By Doug Durante, Clean Fuels Development Coalition and Doug Sombke, South Dakota Farmers Union Special to The Digest Without question while the modern ethanol industry was built on legislation that provided incentives, market assurance, and other tools, the shift to the regulatory side of the equation has been a painful, foot dragging exercise that has resulted […]
By Brent Erickson, Executive Vice President, Industrial & Environnmental Section, Biotechnology Innovation Organization Special to The Digest On September 30th, the 2018 Farm Bill officially expired. And while both chambers of Congress passed their respective bills, the final version of the legislation that supports the agricultural sector in the U.S. is still being negotiated between […]
By Daniel A. Lane, Ph.D., Member, Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. Special to The Digest At its most basic level, technoeconomic analysis or assessment (TEA) is a cost-benefit comparison tool used to evaluate the commercial viability of a process. While many companies are quite familiar with this tool, a number of startups often forgo TEAs of […]
By Dave Humbird, Ph.D., Member, Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. Special to The Digest For new technologies in the bioeconomy (and in the chemical process industry more broadly), the putative path to commercialization is some form of: lab, pilot, demonstration, commercial. The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale is often proposed to track this progression, effectively ranking […]
By Wayne Lee, CEO, Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. and Martin Wahl, Director of Marketing, Lee Enterprise Consulting, Inc. Special to The Digest Last fall, the experts at Lee Enterprises Consulting published a series of articles entitled Financing Bioeconomy Ventures[1]. At a high level, this previous series covered pro formas, business plans, strategic analysis, market assessment, engineering design, […]
By Bryan Sherbacow, Chief Commercial Officer, World Energy Special to The Digest As 2018 has made all too clear, climate change is real and it’s impacting all of our lives. July 2018 was the hottest month ever recorded in California. We have dealt with the state’s largest wildfire this summer, just one year after the […]
Recently, Neste, the world’s leading producer of renewable diesel, UK-based chemical recycling company ReNew ELP, and Australian technology developer Licella (Cat-HTR™ process) joined forces in a development project to explore the potential of using mixed waste plastic as a raw material for fuels, chemicals, and new plastics. This brings me to the topic at hand […]
by Antoine Schellinger Special to The Digest In what has now become the final RFS2 issued policy under Scott Pruitt, there is no change from the policy established in the proposed and final 2018 Renewable Volume Obligation (RVO). The use of cellulosic waiver authority still dominates the rationale. EPA still back calculating (“implied volume requirement”) […]
By Jeremy Martin, Senior Scientist, Clean Vehicles, Union of Concerned Scientists Republished by permission, the original is here. Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is gone, but the messes he created will be with us for a long time. His approach to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) took an already complicated policy and turned it upside […]
By Sam Nejame, Special to The Digest Here in Cambridge it’s humid and the spritely Liz Warren will soon be seen power walking in a straw hat through my neighborhood again. Amidst the brimstone of the ongoing blue/red culture war, it is useful to consider that even the less than conscientious former EPA chief Scott Pruitt […]
