocessing technology (CBP).
Mascoma Corp., a well-known firm pursuing the advanced production of cellulosic ethanol, announced today what they’re calling “major scientific advances” that will enable them to produce lower cost, lower carbon fuel from sustainable sources.
This is a true breakthrough that takes us much, much closer to billions of gallons of low cost cellulosic biofuels. Many had thought that CBP was years or even decades away, but the future just arrived. Mascoma has permanently changed the biofuels landscape from here on.
-Dr. Bruce Dale, Scientific Advistory Board of Mascoma
Mascoma’s value-proposition is to elminate as many steps as possible in the processing of non-food cellulosic feedstocks to produce ethanol. The consolidation of the process—which involves enzymatically breaking apart cellulose into sugars, and then fermenting the sugars into alcohol—dramatically reduces overall cost. CBP eliminates the need for added and costly enzymes to process pretreated lignocellulose into ethanol. Read the rest of this entry »
The 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals
One of the world’s most prestigious and established biofuels meetings, the 31st Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals, is currently underway May 3-6 in San Francisco, with more than 800 scientists expected to attend sessions on topics ranging from commercialization of biofuels and their long-term sustainability to emerging technologies and turning algae into fuel.
Jay Keasling of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California visited Stephen Colbert last night, explaining that the same yeast that we use to produce beer and bread will soon be fueling our cars and planes.
The 9 billion gallons of ethanol that Americans used last year helped drive down oil prices. For those of us who fuel our vehicles with gasoline, as much as 10 percent of that gasoline is ethanol. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires that more biofuel be used every year until we reach 36 billion gallons by 2022.
Reduced oil prices are good. We can go from good to great, if we move past fuel from food and haste to fuels from wood and waste. Although the economics do not yet favor major production, pilot plants are taking wood and paper waste and converting it to fuel. Other cellulosic material is even more promising. Some grasses , energy crops, and hybrid poplar trees promise zero-emission fuel sources. These plants absorb CO2 and sequester it in the soil with their deep root systems. These plants often grow in marginal lands needing little irrigation and no fertilizers and pesticides, standing in sharp contrast to the industrial agriculture that produces much of our fuel. (see Dedicated Energy Crops Could Replace 30% of Gasoline: Ceres, Inc. Wants to Make it Happen) Read the rest of this entry »
Courtesy of Reuters, here is a list of cellulosic ethanol plants currently operating or under construction in the US. We’ve been following a number of these companies over the last year, and I’ve linked each company name to either something we’ve written about them or their company website.
On Wednesday, BPanounced a joint venture with Verenium to build the world’s largest cellulosic ethanol facility. BP’s total investment—now $112.5 million—will be the largest by an oil company in advanced, non-food-based biofuels.
The Florida-based plant would be 25 times larger than Verenium’s existing (and operational) cellulosic ethanol facility in Louisiana, which began operation earlier this month and is expected to produce 60+ million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year when at full capacity. This new, larger facility is schedule to break ground in 2010 and commece operations in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »
As it stands right now, there are comparatively few places to purchase alternative fuels. As of 2005, there were approximately 168,987 gas stations in the United States; of those, just 2,200 sell E85 ethanol fuel.
