biofuel

Two of the top-ranking members of the House Agriculture Committee are among the four lead sponsors of a bill to eliminate the federal mandate for corn-based ethanol.

The think tank World Resources Institute says the world food gap could be narrowed greatly if crop-based biofuels - made from corn, sugarcane or vegetable oils - are eliminated. In a working paper, WRI points to estimates that food production must rise by 70 percent by 2050 to feed the growing world population. "If crop-based biofuels were phased out, the 2050 crop calorie gap would decrease from 70 percent to about 60 percent, a significant step toward a sustainable food future," says the report by Tim Searchinger and Ralph Heimlich.

A co-sponsor of a Senate amendment to eliminate annual targets for ethanol consumption says the amendment will not be called for a vote as part of debate on the Keystone pipeline.

A convenience store chain in six mid-Atlantic states, Sheetz Convenience Stores, said it will offer E15 at 60 of its fuel stations in North Carolina by spring 2016.

A combined $9.6 million will go into grants to support production of advanced biofuels and the bio-economy, said the Agriculture Department. The largest block of money, $5.6 million, was divided among...

For the most part, farmers put their cropland to more intense use rather than convert forests and grasslands because of demand for biofuels in recent years, says a study by the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development.

The Congressional Budget Office says, "In the future, meeting (biofuels) mandates will be challenging" because of the so-called blend wall at the traditional blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline and because of the slow development of...

The Spanish energy company Abengoa opened the world's largest cellulosic refinery in Hugoton, about 90 miles southwest of Dodge City, Kansas, said Biofuels Digest.

The Agriculture Department announced a $91 million loan guarantee for an advanced biofuel plant in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, that will turn pine chips into 8-10 million gallons a year of reformate, a drop-in ingredient for gasoline and jet fuel that can be added during the regular refinery process.

The government could set the ethanol mandate above the so-called blend wall and have little impact on retail fuel prices, says a paper by two Iowa State University economists. The fuel industry could meet the mandate by lowering price for E85, fuel made with 85 percent ethanol, and selling more of the biofuel. "We find that compliance with ethanol mandates that are feasible to meet with current infrastructure would have small, if any, effects on the retail price of E10," says the paper by Sebastian Pouliot and Bruce Babcock of the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development.

Biodiesel production is booming in Brazil and Argentina and will put a pinch on exports of soybean oil, the feedstock for making the biofuel, says the Agriculture Department. Biodiesel is forecast to consume one-third of soy oil in the two countries during this marketing year, double the amount that was used six years ago. "In contrast, exports are forecast to fall from more than half of total use to just over 40 percent over the same period," said USDA'S "Oilseeds: World Markets and Trade" report. Brazil and Argentina are the largest soybean producers in the world after the United States.

Fulcrum Sierra Biofuels will receive a $105 million loan guarantee to build a plant in McCarran, Nev, to produce biodiesel jet fuel from municipal solid waste, said the Agriculture Department. The plant would produce 11 million gallons a year of fuel. The loan guarantee is nearly half of the $226 million cost of the plant. Cathay Pacific Airways said last month that it would invest in Fulcrum Bioenergy and negotiated a 10-year contract with Fulcrum for 375 million gallons of fuel.

There are few federal or state safeguards against the introduction of an invasive species as a biofuel crop, say researchers at the University of Illinois in two newly published papers.

"Rep. Bruce Braley is betting the farm on corn — and Democrats’ hold on the Senate may be in danger if he’s wrong," says the lead sentence in Politico on the Senate campaign in Iowa. The Hawkeye state is No 1 i corn and ethanol production, with several thousand people working at ethanol plants. Braley

The ethanol mandate is likely to be set higher than initially proposed by the EPA, says Sen Al Franken, Minnesota Democrat, in comments quoted by The Hill newspaper. Franken was among 10 Democratic senators, including Agriculture chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, who met White House advisor John Podesta to discuss biodiesel.

The Agriculture and Energy departments awarded a total of $12.6 in research grants to 10 projects, from Virginia to California, to improve to improve plant feedstocks for the production of biofuels, biopower, and biobased products. The work is part of developing non-food sources of biomass.

In a report titled "Ethanol's Broken Promise," the Environmental Working Group says the scaled-back ethanol mandate proposed by EPA "would lower U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 3 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2e) – as much as taking 580,000 cars off the road for a year." EWG says its figures take into account the effect of bringing more land into crop production.