By Elizabeth E. Hood, PhD and Lorenz Bauer, PhD, Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. Special to The Digest Introduction An important mitigation strategy for the impact of fossil fuels on the environment is to use biofuels from renewable sources for transportation. The problem is that the cost of biofuel production is high and this nascent industry cannot […]
The profusion of government-based Three-Letter Acronyms got so out of hand at one stage that the Navy’s Director of Operational Energy Chris Tindal began a meeting not long ago with a slide that said, simply, EYA. Explain Your Acronym. But there’s one TLA that was so friendly and promising that it forms the exception to the […]
India’s SunLight Fuels licenses IH2 Technology for hydrocarbon transportation fuels from agricultural waste In India, Sunlight Fuels has signed a Front End Loading license agreement for IH2 Technology with CRI Catalyst, a division of Shell. Project details The Sunlight Fuels agreement is the first IH2 FEL-2 license granted in India for a commercial scale plant. […]
Note. This is Part 2 of our series on the inside true story of KiOR. In part 1 of our series, here, we explored: the formation of BIOeCON and KiOR, the problem of too much oxygen and coke, the entry of Khosla Ventures, and the loss of a CEO. Also, “a recipe for technical failure”, disastrous pilot […]
Not long ago, KiOR quietly re-named itself Inaeris Technologies and launched a modest website which discussed the technology and management in little detail, but focused to an extraordinary extent on a declaration of values. Empowerment, honesty, fairness, “lessons learned from our collective experience” and so on. Warm, kindly Hallmark Card sentiments, universally popular, admired and […]
The High Priests of the Advanced Bioeconomy look upon the advocates of methane roughly the same way that Pope Leo X looked upon Martin Luther. It’s heresy, they say. With the exception of the happy but limited tonnes of biogas coming from digesters and landfill, it’s not renewable, goeth the rap against methane. It’s a […]
Turns out that even in a genome stripped down to only those genes absolutely essential for human life, some 16% of the matter in there is completely mysterious to researchers in terms of its purpose or function. They know it’s there, they know it plays a role. They have no idea what that role is. […]
Two giants hook up to bring cellulosic biodiesel to scale. A new source of biodiesel feedstock, and a new source of renewable fuels. In Iowa, ExxonMobil and Renewable Energy Group have agreed to jointly study the production of biodiesel by fermenting renewable cellulosic sugars from sources such as agricultural waste. REG has developed a patented […]
Is ethanol really worth $3.81 for the octane but costs only $1.39 on the market? How could that be? Math majors around the country are frequently perplexed by this one. If you start with 84-octane RBOB gasoline and add a 10 percent blend 100-octane ethanol, how the heck do you get 87-octane gasoline at the pump? […]
$2.25 per gallon hydrocarbon fuels from biomass, unsubsidized? CRI moves to second-stage towards a commercial-scale deployment of its high-yield, low-cost drop-in fuel technology. And residence time may be the key. This week, a cryptic but tasty news kernel has emerged from CRI, that they have entered into a Front End Loading (FEL-2) evaluation package license […]
