The Upside of Biodiesel/Biodfuels

OK, now how about some good news from the biodiesel/biofuels arena. First off, an announcement that the market is growing enough for biodiesel companies to up production (via Green Car Congress):

American Biofuels (ABF) plans to quadruple its soy biodiesel production capacity to 40 million gallons per year (mgpy) in 2006.

The company is planning a new 20-mgpy East Coast facility to supply New York State and surrounding states and expects this facility to be in production by late 2006. ABF is also expanding its existing production biodiesel plant in Bakersfield, California to 20 mgpy.

ABF originally expected to complete an expansion of the Bakersfield plant from 5- to 10 mgpy by January. The company decided, however, to increase certain designs to accommodate even further expansion later this year.

Another story about this expansion at RenewableEnergyAccess notes:

In 2005, the entire biodiesel production in the United States was 66 mgy.

Demand is expected to increase by several hundred percent over the short term. With biodiesel selling at or below the price of regular diesel, it is no longer a specialty market. Automobile manufacturers like Daimler-Chrysler, for example, have approved the use of B-20 fuel (20% biodiesel and 80% diesel) in its commercial, military and government vehicles.

And where are we going to get the "fuel" for all this biodiesel/biofuel? Andrew Leonard over at his Salon blog How the World Works notes President Bush's mention of switchgrass during the SOTU address (and wonders if his speechwriters have been reading Salon lately):

Last Friday, How the World Works covered the recently published findings of University of California at Berkeley researchers who were investigating the energy efficiency of biofuels. As part of their conclusions, the researchers noted that some of the best results came not from biofuels derived from corn or soybeans, but from switchgrass. Getting those results on a commercial basis, however, would require advances in "cellulosic technology" to enable the successful processing of woody plant fibers and other forms of farm waste.

And there the president was, mentioning switchgrass in his speech Tuesday night. Even more amazingly, the details of his Advanced Energy Initiative specifically referenced cellulosic technology. From a Salon blog to the State of the Union -- spooky, very spooky.

Switchgrass is pretty neat stuff -- indigenous to the Great Plains, able to thrive in poor soils, ecologically sustainable in a way that corn and soybeans are not. But excuse us for being suspicious that the president's piddling funding proposals for additional research will goose its development in any truly signficant fashion. If one were predisposed to be cynical, one might suspect that the bulk of administration action likely to be taken in the future with regard to renewable biofuels will be the same old same old -- subsidies to the powerful corn and soybean lobbies.

Last year's National Energy Bill mandated the production of 8 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2012. No doubt Archer Daniels Midland and Midwestern corn farmers were overjoyed at the prospect. With Minnesota leading the way, and Iowa and Wisconsin likely to follow closely, the big corn-growing states have been aggressively passing mandates requiring percentages of ethanol be blended into the gasoline sold in their states. (Minnesota currently requires a 10 percent ethanol blend, and last year passed a law bouncing it up to 20 percent by 2013.)

As a side note, Leonard offers this criticism of Bush's energy mumblings... erm policy initiatives from the SOTU:

As numerous observers have pointed out, if Bush really wanted to decrease our foreign dependence on oil, he could achieve more with one stroke by requiring significantly higher fuel-economy standards than by virtually any other short-term method. Or, if he really wanted to make a splash, he could take a page from California's book, and propose a really robust national version of the California Solar Power Initiative, a $2.8 billion program that should be a government model for how to really push renewable energy, instead of the State of the Union's pallid offering.

If you're new to the concept of biodiesel/biofuels, Reuters has a handy cheat sheet:

• Biodiesel, which works in any diesel engine, is a clean-burning fuel derived from any fat or vegetable oil. About 90 percent of U.S. biodiesel is made from soybean oil. It takes roughly 7 pounds (about 3.2 kg) of soybean oil to make one gallon (about 3.8 liters) of diesel.
  
• Ethanol, an alcohol most often made from grains and sugar cane, is blended with gasoline to reduce tailpipe emissions in cars and trucks.
• Biodiesel production capacity in Europe, mainly in Germany and France, has risen sharply as countries try to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and cut the bloc's dependence on fuel imports. The EU in 2004 set a target that fuels should contain 5.75 percent of biofuels in 2010.
• Brazil is the world's leading producer and exporter of ethanol, derived from the country's huge sugarcane crop. It already blends its domestic gasoline with 25 percent ethanol and is looking to U.S., Japanese and Indian markets to boost exports.
• In the United States, the second largest biofuel producer after Brazil, hundreds of major truck fleets use biodiesel including all branches of the U.S. military, NASA, several state departments of transportation and public utility fleets.
• China, the world's second largest energy consumer, is also the third largest ethanol producer. The Philippines encourages use of coconut oil for biodiesel.