By Brent Erickson, Executive Vice-President, Biotechnology Innovation Organization Special to The Digest In setting the 2014-2016 Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cited “practical and legal constraints” on the oil industry’s ability to meet the volumes established by Congress. The agency’s methodology in that rule – which it has now proposed […]
By Mahmood Ebadian, Ph.D. Special to The Digest Regardless of the type of industry, the primary goal of any supply chain is to fulfill the customers’ needs efficiently and effectively over the lifetime of the business. An efficient supply chain is capable of maximizing the use of resources across the supply chain as planned while […]
By Zoltán Szabó, Special to The Digest The sustainability aspects of transport fuels are in the spotlight this year in Brussels as a number of key files make their way through the process, namely the Energy Union package, the new Renewable Energy Directive, a communication on transport decarbonisation, and the bioenergy sustainability policy. Correct carbon accounting, […]
By Dick Roche, former Irish Minister for Environment and EU Affairs Special to The Digest When the EU Commission produced its 2012 proposal to cap at 5% the contribution crop-based biofuels can make under the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), the logic of the Commission’s position was widely questioned. Critics, including this writer, challenged the extraordinary […]
By Lorenz Bauer, PhD and William Quapp, MSME, special to The Digest Introduction The continued interest in advanced biofuels has produced numerous exciting technical advances on the laboratory, pilot and demonstration scales. However, attempts to translate these small scale successes into commercial technologies have been less successful. It is easy to blame lower oil and […]
By Brent Erickson, Executive VP, Biotechnology Innovation Organization, Special to The Digest Congress has made it a priority to try and return the annual appropriations process to regular order, following multiple years of passing late omnibus funding bills. Omnibus funding bills rob many successful programs of the individual evaluation they merit; the Farm Bill Energy […]
By Mark Warner, PE, Founder, Warner Advisors LLC, Special to The Digest Understanding the challenge of commercializing innovative foods will separate those that change the future of food, from others that become an asterisk in a market study. In my previous publication “What makes scale-up of industrial bio-technology so difficult”, I expanded on the technical challenges […]
By Jan Koninckx, Global business director for advanced biofuels, DuPont. Special to The Digest February 2016 was the warmest February on record—perhaps of all time. Not by tenths of degrees, as records are often broken by, but by a staggering 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average. The body of evidence for global warming continues to […]
By Brent Erickson, Executive Vice-President, Biotechnology Innovation Organization Over the past decade, federal policies such as the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the USDA Biobased Markets Program, the Navy’s Green Fleet initiative, the Second Generation Biofuel Tax Credit, and others have created momentum for industrial biotech innovations, including biofuels, renewable chemicals and synthetic biology. While policy […]
By Douglas L. Faulkner, “The Cleantech Conservative” With baseball’s spring training once again underway, it seemed appropriate to channel one of that sport’s legendary players into an article on biofuels. The late, great New York Yankee catcher and all-round American folk commentator, Yogi Berra, coined many timeless observations. “The future ain’t what it used to […]
