After Senate vote, Farm Bill energy programs remain in limbo

Posted on 06/12/2013 by Kathiann M. Kowalski

A solar powered livestock watering system in Wyoming. Systems such as this one have been eligible for funding under the REAP program. (Photo by eXtension Farm Energy via Creative Commons)

The Senate passed the Farm Bill Monday night by a vote of 66 to 27 with wide bipartisan support.

Now a big question is whether mandatory funding for clean and renewable energy programs will continue at reduced levels or disappear.

The answer depends on what happens later this summer in the House of Representatives and in conference committee.

Running more than 1,100 pages long, the Senate bill amends a comprehensive law covering food stamps, crop insurance, conservation, and more. Almost 80 percent of the Senate bill’s $955 billion is for the federal food stamp program. Programs for clean and renewable energy get less than 1 percent.

The Senate bill that passed on Monday provides $900 million in mandatory funding over five years for the Rural Energy Assistance Program (REAP), the Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP), and related programs.

On an annual basis, that comes to $180 million–31 percent less per year than under the 2008 Farm Bill. The 2008 law expired last year but was extended until September 30 as part of January’s fiscal-cliff compromise. →

Study: U.S. biofuels policy pushes GHG emissions overseas

Posted on 03/28/2013 by Dan Haugen

Forests give way to farmland in Brazil. A new study says climate benefits from U.S. ethanol mandates are largely negated as other countries clear forests and grasslands for agricultural use. (Photo by BBC World Service via Creative Commons)

The U.S. ethanol mandate is successfully lowering the nation’s greenhouse-gas footprint — but likely to cause a slight increase in emissions around the globe, according to the latest study of biofuels’ climate impact.

The analysis comes from researchers at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, in a paper published this month in the journal Energy Policy.

“We find a very modest effect, but if you think that the ethanol mandate is a big winner in terms of its greenhouse gas implications, it doesn’t appear to be,” said Brian Murray, a co-author and the institute’s director for economic analysis. →

In race to develop aviation biofuels, Midwest wants to win

Posted on 11/27/2012 by Kari Lydersen

(Photo by Martin Naroznik via Creative Commons)

In the not-so-distant future, jets could be traversing the sky powered not by petroleum but by fuel derived from crops, agricultural waste, trees, algae, even municipal solid waste and sewage.

In the U.S. and other countries, research is ramping up into aviation biofuels, which can be used in standard jet engines with no conversions needed. Biofuels promise much lower emissions of carbon dioxide and other harmful compounds as well as price stability and geopolitical security.

Commercial-scale development of aviation biofuels is still in the early stages, and as experts explained at the Airports Going Green conference in Chicago earlier in November, viable aviation biofuel industries would look significantly different in different regions of the country. With growing competition for government research dollars and investment between regions, Midwestern players from the industry, academic and investor realms are trying to position the region as the national leader. →

Supporters of military biofuels program gear up for battle

Posted on 11/21/2012 by Greenwire

The USNS Henry J. Kaiser is refueled with a 50/50 biofuel blend during training exercises in the Pacific Ocean in July. (Photo via U.S. Navy)

By Annie Snider

With the Senate poised to begin debate on the defense policy bill after the Thanksgiving recess, a coalition of senators is gearing up for battle against a pair of controversial amendments targeting the military’s biofuels program.

Opposition to the two amendments — one that would prevent the Defense Department from making operational purchases of alternative fuels that cost more than traditional petroleum and one that would block the Navy’s portion of an interagency plan to invest $510 million in building commercial-scale biofuel refineries — began with Sens. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) this spring. Now, according to a Democratic Senate aide, the core group opposing the amendments has grown to roughly a half a dozen senators. →

What biofuel is the best to move nations forward?

Posted on 09/18/2012 by Jeff Kart

Harvesting sugarcane for ethanol production in Brazil. (Photo by Sweeter Alternative via Creative Commons)

Scientists are refining answers to the impacts of turning plants into energy.

A Michigan-led team of researchers from four nations are studying the best ways to increase the production of cleaner fuels like ethanol and biodiesel.

In years to come, they hope to develop policies for the U.S., Mexico, Argentina and Brazil that will maximize the benefits and minimize social and environmental costs associated with renewable energy development.

This is more than just another study on biofuels, lead researcher Kathy Halvorsen tells Midwest Energy News.

“Our study is unique in its integration across social and ecological systems and in its cross-national comparative framework,” said Halvorsen, a professor of natural resource policy at Michigan Technological University. →

Could genes keep drought from withering biofuel crops?

Posted on 08/01/2012 by Dan Haugen

(Photo by arbyreed via Creative Commons)

This summer’s drought continues to raise questions about the economic and political sustainability of today’s corn ethanol in a hotter, dryer climate.

Corn prices hit a record high this week, which means higher costs for ethanol producers. Meanwhile, AAA is blaming ethanol for recent gas price increases, while ranchers and poultry producers lobby Washington for a temporary rollback of the federal Renewable Fuels Standard.

All of which makes Andrew Leakey‘s research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign particularly timely.

Leakey is part of a team of researchers who were recently awarded a $12.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study drought-resistant plant DNA. →

Could hot springs hold the key to cheaper cellulosic biofuel?

Posted on 06/23/2012 by Dan Haugen

A geyser in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, the source of a rare heat-tolerant bacteria the Wisconsin researchers think might hold a key for advancing cellulosic biofuel production. (Photo by MOBmole via Creative Commons)

A rare bacteria scooped from a Russian hot spring in the 1980s might contain a key to making cellulosic biofuels less expensive to produce.

The Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center, in Middleton, Wisconsin, last week announced a patent on a newly discovered enzyme that its scientists extracted from the bacteria.

“It’s a very interesting and strange bug,” said Phil Brumm, chief scientific officer at C5-6 Technologies, one of the research center’s industry partners.

The enzyme is capable of breaking down a variety of plant materials and turning them into fermentable sugars, and it can do so under extreme heat — up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s important because one of the strategies researchers are pursuing to make cellulosic biofuel production more efficient is to heat the plant material first, making it easier to digest.

It’s the same reason we often cook our vegetables before eating them. The heat begins to break down the sturdy cell walls, which means less work for our stomachs.

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Cellulosic biofuel gets better, but there’s a ‘but’

Posted on 06/06/2012 by guest contributor

Photo: USDA/Creative Commons

Cross-posted from EarthTechling with permission

By Pete Danko

Starch-based ethanol (think: corn) is largely discredited as a smart alternative to fossil fuels – at least that’s what some people think – so a lot of hope is being put into cellulosic ethanol. It has the advantage of using plant matter that we don’t eat.

The problem: So far cellulosic ethanol is proving to be economically challenging. Despite a lot of government support, it has failed miserably in living up to the production levels called for under a renewable fuel standard passed by Congress a few years ago.

Now a study out of Purdue University, focusing on the economics of a novel cellulosic ethanol production process, is suggesting the biofuel might not be a total lost cause. The study says that cellulosic ethanol could be competitive with regular ol’ gasoline. The kicker, however, is that it takes fossil fuels to pull that off, and also depends on high oil prices.

The story begins with the work by trio of Purdue chemical engineers — Rakesh Agrawal, Fabio Ribeiro and Nick Delgass — who have been trying to find a way to use catalytic hydrodeoxygenation to get more fuel out of less biomass.
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Could sweet sorghum dethrone corn as biofuel king?

Posted on 02/09/2012 by Dan Haugen

Could juice from this corn-like, African plant someday fuel our cars? (Photo by ILRI via Creative Commons)

Most biofuels today are made by extracting sugar from plant material, then feeding it to bugs in a fermenter, which transform it into larger molecules similar to crude-oil hydrocarbons.

Dave Jessen is working to bypass all of that.

Jessen is chief technology officer at Chromatin, a Chicago biotech company that’s working to genetically engineer varieties of sweet sorghum that would convert sugar to biofuel before it even leaves the plant.

“You let the plant do all of that extra work,” says Jessen.

If successful, within a few years Chromatin will have a plant from which you’ll literally be able to wring biodiesel out of at harvest.

Chromatin’s concept has enough promise that the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) recently awarded $5.7 million to Chromatin under its PETRO (Plants Engineered To Replace Oil) program. PETRO’s challenge to participants: come up with a crop that produces twice as much energy per acre as what’s currently possible with corn.

The sugar-rich, tropical grass — which looks like corn without the ears — would appear to have many advantages. It grows quickly, up to 14 feet tall, in time to plant and harvest twice a year in warmer regions. And it requires half the water and fertilizer it takes to grow corn. Scientists are also working on varieties that produce even more sugar, and ones that could be grown in colder climates.

Still, a century and a half after sweet sorghum was introduced to America from Africa, it remains a boutique crop in this country with little commercial-scale infrastructure. Competing with corn — or even finding a place alongside it — will require investment in new equipment and years of outreach and education to farmers, who won’t be easily convinced to switch from a known commodity.

Alternative to imports

In the 1860s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was interested in sweet sorghum as a way to reduce reliance on imported sugar cane and slave-owning sugar plantations, according to the National Sweet Sorghum Producers & Processors Association. At the time, the Midwest was the biggest producer of sweet sorghum, which was sometimes called the “Northern Sugar Plant.”

Ultimately the plant proved unsuitable for making dry sugar, and instead it was used to make syrup (and probably moonshine, too, says Jessen). By the 1890s, the crop had mostly migrated to the Southeast, where it’s better suited for the climate.

Sorghum syrup, sometimes called sorghum molasses, still turns up at farmers markets from Iowa to Indiana (where you can attend the annual Crawford County Sorghum Festival in October). Sorghum syrup production peaked around 24 million gallons in the 1880s and then plummeted as glucose syrups took over the market.

Today it’s a tiny industry, accounting nationally for somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 acres of cropland.

AN ‘IDEAL CROP’

A stand of sweet sorghum being tested for biofuel production in Mozambique. (Photo by Swathi Sridharan via Creative Commons)

Countries such as India and Brazil are already ramping up sweet sorghum production to supplement sugar cane as an ethanol ingredient. That isn’t happening yet in the United States, which is more attached to corn, but the federal energy and agriculture departments are funding research and a handful of companies have small projects in the planning stage.

“It’s an ideal crop for almost everything,” says Ismail Dweikat, a sorghum genetics researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who is working to create a cold-tolerant variety to expand the crop’s range. “It’s very cheap to grow. It’s very cheap to make ethanol out of. It’s environmentally friendly. It does not require as much nitrogen or irrigation. It’s an ideal crop.”

In places that receive at least 15 to 20 inches of rain per year, sweet sorghum can be grown without any irrigation at all, says Dweikat. It requires half the fertilizer that corn crops take, and the process of making ethanol from it is far less energy intensive. Instead of grinding and cooking kernels, you simply juice the stalks, add baking yeast, and wait 48 hours.

An improvement such as the sugar-oil conversion Chromatin is working on could be the game-changer the crop needs to find a place in U.S. energy production.

Convincing farmers

Improving on nature’s design may prove to be the easy part, though. Next comes convincing U.S. farmers to grow it.

Our agricultural infrastructure, from the subsidies to transportation, is set up for producing lots and lots of corn. Getting farmers to try sweet sorghum instead is going to take time, education, and probably incentives, too.

Dweikat says government and universities will likely have to take the lead in advancing early projects. He thinks existing ethanol plants could be adapted to also process sweet sorghum for less than $5 million per facility.

The production facilities would need to be located close to the sweet sorghum farms. The juice needs to be collected and processed within hours of harvest or it goes bad. That also means it’s a commodity that can’t be stored like corn, so farmers would lose control over when they sell.

Current sweet sorghum varieties can’t be planted until soil temperatures are above 65 degrees. The variety that Dweikat is working on would be able to sustain 50 degree soil temperatures, but even then Midwest farmers might not be able to fit two cycles into each growing season, something that’s possible in the South.

Policy changes are needed, too, according to Chris Cogburn, strategic business director for the National Sorghum Producers. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t yet recognize sweet sorghum ethanol in its renewable fuel standards, something the association is lobbying to change. Until that happens, and more productive hybrid varieties are available, most companies are holding off on significant investments, says Cogburn.

How much potential?

Dweikat thinks those investments might be less than five years off. Chromatin’s PETRO grant is for a three-year study, after which the DOE plans to pursue field testing of the most promising energy crops. Others crops being studied through the PETRO program include grasses, tobacco, camelina, and pine trees.

“What we tried to do was to put together an interesting portfolio of approaches that could theoretically hit the cost and yield targets,” says Jonathan Burbaum, PETRO’s program director.

At the end of the project, PETRO won’t be endorsing any single crop, and that’s because all agriculture is regional and the best option will depend on where you plan to grow it. (Sweet sorghum, for example, may have advantages in drier climates or marginal crop land.)

“It’ll have a niche, and it’ll fit well,” says Cogburn. “Could you produce 500 million gallons from sweet sorghum? I think that could happen. It’s going to be a good-sized industry, but it’s not going to be corn ethanol.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: An earlier version of this story misstated the amount of time it takes to convert sorghum sugars to biofuels. It is 48 hours, not 4 to 8 hours.

Dan Haugen is an Energy Journalism Fellow at Midwest Energy News. Contact him at dan@danhaugen.com.

This work by Midwest Energy News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Garbage trucks powered by … garbage

Posted on 01/04/2012 by Ken Paulman

While using waste methane from landfills or agricultural operations to produce electricity is becoming more common, EnergyNOW reports that Waste Management is going a step further and using the gas to power some of its garbage trucks in California.

As diesel gets more expensive, truck fleet operators around the country are considering a switch to compressed natural gas, which can be cheaper but comes with higher upfront fueling costs. And because natural gas is essentially methane, there’s no reason why waste landfill gas can’t be liquified and used in those same trucks.

The potential for landfill gas as a motor fuel is limited, however. EnergyNOW calculates that liquified methane could displace about 800 million gallons of diesel fuel per year, or about 2 percent of the total currently used.

Tag Archives: biofuels