Advanced BioFuels USA

by Jim Spencer and Mike Hughlett (Star Tribune)  The biofuel’s intended uses for energy independence and greenhouse gas reduction have become matters of debate. But no one questions its political clout, economic importance or staying power. — … Janet McCabe is a former assistant administrator of the air and radiation office at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She once oversaw the nation’s ethanol program. She believes the country will never reach its sustainable-energy goals without major policy changes. But McCabe also has “some sympathy for the agricultural community,” which got drawn into ethanol at the government’s behest.

“We said to farmers, ‘Please step up to end our reliance on foreign oil,’ ” she explained. “A lot of people in the farm belt stepped up.”

The idea was to expand traditional corn ethanol up to 15 billion gallons a year and then move toward advanced biofuels made from more truly renewable sources known as cellulosic.

“Corn ethanol was supposed to be transitional,” Swenson (David Swenson, an economist at Iowa State University) said. But cellulosic ethanol production was more complicated and therefore more expensive than expected. “They had a lot of processing and pre-processing hurdles to get over.”

Congress anticipated that cellulosic ethanol would be the green gem of biofuel production. Cellulosic is made from the stalks, stems and leaves of plants, including corn detritus — but not corn itself. Cellulosic biofuels were expected to cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least 60%. In 2007, ethanol supporters estimated that cellulosic biofuel production would be 7 billion gallons in 2018. Instead, about 11 million gallons were produced.

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“It’s a classic example of Congress defining a pie, and the pie gets smaller because of fuel efficiency,” said McCabe, now director of the Environmental Resilience Institute at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

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Hill (Jason Hill, a professor of bioproducts and biosystems engineering at the University of Minnesota) said climate change represents a much bigger threat to the country than the death of the RFS or a final divorce from petrochemicals. Transportation emissions account for a third of U.S. greenhouse gas production.

“When you get down to it,” Hill said, “corn and oil are interested in the same thing: putting liquid [fuel] in a gas tank.”   READ MORE

Corn still fuels Iowa economy (Messenger News)

2019 Ethanol Production Profits: Just How Bad Was It? (FarmDocDaily)

Helping biofuels industries expand: Gov. Kim Reynolds is leading effort to boost their growth (The Messenger)

Excerpt from FarmDocDaily:  The ethanol industry in 2019 experienced its first losing year since 2012, thereby ending a run of six consecutive years of positive returns.  The estimated loss for a representative Iowa ethanol plant in 2019 was -$1.6 million.  While large, the 2019 loss was still far less than the -$6.7 million loss in 2012.  The evidence points to a combination of a steep drop in net ethanol exports and increases in production efficiency as the driving forces behind the low prices and financial losses experienced by ethanol producers during 2019.  The fortunes of the U.S. ethanol industry will probably not improve until production and use are better balanced.  This will require shuttering some production capacity, additional demand, or some combination of the two.  The most optimistic scenario is additional demand for U.S. ethanol exports as part of the Phase 1 trade deal with China.  READ MORE