The Navy’s two-day demonstration, which will happen during the biennial Rim of the Pacific exercise around Hawaii from June 29 to August 3, is part of its plan to send such a strike group on a regular, months-long deployment in 2016, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus said …

…The demonstration strike group will include aircraft operating on 50/50 blends of biofuel and conventional aviation fuel, and noncarrier ships operating on 50/50 blends of biofuel and diesel. Other parts of a strike group – a carrier and submarines – already are nuclear-powered.

The blends, of a kind not derived from food stocks, already have been tested on ships and aircraft, but the demonstration is meant to show that an entire strike group can operate together on these fuels, Mabus said.

…Nations sending units and/or personnel to this year’s event are: Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Tonga, the United Kingdom and the United States.

…The Navy has announced the ships that will take part in the Great Green Fleet demonstration.

The ships are:

USS Nimitz, aircraft carrier

USS Princeton, cruiser

USS Chafee, destroyer

USS Chung Hoon, destroyer

USNS Yukon, oiler

The aircraft are:

MH-60R Seahawk, helicopters

MH-60S Seahawk, helicopters

F/A-18 C/E/F, fighter jets

E-2C Hawkeye, early warning and battle management aircraft  READ MORE

The Standing Committee on Rural Development, in its report on the demands for grants of the land resources department, noted that the bio-fuels programme was started in 2003 and “in-principle” approval had been given for “demonstration phase” involving plantation over 300,000 hectares of bio-diesel producing non-edible oilseeds (jatropha and pongamia) on degraded forest and waste land.

…It noted that funds have not been allocated for bio-fuels programme in the current fiscal (2012-13) as the decision on its future “has been pending for long.”

…A senior official of the department told the panel that a study by TERI had found the programme to be financially unviable.  READ MORE and MORE (Biofuels Digest Asia)

…BRISK (Biofuels Research Infrastructure for Sharing Knowledge) is rooted in the recognition that engineering new production processes for fossil fuel alternatives is among the most promising technological fixes for reducing carbon emissions. A European network of 26 leading universities, hosted by KTH, the BRISK programme is designed to cross-fertilise experimentation in thermochemical biomass conversion by funding the movement of researchers among at least 60 test facilities and pilot plants stretching from Turkey and Greece in the south to Scandinavia and the UK in the north.

Established last autumn, BRISK began accepting proposals for trans-European research projects in April.

…BRISK aims to give researchers the tools to answer fundamental questions about every step in conversion of biomass to fuels: preparing the feedstock, reaction processes such as pyrolysis or gasification, treatment of the resulting products, and catalytic processing.  READ MORE

Bio-ethanol can be used as petrol supplementary and it will increase the octane number of petrol as it is added to the fuel. It will lead to the decrease of greenhouse fuel production.

Bio-ethanol will be manufactured from cellulose material including wood, paper, wheat wastes and sugarcane inside the country.   READ MORE

Let’s go back 10 years ago, before the first Renewable Fuel Standard was passed, when there was 1.1 billion bushels of corn used for ethanol. Then, we’ll look at 2007-08, five years atom, when RFS had been implemented and RFS2 was on the way. And, we’ll look at the WASDE forecasts now available for the 2012/13 season.

The RFA’s Geoff Cooper reports, “USDA released its first estimate of the 2012/2013 corn crop size and it is a big one.  According to this estimate, USDA is projecting record US corn production of 14.79 billion bushels – up 1.7 billion bushels from the previous record of 13.09 billion bushels in 2009. USDA is also projecting corn for ethanol use to be 5 billion bushels for the marketing year running from September 1, 2012 to August 31, 2013. ”

…Based on USDA’s forecast, the corn available for other uses, such as export and the feed markets (which is how field corn plays into the food market, as field corn is not used for human consumption) will have increased 31 percent during the corn ethanol era.

Let’s put this in terms of corn available for other uses, per US resident. In 2002 the population stood at 287 million, and there was 30.4 bushels of corn – that’s 1706 pounds – available per US resident for all other purposes besides corn ethanol.

Where is that today, after a decade of negative press on food vs fuel? The 2012 population stands at 313, and there are expected to be 36.6 bushels of corn – that 2050 pounds, available per US resident for all other purposes besides corn ethanol.  READ MORE

“We think the model will help policy makers and forest managers make informed decisions to maintain forest productivity while minimizing the environmental impact of managed forest plantations,” says Dr. Shiying Tian, a Postdoctoral Researcher at NC State, and lead author of a paper on the model, just released in the Journal Of Environmental Quality. “It also will help us understand how these forest systems will respond if we see changes in temperature or precipitation related to climate change,” says Dr. Mohamed Youssef, Assistant Professor of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at NC State, and co-author.

…The new model is timely, due to a number of emerging uses for forest land. One example, the national interest in identifying new means of growing biofuels crops, like switchgrass, by planting it in the space between trees in commercial forests. DRAINMOD-FOREST will help determine whether such an “inter-crop” method is viable and sustainable. Would it hinder tree growth? What would the environmental consequences be? “We could also use the model to determine the viability and environmental impact of introducing new commercial tree species,” Tian says.  READ MORE  Abstract

The study commissioned by the Ministry of Mines and Energy found that Colombian ethanol made with sugar cane emits 74% less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. Ethanol made with palm oil produces 83% less emissions.

These reductions mean that if all of the country’s existing cane sugar and palm oil facilities operated at full capacity, carbon dioxide emissions would drop by 1.8 million tonnes – 3% of the country’s CO2 emissions in 2008, the report stated.

…Though still years behind the world’s largest biofuels producers, the U.S. and Brazil, Colombia’s ethanol industry is set to benefit from the U.S. Free Trade Agreement, which takes effect May 15.

Cane sugar ethanol is not produced in the U.S., and while Brazil’s exports to the U.S. face high tariffs, Colombian fuel will avoid them as a result of the FTA.  READ MORE

This congress is the leading Latin American meeting dealing with new uses of forest, agricultural and microalgal biomass as source of bioenergy, chemical products and biomaterials.

1. Subject Areas

[a] Chemical Processes

Biomass conversion processes as a way to obtain intermediate products of commercial interest, including scientific, technological, and economic aspects, as well as methodology optimization, product characterization and applications. The main topics that are considered for this subject area are:

• Hydrolysis of lignocellulosic raw materials and microalgal biomass.

• Separation processes of biomass components with organic solvents, gases under sub-and supercritical conditions, ionic liquids, among others.

• Transesterification reactions.

• Chemical modification of cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin.

• Refinement of by-products from lignocellulosic and microalgal biomass to obtain biofuels and bioproducts.

• Scaling up of chemical processes.

[b] Thermochemical Processes

The thermochemical conversion area considers the application of processes at the laboratory, pilot and industrial level, product characterization and applications, and the production of solid, liquid and gaseous biofuels. The following areas are considered:

• Processes for wood, bark and waste organic materials roasting, pellets and roasted pellets.

• Fast and slow pyrolysis to produce bio-oil and biocharcoal.

• Hydrothermal processes for biomass conversion or its components.

• Fischer-Tropsch by-products and bio-oil.

• Biogenic methane obtained from synthesis gas and hydrogen.

[c] Biological Processes

Biological processes consider the conversion of agricultural, forest and microalgal biomass in intermediate products of scientific and/or commercial interest, including, among others:

• Alcoholic fermentation and bioethanol production.

• Anaerobic digestion and biogas production.

• Enzymatic hydrolysis of biomass.

• Use of microorganisms and enzymes to obtain specific products of interest.

• Microalgae production for biodiesel and hydrocarbons.

[d] Sustainability

This area is focused on the application of life cycle analysis in biorefining processes, sustainability analysis fossil fuels substitution with biofuels, as well as the logistic aspects and availability of biomass. The following topics are considered:

• Life cycle analysis of biomass biorefining processes.

• Economic, environmental and/or social assessment on biorefining processes.

• Energetic evaluation of biorefining processes.

• Biomass logistics applied to biorefineries.

• Availability of biomass as raw material for biorefineries.

• Cultivation and improvement of dendro-energy species.

[e] Biomaterials

Products and processes related to new types of biomaterials, their characterization and development of commercial applications, in particular, it is important to note:

• Thermoplastic biomaterials.

• Biodegradable materials.

• Thermosetting resins based on renewable resources.

• Composite biomaterials.

• Conventional and functional packaging based on renewable resources.

2. Submission of Papers

Contributions must be submitted in the form of an abstract, not exceeding 500 words, that must include the following information:

• Title (no more than 15 words).

• Full name of the author and co-authors.

• Brief résumé of the author (including phone and e-mail) and preferred mode of presentation (oral or poster).

• Subject area of ​​the abstract, according to the terms of section 1 of this document.

The prestigious Journal of Biobased Materials & Bioenergy will edit a special issue (during the first half of 2013) containing selected papers from the Conference.

• Deadline for abstract submission is June 30th, 2012.

• Notification of paper acceptance for oral and paper presentations will be sent on August 15th, 2012.

• On-line registration will be available from August 15th, 2012.

OK, let’s see. A dominating position in the future of manufacturing, a structural advantage in the cost of energy, enough food security and energy security to pursue an expansionist foreign policy.

Eventually, dominance in finance when all the capital has drained out of the EU and the US and sits in mountains of cash back in China, as it did before the Age of Navigation and the Industrial Revolution eroded China’s 2000-year dominance of world trade.

Let’s look at the 20 signs.

Next generation technologies deploying in China

Lemna.  …build-out of ten commercial-scale units of approximately 5,000 hectares will be implemented step by step at locations to be determined around the world.  …

Cassava stalk.  …ethanol for less than two dollars per gallon…  commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol and butanol distillery that will produce 50,000 metric tons annually.  …

Corncobs. … corncob residues from furfural production into fermentable sugars and then into ethanol…

Pulp mill black liquor. …black liquor gasification technology – a route to 2nd generation biofuels or green power. …

Potato starch residue. …ethanol for fuel use and DDG to verify the profitability for commercialization.  …

Algae.  … 250-module algae biofuels facility …

Integrated biorefineries …

Demand for food crops, oils on rise, affecting world prices …

Aviation biofuels …

New ventures planned …

R&D …

Feedstocks …

Renewable chemicals and Materials …

Expansion to Africa …  READ MORE