Domestic Fuel

Renault has introduced an FFV in France. Renault has focused on electric powered vehicles to lessen gasoline use in the past, but now the Romania based Dacia Logan MCV, now offers a vehicle that can use 100 percent gasoline up to 85 percent ethanol fuel.

The moderately priced 1.6-liter four cylinder FFV Renault replaces the former 1.6 MPI 90 version and, in France, purchase of the vehicle will be tax free. Renault reports that the CO2 emissions are much less so it will qualify for the badging for a low emissions vehicle.

The Logan MCV is available with either a five- or seven-seat configuration. The vehicle is manufactured by the brand’s ISO 14001-certified plant in Pitesti, Romania. It is available now in France.

Growth Energy held a series of roundtable discussions on the ethanol industry during an Executive Leadership Conference this week in Phoenix.

The conference kicked off on Monday with a discussion on the national security implications of continuing America’s dependence on foreign oil. The panel featured Gen. Wesley Clark, Co-Chairman of Growth Energy, and Dr. Gal Luft, Executive Director for the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security.

“Today, oil is the most strategic commodity in the world and it controls the world’s economy,” said Dr. Luft. “If we want to preserve the future of this country we need to give consumers a choice at the filling station. Giving consumers a choice means that oil can no longer control prices and we will begin to grow a competitive market for ethanol.”

The final discussion on Tuesday included a detailed presentation about the future market outlook for grain, ethanol and distillers from industry experts, including Randy Ives, Senior Vice President of Distillers Grains, Hawkeye Gold, LLC; Tom Dorr, President and CEO of U.S. Grains Council; and Bob Casper, President of POET Ethanol Products.

Dorr noted the important role that international trade plays in the ethanol industry. “As producers build out their industry they have to expand their focus to incorporate international trade policies,” Dorr said. “These policies are not easy but there are huge opportunities just waiting to be tapped.”

Ives said the industry needs to continue promoting and educating the public about the value of DDGs. “Distillers grains are not just a byproduct, they are a co-product and we need to start running our businesses under that assumption,” he said.

The goal of Growth Energy’s Executive Leadership Conference was to bring members together to assess the organization and the state of the ethanol industry.

Today, about 1/3 of the sorghum crop goes into ethanol production. An interesting little piece of information I picked up when I spoke with Gerald Simonsen, the Chairman of the National Sorghum Producers during Commodity Classic. Sorghum is a good feedstock for ethanol production for several reasons. First, it uses half the amount of water used in corn production and second, the sugar-based sorghums, like sweet sorghum and energy sorghums produce more ethanol per acre than other starch-based feedstocks.

Simonsen told me that his organization is very focused on the ethanol industry not only from a research, development and marketing standpoint, but also policy. The RFS2 rules were recently announced and Simonsen said that while they were happy to be included, they do have a few issues with some of the things said about sorghum. Therefore, his organization is working with the USDA and EPA to “iron out some of the rough edges and make sure sorghum has a viable future in ethanol.”

Currently, you can produce the same amount of ethanol from a bushel of corn or ethanol. However, Simonsen noted, you can also make sugar-based ethanol out of sweet sorghum and in terms of cellulosic ethanol, energy sorghum and forage sorghum are feedstocks that the US Department of Energy is excited about. These types of feedstocks produce more ethanol from a bushel of sorghum than what we’re seeing today.

“We have a three-way punch. We’ve got the whole ethanol thing surrounded. We just have to bring it together and move forward,” concluded Simonsen.

You can listen to my interview with Gerald below.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (1.8MB)

The winner for the Renewable Fuels Association’s (RFA) E85 Flex-Fuel Challenge Cutest Kid Photo Contest is in – Latisha Martinex of Virgina Beach. Ms. Martinex will receive free ethanol for one year and her photo was selected by the judges based on creativity and quality.

More than 1,000 photos were submitted and of those, “Amira and her Snow Love,” submitted by Megan Pomeroy of Le Mars, Iowa, is the winner of a $500 ethanol fuel card after receiving the Most Voted award from daily votes on the E85 Challenge website.

“The Cutest Kid contest is the E85 Flex Fuel Challenge’s most successful marketing effort to date, reaching more than 1,000 families nationwide, said RFA Market Development Director, Robert White. “Contests such as this allow us to reach out to non traditional groups, like mothers, to introduce ourselves and better educate them on the value of renewable fuels. Congratulations to all the winners.”

The first 1,000 entrants for the Cutest Kid Photo Contest received a free eco-friendly reusable shopping bag filled with consumer information about Flex-Fuel Vehicles (FFVs), ethanol facts and a reusable bag fact sheet. The Cutest Kid Photo Contest was the 4th E85 Flex-Fuel Challenge Contest.

Daryl Hannah has changed her hat, per se, and along with the promotion of biodiesel, she is now promoting higher blends of ethanol. On Tuesday, March 23, 2010 Hannah’s ‘79 Pontiac Trans-Am, that was featured in the movie “Kill Bill,” will be featured in the TV show EcoReview. The Topic is The Greening of the Auto Industry: from Paint to Fuel and the host of the program is Tom Harvey. The show will take viewers though how alcohol fuel is produced and used around the world for transportation, cooking and heating. In addition, the program will highlight a new California certified smog station test that recently compared unleaded gas emissions to those of E10, E15 and E85. For those unable to get the show, you can watch it here.

Hannah’s next appearance will be during a press conference in Sacramento on March 24, 2010 to promote the E15 waiver. She along with David Blume, author of Alcohol Can Be a Gas, will present the Environmental Protection Agency with more research to substantiate the benefits of using E15 and higher blends of ethanol as a gas additive – information the EPA claims is lacking. The research presented will include the “Kill Bill” Trans-Am which was converted to run on ethanol last year and tested using the California certified smog test for E10, E15 and E85. The test shows that all blends not only meet but exceed the standards set out in the Clean Air Act. The event is being hosted at Sacramento’s “Flyer” E85 station located at 4250 John Madison Avenue, Sacramento California, beginning at 2:30 pm Pacific Time. For those that are interested but can’t make the event, it will be streamed live here.

The E15 waiver was a hot topic during Commodity Classic and for good reason: EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in response to a question asked during a Congressional hearing, said she felt they’d be ready to make a decision late summer. Originally, the EPA was to have ruled on the E15 waiver, that would waive the Clean Air Act to allow up to 15 percent ethanol in motor vehicles, by the beginning of last December. At that time, they deferred to mid-summer – now they are saying possibly by end of summer.

“Though without giving a date, clearly that date has passed and that’s troubling I think, and we’ve got to keep the pressure on,” said Brian Jennings, the Executive Director of the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE) during an interview with DomesticFuel during Commodity Classic.

According to Jennings, Robert White with the Renewable Fuels Association (RFA), and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, the EPA is doing more work on small engines and the effect of ethanol blends on catalytic converters. This despite the large number of research already available.

“But it does seem frustrating to us that they keep looking for some sort of excuse to delay or not to make the decision when we feel the preponderance of evidence, so far, and as it continues to come in, is going to justify this,” continued Jennings.

Both Vilsack and White agree and feel that the E15 waiver will pass – especially since the Renewable Fuels Standard mandates 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022 and the E10 blend wall is approximately 14 billion gallons and White notes that there are 22 billions gallons above the blend wall that need to find a home.

“E15 is great, but it’s still a band aid for the real issue and the sticking point is going to come very soon and the problem we’ve been facing for well over a decade is you simply can’t flip a light switch for this infrastructure to be there,” explained White.

You can download (mp3 file) or listen to a Robert’s interview here:

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You can download (mp3 file) or listen to Brian’s interview here:

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It’s been a long road, but according to a company statement released by Dresser Wayne, Underwriters Laboratory (UL) has approved the use of the company’s Ovation Eco Fuel dispenser for the use ethanol blends up to 25 percent (E25). This is great news as the ethanol industry waits to hear if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will rule in favor of the E15 waiver, which would allow up to 15 percent ethanol blends to be used in conventional vehicles.

“Motorists continue to call for greener fueling solutions and retailers are demanding technologies that will help them stay in front of the market opportunity while managing regulatory changes,” noted Scott Negley, Director of Alternative Energy Products at Dresser Wayne. “Our Eco Fuel dispenser is in use across North America and is designed to handle the higher blends without modifications.”

UL has been working to certify various pump dispensing equipment for use with higher ethanol blends even though there has been widespread use of these components to dispense E85 for more than a decade. Should the E15 waiver be passed, retailers who have installed the Eco Fuel dispenser will not have to modify or upgrade any equipment. For those consumers looking to use more than E15 and own a flex-fuel vehicle, will be able too use any blend of fuel between E10-E85.

“UL’s certification of this dispenser for up to 25 percent ethanol use is an important step forward and will help expand the use of ethanol,” said Renewable Fuels Association Director of Market Development Robert White. “With EPA expected to approve 15 percent ethanol blends sometime this year, this announcement provides some comfort to gas station owners facing increased ethanol blending. Likewise, it provides comfort to stations looking to install blender pump technology offering a wide range of blends from 10 up to 85 percent.”

There have been several recent announcements from the ethanol industry to increase the number of blender pumps across the country. The RFA is working alongside the American Coalition for Ethanol and numerous state corn groups to install 5,000 blender pumps in the next three years as part of its Blend Your Own Ethanol campaign. Growth Energy recently announced that it is offering funding for blender pump installation between $2,500-$5,000.

In this edition of “The Ethanol Report,” we hear from Geoff Cooper, Vice President of Research and Analysis for the Renewable Fuels Association, about what is right and what is wrong with the rule for the expanded Renewable Fuel Standard released early last month by the Environmental Protection Agency.

The good news is that the RFS2 improves upon the rule EPA proposed last year, and that it is much better than what California is using to determine lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions. The bad news is the continued reliance on the non-scientific indirect land use change. EPA’s new calculations determined that corn ethanol was better than they first thought when it comes to indirect land use change, so they cut that penalty in half, while they totally eliminated it for sugarcane ethanol – a move that has RFA mystified.

This podcast was recorded at the recent National Ethanol Conference, where RFS2 was the main topic of discussion. We reference a presentation done at the conference by EPA’s Sarah Dunham, which you can find in a previous post here on Domestic Fuel.

You can subscribe to this twice monthly podcast by following this link.

Listen to or download the podcast here:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.0MB)

A team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have figured out how to get the the sugar molecules trapped inside inedible plant biomass, a key step in the creation of cellulosic biofuels.

This press release from the school says the process, featured in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, converts up to three-quarters of the sugars locked up in raw corn stover into simple, fermentable sugars … an attractive alternative to the enzyme-based approaches currently favored by biofuels researchers:

“Our chemical process is extremely efficient,” says Ron Raines, a UW-Madison professor of biochemistry and chemistry. “It also has marked advantages over the existing processes-both chemical or enzymatic-for producing sugars from biomass.”

Raines’ chemical approach, which he developed with graduate student Joe Binder, a doctoral candidate in the chemistry department, on the other hand, relies on a mixture of an ionic liquid and dilute acid-both of which can slip past lignin-to dissolve the long chains of sugars in biomass and break them up into individual molecules of glucose and xylose.

The article goes on to say that the researchers were able to get about the same amount of sugar out of the biomass as the more-expensive enzymes usually used. This could significantly cut the cost of cellulosic ethanol, helping move that industry forward.

There’s only one week left to get the early registration discount for the Ethanol 2010: Emerging Issues Forum. The event will be held at the Magnolia Hotel on April 8 and 9 in Omaha, Nebraska.

The fifth annual forum features a number of experts on topics including marketing, transportation, RINS and lifecycle emissions of the ethanol production process. This two-day conference is designed to encourage dialogue between speakers and participants, and seating is limited to 125.

Guest speakers include USDA Undersecretary for Rural Development Dallas Tonsager; RINstar founder Clayton McMartin; Marty Ruikka of PRX Geographic on feedstock supply and demand issues; and Trevor Hinz of ICM on enhancing production efficiency and capacity.

The Nebraska Ethanol Board will be hosting the forum. The Ethanol Board assists ethanol producers with programs and strategies for marketing ethanol and related co-products. The Board supports organizations and policies that advocate the increased use of ethanol fuels – and administers public information, education and ethanol research projects. The Board also assists companies and organizations in the development of ethanol production facilities in Nebraska.

To register for the conference, click here.