Political Ecology

Sarah Lyutse of the NRDC reports as follows: Last week, NRDC released a new fact sheet on the VEETC, highlighting how our government’s biggest incentive program for biofuels has almost exclusively supported the production of corn ethanol which, when all direct and indirect costs are added, creates more global warming pollution than the oil it [...]

In Washington, the EPA issued this week its proposed RFS2 renewable fuel blending mandates for 2011. Stunners among the announced targets were the confirmation of an 800 million gallon blending mandate for biodiesel, and the dropping of the cellulosic biofuel mandate from 250 million gallons to a 6-25 million gallon range.Overall the EPA did not [...]

Therefore, special process for removal of the remaining water is required for manufacture of anhydrous ethanol. Various processes for producing anhydrous ethanol have been used/suggested. These include: (i) chemical dehydration process, (ii) dehydration by vacuum distillation process, (iii) azeotropic distillation process, (iv) extractive distillation processes, (v) membrane processes, (vi) adsorption processes and (vii) diffusion distillation [...]

If either biogas losses were reduced or biomethane was utilised in a vehicular engine optimised for biomethane (such as a bus powered solely on gaseous biofuel) then biomethane would generate significantly more net greenhouse gas savings than ethanol. It was found that if biogas losses were eliminated and the biomethane was used in a vehicle [...]

Previous studies estimated that a gallon of corn-based bioethanol requires the use of 263 to 784 gallons of water from the farm to the fuel pump. But these estimates failed to account for widely varied regional irrigation practices, the scientists say.The scientists made a new estimate of bioethanol’s impact on the water supply using detailed [...]

Florida startup Algenol Biofuels says that it can efficiently produce commercial quantities of ethanol directly from algae without the need for fresh water or agricultural lands–a novel approach that has captured the interest and backing of Dow Chemical, the chemical giant based in Midland, MI. The companies recently announced plans to build and operate a [...]

Hill and his colleagues calculated the emissions associated with a billion-gallon increase in ethanol production and consumption, or the equivalent amount of gasoline–about the same as the rise in U.S. gasoline production from 2006 to 2007.For gasoline, the combined climate-change and health costs of that increase are $469 million, the researchers concluded; for corn ethanol, [...]