Archive for December, 2008
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: a Biofuels Digest special report
2008 was supposed to be the year when biofuels boomed, but producers and developers were under siege all year from a “vast, chicken wing conspiracy” drawn from groups that Daniel Gross, writing in Slate, described as “poverty activists, inflation hawks, efficiency freaks and environmentalists”. He could have added “an aggressive coalition of processed food, meat [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #1, Land use changes, emissions
A pair of articles in Science magazine at the beginning of the year set the tone for a negative debate on the role of biofuels, when two sets of researchers challenged the effectiveness of biofuels as a climate-change mitigation strategy.
A team led by Timothy Searchinger offered an indirect land-use impact model that showed a sharply [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #2, Algae
Algae bloomed in 2008, with Sapphire Energy raising $100 million in funding and providing fuel for the January 2009 Continental Airlines test flight.
Origin Oil, PetroAlgae, Solazyme, Aquaflow Bionomics, UOP, and Bionavitas were among major movers this year in bringing us closer to commercialization. General Atomics and SAIC pulled in major grants for algae-based aviation fuel, [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #3, Gasification, pyrolysis, green fuels
2008 was supposed to be the year when cellulosic ethanol went mainstrean, with Range Fuels’ planned launch of its DOE-supported demonstration scale plant.
Instead, it was companies such as Sustainable Power, Sapphire, Virent, Amyris and LS9 that attracted attention with their green diesels and gasolines – made from biomass but otherwise having the same molecules and [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #4, Obama’s election and the Green Dream Team
With the election of ethanol supporter Barack Obama over ethanol foe John McCain, biofuels supporters drew a breath of relief. The appointment of biofuels subsidy author Tom Daschle to the cabinet was a good sign, as was the appointment of former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack to head USDA.
The appointments of Carol Browner as energy policy [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #5, EU mandate and subsidies collapse
Partly as a result of negative publicity regarding biofuels, the European Union watered down its 2020 biofuels conversion goals, while Germany began to remove tax credits that aided its domestic biodiesel industry. The biofuel tax increases, aimed at ultimately creating tax parity between biofuels and conventional fuels, rendered the domestic German biodiesel industry unable to [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of the Year: #6, Commodity prices
Palm, corn, wheat, ethanol, oil, and soybeans went on their biggest Coney Island rollercoaster ride ever this year, with corn rising as high last summer as $7.85 in the futures markets before falling to $3.50 late in the year. Oil famously climbed into the $130s before falling to $38 by year end.
Palm went as high [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #7, VeraSun’s bankruptcy, and the first generation ethanol collapse
The meltdown seemed to commence in the early summer when corn prices jumped from the $4 range to $7.
Biofuel Energy was the first to indicate that they had significant negative exposure on corn prices. In their case, they had failed to hedge their purchases and were buying in the sky-high open markets and selling ethanol [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #8, the Food vs fuel controversy
In the first half of the year, and stampeded of voices cried out against biofuels in the “food vs fuel” debate where biofuels were blamed for the rise in food prices when corn and other commodity ingredients rose dramatically in price.
Jean Ziegler called biofuels “a crime against humanity”, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg predicted [...]
The Top 10 Biofuels Stories of 2008: #9, India sets a 5 percent biofuels mandate, raises to 10 percent, misses the first target badly
In late 2007, India imposed a 5 percent biofuels mandate, and hiked the mandate to 10 percent in 2008. Chaos ensued.
As Biofuels Digest special correspondent Joelle Brink describes it: “The government couldn’t find enough ethanol to meet its 5% mandate. Since there was a sugar surplus at the time, one idea was to temporarily use [...]
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The 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy - Sponsored by Core Informatics
Click on company name for latest company news
1. Coskata
2. Sapphire Energy
3. Virent Energy Systems
4. POET
5. Range Fuels
6. Solazyme
7. Amyris Biotechnologies
8. Mascoma
9. DuPont Danisco
10. UOP
11. ZeaChem
12. Aquaflow Bionomic
13. Bluefire Ethanol
14. Novozymes
15. Qteros
16. Petrobras
17. Cobalt Biofuels
18. Iogen
19. Synthetic Genomics
20. Abengoa Bioenergy
21. KL Energy
22. Ineos
23. GreenFuel
24. Vital Renewable Energy
25. LS9
26. Raven Biofuels
27. Gevo
28. St.1 Biofuels Oy
29. Primafuel
30. Taurus Energy
31. Ceres
32. Syngenta
33. Aurora Biofuels
34. Bionavitas
35. Algenol
36. Verenium
37. Simply Green
38. Carbon Green
39. SEKAB
40. Osage Bioenergy
41. Dynamotive
42. Sustainable Power
43. ETH Bioenergia
44. Choren
45. OriginOil
46. Propel Fuels
47. GEM Biofuels
48. Lake Erie Biofuels
49. Cavitation Technologies
50. Lotus/Jaguar – Omnivore -
