biofuels
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The Corndoggle
The Portland, Ore. “Willamette Week” has a fairly decent piece on the (fiscal) implosion of the outrageously heavily subsidized ethanol plant in Clatskanie, Ore., which (briefly) produced some “homegrown” motor fuel using 100% imported corn and 100% imported natural gas.
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Amid a sea of troubles, ethanol now has an antibiotics problem
Hard times for corn fuel Photo: Todd Ehler I’ve been writing for a while now about problems with distillers grains, the leftover mash from the corn-ethanol process. A third of the corn that goes into ethanol winds up as distillers grains. Finding a high-value use for this “coproduct” is absolutely vital to the corn ethanol […]
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U.S. government paying industry to pollute
Chris Hayes has a blockbuster scoop up on The Nation: “Pulp Nonfiction,” about how the U.S. government will pay the paper industry up to $8 billion this year to emit more carbon dioxide. Yeah, you read that right. The horror begins, as it so often does, with well-meaning efforts by Congress to encourage biofuels. The […]
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EPA to Ethanol Lobby: Drop Dead!
For a while, I was afraid the EPA might actually bow to political pressure and raise the so-called blend wall for ethanol, i.e. the amount of ethanol that can currently be mixed into gasoline and sold at the pump.
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Oregon tries to undo ethanol leg. while ‘enviros’ lobby for biofuels subsidies
Oregon is struggling to undo bad ethanol legislation. Meanwhile, the Oregon Environmental Council continues to shill for ethanol subsidies because there might someday be a magic pony of ethanol created in an entirely different way, using entirely different plants and processes, and if we don’t support agribusiness with subsidies and mandates now, why, why, they […]
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I-5 to become eco-haven?
Rocket scientists Governors Gregoire, Kulongoski, and Schwarzenegger are supporting a brilliant idea to grab some of the stimulus funds. From a Seattle Times article that garnered 140 comments: The three governors envision a series of alternative fueling stations stretching from the Canadian border to Mexico, creating what has been dubbed a “green freeway.” They also […]
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Southern Company embraces the only affordable way to ‘capture’ emissions at a coal plant today
The best and cheapest near-term strategy for reducing coal plant CO2 emissions without forcing utilities to simply walk away from their entire capital investment is to replace that coal with biomass (see here). Today, Energy Daily ($ub. req’d) reports on the huge — but little covered — news from one of the nation’s biggest carbon […]
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Big Oil [hearts] biofuels
Update [2009-3-19 12:37:25 by Tom Philpott]:Also on the theme of Big Oil loving biofuels: Valero Energy, the largest U.S. oil refiner, just snapped up seven ethanol plants from bankrupt ethanol maker Verasun for $1 billion. To get the plants, Valero beat out corn-processing giant Archer Daniels Midland, which had bid $700 million. ——————- From Reuters: […]
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The DOE’s annual biofuels conference doesn’t inspire confidence
Team Ethanol got together recently at the Department of Energy for Biomass 2009: Fueling Our Future — a conference on all things biofuel. Needless to say, they’re still singing the same old song. More subsidies, a higher blend wall (a cheer that USDA Chief Tom Vilsack knows well) and much crowing over the promise of […]
