If Cleveland-Cliffs’ plans work out, the biofuel company it bought last week will soon help fuel taconite mines and power plants in Eveleth and Silver Bay, Minn. Once those plants are built, the Cleveland-based company will burn a mix of the cubes and coal to run its United Taconite Mine in Eveleth, its Northshore Mining power plant in Silver Bay and the Tilden Mine in Michigan, spokeswoman Maureen Talarico said. Dana Byrne, a Cleveland-Cliffs vice president, said Renewafuel’s technology “enables us to be proactive in addressing challenging environmental issues for us and the states in which we operate. The fuel cubes, which are about the size of a charcoal briquette, generate twice as much energy as other biofuels. The cubes were successfully tested at the University of Iowa’s power plant and in the Empire Iron Ore Mine in Michigan. Spokeswoman Talarico said Cleveland-Cliffs expects to produce 100,000 tons of the cubes per year in Battle Creek and 150,000 tons a year in Minnesota and at subsequent plants.
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Before leaving for the holidays, the state Senate passed a bill that would provide a 75-cent tax credit to companies for every gallon of biofuel they produce for the next three years. It’s not exactly what industry officials wanted — biofuel companies were asking for a $1 tax credit for every gallon produced — but it’s enough to “keep the doors” open if it passes the state House and is signed by the governor, says Ben Wooten, president of Keystone Biofuels and founding member of Pennsylvania Biodiesel Producers Group. Biofuels, what some consider a pillar of future energy production, might not have a future in Pennsylvania without help from the state government, says Wooten and others. Pennsylvania companies consume eight to 10 million gallons of biofuel a day, but Pennsylvania biofuel producers supply only 600,000 gallons of it, he adds. The market is there, he says, but in-state biofuel producers just need to be on a level playing field with those from states like Iowa and Indiana. In the three years since the federal government created tax credits for biofuels, production has ballooned from five million gallons to about 350 million, according to Wooten.
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US President George W Bush insists that the feedstock to produce ethanol from plants be the American corn, which scientists like to call Zea mays ; it’s amazing how corn goes into so many feeds of poultry & livestock, goes into so many food products that if you’re making ethanol out of your corn, you’re competing against the makers of food products who are forced to buy your expensive corn so the food makers raise their prices, and all the poor consumers can do is raise the roof and empty their pockets. The Brazilians insist that the feedstock to produce ethanol from plants be the Brazilian sugarcane, which scientists like to call Saccharum officinarum ; the plant’s saccharine promise of energy security is at the expense of the forest which the Brazilian farmers cut down the Brazilians solve a problem and create another, bigger problem. Mendoza explains that because the supply of corn is being diverted to the making of ethanol instead of feed (for poultry & livestock) or food (for people), and since the US produces 40% of the world’s corn and supplies 70% of all corn exports, whatever ethanol science the US practices on corn, that’s the dominant science that applies. I know of an ethanol science that favors the poor, and it comes from the other side of the world, the land of Mahatma Gandhi , that is, India . The science is applicable to sweet sorghum as the feedstock for ethanol; sweet sorghum science has been generated by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) under the leadership of Director General William D Dar who has headed the Institute since 2000.
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But the bill left out two major provisions that Congressional Democrats had pushed for months - over $20 billion in funding for renewable energy, paid for largely by taxes on Big Oil, and a requirement that utilities buy 15 percent of their power from renewable sources. Debate on the bill in both the House and Senate had been intense for the last few weeks. Joe Barton, R-Texas, complained that the bill will undo many of the efforts made to foster increased production of fossil fuels in an energy bill passed in 2005. Barton called the bill a “no-energy” bill and “a recipe for recession,” arguing that the conservation measures mandated by the bill would raise prices for fuel, homes and appliances for consumers. Fortune chose the absolutely dumbest of the dumb that the gods of fate and humor delivered into our laps - and yours - this past year.
The new renewable fuel standard (RFS) calling for production of 36 billion gallons of biofuels by 2022 will help accelerate development of advanced industrial biotechnology applications necessary to economically produce these volumes of biofuels, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) said today. In order to meet the new RFS we must couple advances in biotechnology with the building of a huge new energy infrastructure. The industrial biotechnology and biofuel industries are ready and able to meet the challenge of sustainably increasing production of cellulosic and advanced biofuels to accomplish the goals of the new renewable fuels standard. Industrial biotechnology companies have made extraordinary leaps in an array of applications for biofuel production, from discovery of new microbes and enzymes for cellulosic ethanol production to creation of novel ones through synthetic genomics that can actually produce hydrocarbon molecules.
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Promoters of the ethanol mandate assert that it would help the United States achieve energy independence and slow the accumulation of greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. For example, a 2006 report by the International Institute for Sustainable Development estimated that if one took into account state renewable fuel tax breaks and direct agricultural subsidies that reduce other costs, the total amount of the ethanol subsidy rises from $1. The International Food Policy Research Institute just issued a report projecting that if countries simply pursue their current biofuel expansion plans, the global price of corn will increase by 26 percent and the price for oilseeds will rise by 18 percent. The Food Policy Research Institute report notes that “The increase in crop prices resulting from expanded biofuel production is also accompanied by a net decrease in the availability of and access to food.
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But the Republican candidates are divided over whether the government should require increased production of the fuel or whether to continue the subsidies and import tariff upon which the industry has come to depend. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, supports some of the biofuel industry’s priorities, such as the continuation of tax subsidies, but he has stopped short of endorsing the 36 billion-gallon mandate. The next administration is likely to be lobbied by the ethanol industry to increase the market for the fuel by allowing more of it to be used in conventional gasoline. The focus on biofuels in Congress owes a lot to the importance of the Iowa presidential caucuses, according to the industry’s critics.
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The new energy legislation sets a rising mandate for renewable energy up to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022 and establishes higher fuel economy standards for passenger cars and light trucks for the first time in more than three decades. But many analysts believe there’s enough political momentum within the Democratic-controlled Congress to insert the renewable tax credits - many of which expire at the end of 2008 - into other legislation in the new year. Also, key proponents of the renewable energy mandate have vowed to bring up the bill in the next Congress. Their strong lobbying effort motivated Republican senators to block the revenue-raising items that could have cost the large oil companies more than $13 billion over the next 10 years. He said many refiners feared that uncertain production of biofuels in the years ahead - in the case of drought, or if planned advanced biofuel technologies didn’t deliver - would mean multi-billion-dollar investments would leave stranded assets. We reserve the right to edit and publish your comments along with your name; we reserve the right not to publish reader comments.
A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has warned that switching from fossil fuels to biofuels could do the planet more harm than good. Prof Paul Crutzen calculated the global warming effects of the fertiliser needed to grow energy crops like biodiesel and bioethanol were much worse than has been estimated. He believes a larger proportion than thought of the nitrogen in fertilisers is converted into nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, New Scientist magazine reported. But Prof Crutzen and his colleagues calculated the true figure was closer to 3-5% - enough to negate the savings in carbon dioxide emissions made by switching from fossil fuels. They estimated that biodiesel made from rapeseed was the least efficient biofuel, potentially having a significantly greater warming effect than fossil fuels. Prof Crutzen, of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for chemistry for his work on the threat to the ozone layer.
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