Socioecology Research Today

Earlier this year, industry group the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) published a Disruptive Challenges report outlining the risks to the financial well-being of utilities from distributed energy. It recommends a push to reexamine policies that create incentives for renewable energy, particularly net metering, and advocating pricing changes that ensure utilities can recover the cost of [...]

Here’s the pattern: bend to public will when mandate efforts become popular, establish big projects, hire top R&D talent and bottle up IP to prevent technology spread, kill off the projects with absurd profit requirements, cite lack of feasible technology as a reason to kill or delay mandates, and then lobby like crazy to get [...]

In California, Propel Fuels has opened another in its chain of transformative Clean Mobility Centers — and the first station in Fresno to offer E85 Flex Fuel and biodiesel, sourced from Central Valley producers including Community Fuels in Stockton and Calgren Renewable Fuels in Pixley. Propel Fuels: Renewable Fuels | E85 Ethanol | Biodiesel – [...]

The International Energy Agency, through its Task 39 group, has published its 207-page report on the “Status of Advanced Biofuels Demonstration Facilities in 2012″.The report, in its pages, contains detailed project summaries as well as summary tables that track the company, location, company, feedstocks, products, capacity, project type (e.g. pilot, demo, commercial) and status (operational, [...]

FireWater Fuel Corp. (FFC) is on a path to make the hydrogen economy a reality by implementing a game-changing catalyst technology for producing hydrogen fuel from water and clean electricity. The high-density hydrogen fuel can therefore act as a storage medium for alternative technologies such as solar and wind, or as a carbon neutral source [...]

Liquid Robotics is betting that autonomous vehicles will emerge as the best way to troll the oceans to gather data. The Silicon Valley-based company yesterday raised $45 million in a series E round to grow the company’s sales and services around what it calls “high-value ocean data services” in research, defense, and oil and gas [...]

http://www.biofuelsdigest.com/biobased/2013/03/28/cell-o-core-uses-cereplast-compostables-resins/

Anellotech’s products will be profitable and priced competitively to their identical petroleum-derived counterparts. These excellent economics are achieved by performing the thermo chemical conversions in one processing step in a single fluidized bed reactor, using an economical, proprietary catalyst and non-food biomass feedstocks.The first application of the technology, Biomass to AromaticsTM (“BTA”) will produce “green” [...]

Biofine has been running for several years now at pilot scale (1 dry tonne per day) has proven out on its targeted yields and the process’ stability with an array of biomass feedstocks.The process produces three co-products of interest — the valuable commodity chemicals formic acid and furfural — and a biochar used to provide [...]

In the chart below, we look at the 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy to see exactly who is making what, and what progress they have made towards commercial-scale. The Dew Drop Inn — Who’s Dropping in What in Biofuels? : Biofuels Digest