(Business Day) State wants industry to source feedstock from small-scale farmers, writes Hopewell Radebe
The government has not moved an inch on the proposal by the farming community to include maize as an alternative crop for …

by Felicity Carus (Aol Energy)  Now that almost all the gasoline in the United States is blended with up to 10% ethanol, producers are looking to export markets and refiners are looking at retooling strategies …

(Environmental News Network)  Biofuel production has ratcheted up to become a major part of America’s energy and agricultural industries. Corn, or maize, is by far the most widely grown crop to be converted into ethanol. …

by Peter Hemphill (Weekly Times Now)  …While ethanol production has become the largest use of the corn crop, it has also developed a high protein byproduct – dried distillers grains with solubles – now highly …

by Jeff Wilson and Whitney McFerron (The Washington Post)  …Global food costs are down 11 percent from a peak a year ago as grain output rises from China to Canada, U.N. data show.
…The Agriculture Department affirmed its forecast for …

by Iowa State University News Service (Ethanol Producer Magazine)   The most recent annual results from a four-year Iowa State University study on using cover crops between rows of corn reveals that higher yields – …

by Barry Amundson  (Tri-State Neighbor)  Gregg Carlson doesn’t like to hear the negative comments about ethanol.
The SDSU Extension farm precision agronomist has been telling farmers at crop expos this winter and others he talks with that …

(EurActiv)  Greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels such as palm oil, soybean and rapeseed are higher than those for fossil fuels when the effects of Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) are counted, according to leaked EU …

(National Corn Growers Association)  Ongoing media coverage on corn usage tends to sensationalize trends by pitting demand from the ethanol industry against that from livestock, but Corn Board member Wesley Spurlock, a Texas farmer, has …

by Rudy Ruitenberg (Sydney Morning Herald)  The US policy to produce ethanol biofuel from corn is raising prices for the grain across the world, said Jose Graziano da Silva, the new director-general of the United …

by Holly Jessen (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Despite the promise of methane from anaerobic digestion technology, low natural gas rates and other factors have kept ethanol producers from jumping in with both feet.
…On top of the …

by Geoff Cooper (Renewable Fuels Association)  …According to a landmark study by the Keystone Alliance (a group including both farm groups and environmental organizations, such as Environmental Defense Fund and The Nature Conservancy) the amount of …

by Kevin Bullis (MIT Technology Review)  Gevo, a prominent advanced-biofuels company that has received millions in U.S. government funding to develop fuels made from cellulosic sources such as grass and wood chips, is finding that …

by Tyler Hamilton (OilPrice.com)  …This isn’t just about corn; it’s also about how we choose to use agricultural residues, municipal organic waste, wood waste, algae biomass, and non-food crops.
Does it make sense to just burn …

(Science Daily)  …Unlike the starch sugars in grains, the complex polysaccharides in the cellulose of plant cell walls are locked within a tough woody material called lignin. For advanced biofuels to be economically competitive, scientists …

by Julie Ingwersen (Reuters)  USDA says ethanol boom creating new patterns in corn use
* Gov’t unsure why feed use falls late in marketing years
* Reports blamed for wild swings in CBOT grain prices
* Industry barbs come …

(Argus Media)  Spain’s Abengoa is building a 70mn l/yr (1,200 b/d) ethanol plant in Uruguay under a $120mn contract with ALUR, which is 90pc owned by the country’s state-controlled energy company Ancap.
The plant, to be …

(EnvironmentalResearchWeb.org)  A global map that identifies areas of low-yielding biofuel crops whose productivity could be increased through intensification has been produced by researchers in the US.
…”The US biofuels target for 2022 is 136 billion litres,” Matt …

by Holly Jessen (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  …According to the USDA, corn farmers produced an average yield of 152.8 bushels of corn per acre in 2010, up 30 percent from the average 20 years ago. Most …

(Science Daily)  Measuring the emission of greenhouse gases from croplands should take into account the crops themselves.
That’s the conclusion of a study in the Sept.-Oct. issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality, which examined the …

by John Maday (Drovers CattleNetwork)  This probably doesn’t surprise you, but growth in ethanol production since the year 2000 contributed to dramatic shifts in U.S. agricultural production, according to a new report from USDA’s Economic Research …

by Joanna Schroeder (DomesticFuel.com)  A new way to remove fiber from corn has been discovered by a professor from Mississippi State University (MSU). He calls his process Elusieve and has filed for a patent. The process was …

by Gouri Shankar Mishra and Sonia Yeh (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Study recalculates water consumption with expanded system boundaries and coproduct credit
Recent studies have estimated the “consumptive water use,” “water embodied,” and “water footprint” of corn-based …

by Kris Bevill (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Add-on technology developed for corn ethanol plants
Rather than retrofitting a corn-ethanol plant to produce i-butanol, n-butanol or use other novel fermentation technologies, three companies are collaborating to turn a …

by Maggie Koerth-Baker (BoingBoing)  …In a nutshell, that’s why liquid fuel is so valuable. So far, it’s the clear winner when we need energy for transportation—especially air transportation and heavy, long-distance shipping—because it allows you …

by Kris Bevill (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Researchers at the University of Miami Rosentiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science recently developed a technique to measure ethanol isotopes and discovered that the ethanol found in urban …

by Holly Jessen (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Hankinson Renewable Energy LLC, a 120 MMgy ethanol plant in Hankinson, N.D., is in the process of starting up an anaerobic digester to produce 54 MMBtu of biogas a …

by Holly Jessen (DomesticFuel.com)  Although the U.S. corn ethanol industry is frequently misunderstood and misrepresented, it’s the only domestic renewable fuel industry to reach significant scale and make a measurable impact on the U.S. fuel …

(PR NewsWire/– Prior studies failed to compare land use predictions to historical data
A new study published in the July 2011 Biomass and Bioenergy Journal on indirect land use change (ILUC) due to biofuels production indicates that the …

by Charles Abbott and Karl Plume  (Reuters)  Ethanol appears almost certain to win the food-versus-fuel contest in the United States. But not just yet.
The Agriculture Department forecast that a tad more corn will be used to make …

(PR-Inside.com)  The global soy chemicals market is forecast to reach over $13 billion by the year 2017, spurred by the anticipated high demand from bio-diesels market and growing adoption of alternative renewable sources of energy. …

by Kris Bevill (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  The latest USDA World Agriculture Supply and Demand Estimates marked a milestone of sorts for the ethanol industry. For the first time, the USDA predicts that more corn will …

by Rep. Jim Sacia  (Journal-Standard)  …Ethanol is another source of alternative energy that has established a foothold in America, and we can be very proud of our own Adkins Energy ethanol plant in Lena.
One of …

by Michael T. Klare  (CBS News)  …Over the coming decades, we will be embroiled at a global level in a succeed-or-perish contest among the major forms of energy, the corporations which supply them, and the countries …

by Martin LaMonica (CNET)  … Agrivida is using genetic engineering and other techniques from the biotech industry to create proteins with specific traits designed for rapid, and cheaper, biofuel production from sorghum, switchgrass, and corn stover, the …

by Ivan Castano  (Renewable Energy World)  ”I think it can be done,” says Raul Felix, climate change and renewable energy practice coordinator at Baker & McKenzie in Mexico City. “However, Pemex is going to have to pay …

by Allison Kilkenny (Huffington Post)  This week marked the world premiere of GasHole, a new documentary film (narrated by Peter Gallagher) about the history of oil prices and the future of alternative fuels.
Biofuel gossip has been …

by Bruce A. Babcock, Jacinto F. Fabiosa (Iowa State University)  The rapid rise in corn prices that began in the fall of 2006 coincided with exponential growth in U.S. corn ethanol production. At about the …

(AlbertLeaTribune.com)  Get ethanol at the pumps.
That’s what the farmer owners of the Poet Glenville ethanol plant told Sen. Al Franken they would like to see. The comments came during a meeting Wednesday at the plant.
“We …

by Morgan Gallagher (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  …Rather than look at only the total mass yield of either the corn grain or the crop residue, we took a different approach. We measured the mass yield of …

by Holly Jessen (Ethanol Producer Magazine)   Although natural gas is king of power generation at ethanol plants, there’s increasing interest in renewable energy technologies that could help ethanol plants someday produce a domestically grown …

by Kathleen Ryan  (Public News Service)  The search for ethanol is devastating one of America’s vanishing ecosystems. That’s the claim in a new lawsuit filed by the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). It accuses the U.S. Environmental …

by Joanna Schroeder (DomesticFuel.com)  The synergies between the biodiesel, ethanol and advanced biofuels industries are growing. One of the things that’s been happening over the past few years is the ethanol industry creating a new …

by Jon Birger (Bloomberg)  …Other than water and sunlight, there’s nothing more important to growing corn — the most-valuable U.S. crop, worth $66.7 billion in 2010 — than nitrogen. Generous applications of nitrogen fertilizer are …

by Jean Caspers-Simmet  (AgriNews.com)  Dave Sovereign tries to help people see the benefits ethanol brings to the economy.
…It frustrates Sovereign when people bash ethanol.
“After 9/11 the president and Congress asked all Americans to do what they …

by Kris Bevill (Ethanol Producer Magazine)  Food and environmental lobby groups took their anti-ethanol message to the Capitol Visitors Center April 14, staging a “Corn Ethanol Policy Forum” that included planned remarks from several legislators …

by Gavin Maguire   (Commodities Now/Reuters)  Ethanol producers often get much of the blame for driving the price of corn to its current multi-year high levels due to that industry’s strong usage of corn to make …

by Charles Abbott and Christopher Doering (Reuters)  The government introduced new wording on corn use on Friday following complaints from ethanol makers that they were not getting credit for the corn byproducts that are fed to livestock.
Instead …

by Maynard Herron and Bob Matousek   (Kansas Alliance for Biorefining and Bioenergy)     AGCO (Hesston, KS) received an award for biomass feedstock supply demonstration as a partial match of a $5 million renewable …

by Tyler Ellyson  (Columbus Telegram)   Robeson, general manager of Frontier Co-op in Brainard, considers the corn-based fuel to be the crutch that the Midwest and Nebraska economies leaned on during the recent recession — keeping …