Domestic Fuel

After attending the BIO 2006 Convention I’m sure that any event being organized by BIO will be world class. That’s what the upcoming World Congress on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioprocessing sounds like it will be. This is the 3rd time the event will be held.

The advance release says it will display, “The latest advances in industrial biotechnology for renewable fuel and sustainable consumer products made from agricultural feedstocks.”

The Congress, to be held July 11-14, 2006 at the Toronto Westin Harbour Castle Hotel, is hosted by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), American Chemical Society, the National Agriculture Biotechnology Council, the Agri-Food Innovation Forum, the Chemical Institute of Canada, BIOTECanada and EuropaBIO.
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I hope you like our event blogging. I’ve been receiving some very nice comments on it, thank you. Here’s a story about an event that’s being blogged in Africa that you might be interested to check out. Keep your eyes on Domestic Fuel too as I have a couple of events coming up that will be covered extensively.

So, check out the Sasol Chevron GTL Challenge diary. They have photos, a daily summary and video. I would have allowed public commenting but this is extremely well done. A lot of companies are seeing the value in this kind of direct to consumer media campaign. I’m jealous that they have a team. Maybe I can work up to an assistant in the near future.

The Sasol Chevron GTL Challenge will see a team of twelve men and women embarking on a symbolic journey from Sasolburg, South Africa to Qatar, to signal the inauguration of the Oryx GTL plant in Qatar on 6th June.
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The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, better known as FAO, is seeing a major international trend toward bioenergy. According to a news release from the FAO Rome newsroom,

“The gradual move away from oil has begun. Over the next 15 to 20 years we may see biofuels providing a full 25 percent of the world’s energy needs,” Alexander Müller, the new Assistant Director-General for the Sustainable Development Department of FAO said here. Factors pushing for such a momentous change in the world energy market include environmental constraints – increased global warming and the Kyoto Protocol’s curbs on emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses – and a growing perception by governments of the risks of dependence on oil.

Apparently the ethanol industry is not doing as well in Australia as it is here in the U.S., according to this story from the ABC Rural Network. (That’s ABC as in AUSTRALIAN Broadcast Company) The reason is that major oil companies have yet to sign contracts to meet future target production goals and officials with the Australian Biofuels Association are concerned. That group is apparently having trouble with their website as well – at least at the time of this post – but I provided the link anyway assuming it will be corrected at some point.
Just a note about the ABC in Australia – I had the pleasure of meeting one of their reporters last year when I attended the International Federation of Ag Journalists (IFAJ) meeting in Switzerland. Her name is Alice Plate and it was very interesting hearing about the support that farm radio has in Australia – much more so than here in the US of A. In fact, the network’s flagship program, the Country Hour, is officially recognised by the Guinness Book of Records, as being Australia’s longest running radio program, celebrating 60 years of Rural broadcasting in 2005. Read all about it’s history here.

I just received the following statement from Tim Haig, Chair of the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. He issued the following statement today in regard to recent biofuel issues in the Halifax area:

The Halifax Regional Municipality recently purchased what we now understand to be partially converted fish oil for use as a biofuel blend. Despite the best of intentions, the partially converted fish oil did not meet the universally recognized American Society of Testing Material (ASTM) biodiesel standard of quality.

The ASTM standard exists to ensure the highest quality of biodiesel fuel is available for consumers and its trouble free use in transportation. The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association does not recommend or support blending any biofuel which does not meet the very specific standard of ASTM D6751. Biodiesel can be produced from fish oil but it must be manufactured to meet ASTM standards. Meeting the ASTM specification is the only guarantee of a reliable and efficient fuel.

Quality for biodiesel is going to be a big focus with the industry this coming year. That was made very clear at the just completed National Biodiesel Conference in San Diego.

The CEO of the National Corn Growers Association was in Japan last week to talk about the history and the future of ethanol in the United States. CEO Rick Tolman attended the Japan Biomass Ethanol Fuel International Symposium in Misasawa, Japan – according to a story on the NCGA website.

Tolman said Japan has many renewable fuel advocates.
“They like the environmental benefits and economic aspects of renewable fuels,” he said. “The focus of the symposium was discussing the potential to build a local industry from surplus rice and from wood chips and forest residue. They were very interested in how the renewable fuels industry has developed in the United States.”
Japan recently passed a law that allows a 3 percent ethanol blend in some vehicles. The nation has one ethanol plant that produces ethanol from sugar.
Tolman said Japan is looking for ways to increase value-added opportunities for its rural communities, just like the United States.

France wants to be the number one ethanol producer in Europe, according to this article from Reuters posted on Planet Ark today. Currently, Spain is Europe’s biggest ethanol producer with annual output of 200,000 tonnes. France occupies the number two spot with output of 100,000 tonnes a year, according to the article. The French ethanol industry coordinator believes that France can beat that by 2008 because they have more agricultural output than Spain. Alain Jeanroy told Reuters he expects France to produce 880,000 tonnes of ethanol by 2008 and two million tonnes by 2015. Currently, most of the ethanol production in France is from sugar beets, but they expect wheat to be most used in the future “due to it’s high availability.” The European Commission set a non-binding goal to have 5.75 percent of their energy supplied by bio-fuels by 2010, but France wants to beat that goal. I found this map of biofuels plants in France that shows where the production is located. The blue dots are biodiesel and the red squares are ethanol. About 40 percent of the biofuels production in France is ethanol, 60 percent biodiesel. The main crop used for biodiesel production is rapeseed.

I am not making this headline up. It is straight out of today’s “Thai Day.” Basically, the short version is that the king of Thailand is promoting the use of biodiesel made from palm oil, but I just love the way the story is written for the Thai audience. It reads like a fairy tale …

Sometime in the early 1980s, as Sumet Tantivejkul remembers it, His Majesty the King took his trusted aide aside and said that he wanted him to look into the feasibility of using palm oil as an alternative to diesel as an energy source.

In response to His Majesty’s address, the Energy Ministry announced that it would promote biodiesel through tax incentives. HM the King’s interest in biodisesel became more pronounced in 2000, when petroleum prices started to soar. The Thai government responded by launching the country’s first “car-free” day to conserve oil reserves in an effort to raise public awareness of air pollution and energy conservation. But a symbolic day was hardly going to make a difference: what the country needed was a long-term solution to the problem of the earth’s rapidly diminishing oil reserves. As His Majesty realized, one solution lies in biodiesel, a substitute made from organic matter – in Thailand’s case, palm oil.

And they all lived happily ever after….

The picture is of the biodiesel reactor at the Pikul Thong Royal Development Study Center in Narathiwat.

Our neighbors to the north may soon have a national biofuels standard. The two leading politicial parties in Canada are both promising to require that renewable fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, make up 5 percent gasoline and diesel fuel by the year 2010. According to a Reuters Canada report, three of the 10 provinces — Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — already require some renewable fuels but there is not a national standard. The two major party candidates are Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin and Conservative leader Stephen Harper and the election is just over a month away, January 23.

This is an interesting story in the INQ7.net about a former Miss Universe who is now championing alternative fuels as what they describe “Ms Fuels For Life.” The story was actually published in the Phillipine Daily Inquirer. Margie Moran was Miss Universe in 1973 and is working with her government’s Clean City program and the U. S. Dept. of Energy and the United States Agency for International Development on this project. In the Phillipines they make biodiesel out of coconuts and ethanol out of sugar.

A lot of people think ethanol is only made from corn and here in the United States that seems to be the case. However, there are other commodities than can be used in the production of ethanol and one of those is sugar cane. A story in today’s Planet Ark out of Sao Paulo, Brazil talks about how ethanol itself is becoming a world traded commodity spurred on by the introduction of flex-fueled vehicles. According to the story, “Brazilian sugar cane mills say they are getting better deals to sell ethanol fuel abroad by extending what used to be only spot market sales into longer-term contracts with flexible pricing, especially with the rise in world oil prices.”

The story says that now people are wondering how much sugar cane will be diverted from sugar production to the production of fuel (ethanol).

I know we’re all about “domestic” fuel here so all I’m trying to do is show you that this is big time stuff. I think the regular media sometimes tries to make people think this ethanol thing is just something dreamed up by a bunch of corn farmers. Not!

Anyway, the folks at BBI International put on some great conferences if you want to learn about ethanol. This one’s in China of all places. It’s the World BioFuels Symposium and it’ll be held in Beijing.

It gets started with a tour of what they claim is the world’s largest ethanol plant – the Jilin Fuel Ethanol Company in Jilin, China November 11. This is one of two plant tours they have arranged. Apparently China is facing a big fuel shortage and with severe air pollution problems they’re looking to renewable fuels like ethanol.

Doesn’t that just make sense?

It isn’t just the United States that’s in on the ethanol growth wave. According to a story in the Mumbai, India, Financial Express, “India’s demand of alcohol for blending and other purposes is expected to reach 2,300 million litres by 2009-10 at 5% blending level.” That’s about 608 million gallons if I did my math right. (1 litres = 0.264172051 US gallons)

The story also says that they make ethanol from molasses and that there won’t be enough sugarcane and molasses production there to meet this expected need.