At 8:30am, there’s a standing daily meeting of the key traders in Gary Haer’s sales group at REG headquarters in Ames, Iowa. And they’re not kidding. Everyone stands. For 15 minutes there’s the rat-a-tat-tat of rumor, fact, competitors, pricing, spreads, the who’s selling what and where, the buying and selling of diesel, renewable diesel and biodiesel across North […]
In oil & gas and biofuels, we hear about crack spread and crush spread. But fuse spread is a critical factor in advanced, low-carbon fuels. Here’s the what and why and who. The most fundamental economic in the oil & gas business has historically been the crack spread, which is the price difference between the […]
It’s New, it’s Neo — the neodiesel companies — brimming with technologies to create cleaner alternatives to a powerhouse fuel. They have the performance, half the carbon, and a range of low-cost feedstocks to choose from. Now, neodiesel heads for Malaysia as a JV opens up ultra low-cost feedstocks with Benefuel’s ENSEL technology. From Malaysia have […]
There’s greenfield construction – new plants. There’s brownfield — redeveloping disused industrial sites. Now, there’s olivefield. Transforming existing sites with new technology that diversify the inputs, reduce the carbon scores, or broaden the product set. As a new JV between Benefuel and Felda exemplifies. In May in “The Neodiesel revolution” we wrote: “Here comes Neo […]
How bad, bent, half-baked, bungled, pettifogged, misconstrued, out-of-date, misleading or agenda-laden can coverage of renewable fuels get? This week, America’s favorite advanced biofuel, biodiesel, gets a hit job. The Digest investigates. In 1994, there were fewer than 1,000 websites. By 2013, there were 672 million. The proliferation of content has resulted in wildly uneven coverage of renewable fuels, if […]
Tired of corn, corn, corn or cane, cane, cane? There are 101 feedstocks in the biofuels canon. Here’s what’s up with each of them, and all of them. In Florida, Biofuels Digest released its annual Guide to biofuels feedstocks, tracking 10,658 items published in the Digest in the past 48 months on 101 feedstocks for […]
Snubbed by Washington as the EPA slashes biodiesel targets despite record production. Now, the National Biodiesel Board gathers for its annual convention, in San Diego, to chart the next moves on its innovative path. What could biodiesel 2.0 look like? Can it really lop 70-80 cents per gallon off the cost by opening up low-cost […]
From the leaders in bioenergy and chemicals— the real issues and trends, as seen at ABLC In California, ABLC-Next has concluded for this year, and it is time to continue the review from a convergence of advanced biofuels leadership in R&D, commercialization, policy and finance. That will reconvene at ABLC 2014 — the Advanced Biofuels […]
REduce, REuse, REcycle. REnewable energy sometimes means REthinking, REfocusing. Great ideas abound for new feedstocks, and novel infrastructure. We admire so many of them. Jatropha, carinata, switchgrass, sweet sorghum, blender pumps, systems-at-sea. And so much more. But what about technologies that bolt-on a different processing unit, but keeps everything else the same. Or uses an […]
Louisiana — it’s as hot as cayenne pepper in biofuels capacity development, but there are cautionary tales hidden in the sauce. When it comes to the first generation of ethanol and biodiesel-based biofuels, Louisiana didn’t figure much into the calculations — to date, there’s just the 5 million gallon (per year) Oswalt Bioenergy biodiesel plant […]
