Is your business model based on government regulations or fuel science? By Bill Brandon, Special to The Digest In light of the recent article on Butamax, I feel a response from the perspective of automakers is appropriate. One of the earlier articles referenced asked “ where’s butanol, or other substitutes for gasoline besides ethanol?” and went […]
by Doug Durante, Executive Director of the Clean Fuels Development Coalition Special to The Digest The recent announcement that the Trump Administration was taking another look at Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards was a welcome reality check for what is a complex and multi-layered issue. There was an immediate knee jerk reaction that this […]
By Gregory T. Benz, Lee Enterprises Consulting Special to The Digest Lignocellulosic slurries at high solids concentrations (10-30%) can be quite viscous. The author has seen some where the viscosity at a shear rate of 1/s is higher than 400,000 cP. Conventional agitator impeller selection guidelines would lead one to use helical ribbon impellers (figure […]
By Gretchen Miller Special to The Digest Meghan Pawlowski crawled through the tall, dense sugarcane jungle, glass vials in hand, searching for her next sample site while she kept her eye out for the scurry of cane spiders. Up to four inches across, these usually harmless creatures are nonetheless an unpleasant one-on-one encounter while tangling in […]
These are excerpts from a complete review of ABLC by Raymond James Senior VP Pavel Molchanov, which you can read here. While the tone (on the whole) is no longer worsening, it is far from being as optimistic as it had been in the early years of this decade. This has little to do with the […]
By Douglas L. Faulkner, “The Cleantech Conservative” Special to The Digest Robert McNally, the author of the new, critically-acclaimed book, “Crude Volatility: The History and the Future of Boom-Bust Oil Prices”, believes that global oil markets are entering an epic, structural shift to a protracted new era of wildly fluctuating crude prices. The reason is […]
By Markus Rarbach, Head of Start-up Business Biofuels and Derivatives, Clariant Special to The Digest In an article published by novaCana.com on January 26th entitled; “Dilema do Etanol 2G: os desafios da matéria-prima celulósica” pre-treatment was identified as the key challenge for the six current commercial cellulosic ethanol plants worldwide. Our approach at Clariant when developing […]
By Lorenz Bauer, Ph.D., Lee Enterprises Consulting Special to The Digest The explosion of interest in using biomass to produce chemicals and fuels has motivated a renewed search for improved methods for pretreatment that enable efficient conversion of the raw materials. The molecules in cellulosic materials, and particularly lignocellulosic material, are intertwined and held together […]
By Charles Loos, PE Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. Special to The Digest From an operations standpoint, a wood-fired power plant can be described as a fuel handling system first, and a power plant second. The biggest challenges stem from the fuel itself – procurement, supply, handling and combustion. By contrast, the steam turbine and power cycle […]
By John Diecker, Lee Enterprises Consulting, Inc. Special to The Digest World rice production for the 2016/2017 crop year is estimated by the United States Department of Agriculture to total 481.5 million tons. The vast majority of this will come from Asia where, in addition to being a major food crop, its cultivation has strong […]
