Biodiesel News

The US Department of Energy (DOE) is expected to spend up to $25 million (€19.8 million) on improving algae production and development. The Department is working on reducing the costs of algae biofuel down below $5-per-gallon equivalent in petrol by 2019 by improving current technologies. If that doesn't seem very ambitious compare that to the state of play without innovation, which comes…
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Hawaii's plans to use an abandoned pipe to transport biofuel from ships docked at Hilo Harbour to a nearby storage facility has passed an environmental assessment and is expected to now be approved. The pipe, which used to be used by Shell Oil, travels under state land. Hoku Kai Biofuels owns the former Shell Oil property and intends to use its nine existing tanks to store up to 1.2 million…
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Cathay Pacific Airways has invested in Fulcrum BioEnergy, a US-based sustainable biofuel developer, as part of the airline's biofuels strategy. The airline hopes this initiative will help it to achieve its goal of carbon-neutral growth from 2020. Cathay Pacific has agreed a long-term supply agreement with Fulcrum for an initial 375 million US gallons of sustainable aviation fuel over 10 years.…
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Airline Boeing and Commercial Aircraft Corp of China (CACC) has opened a biofuels demonstration plant that will turn waste cooking oil, or gutter oil as it known in China, into sustainable aviation biofuel. The plant has a production capacity of 160 gallons per day and estimates suggest that 1.8 billion litres of aviation fuel may be produced per year in China from gutter oil. Hangzhou Energy…
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Asset advisory and auction company Heritage Global Partners (HGP) is to hold a telephonic auction of almost 10% economic interest in North Star Biofuels and related intellectual property owned by R Power Biofuels and Sauber, including a patent and certain trade secrets. The winning bidder will acquire a 9.871% economic interest in a Watsonville, California-based company that owns and operates a…
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KiOR has announced that, as part of its refocus on R&D, it has accepted a bid for substantially all of its assets from certain affiliates of Vinod Khosla that have been providing and will continue to provide it with senior secured financing. KiOR has also filed for relief under Chapter 11 in the US Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. Under the Bankruptcy Code, the bid is subject to…
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Cellana, a biofuels company based in Kailua-Kona, will receive a $3.5 million (€2.6 million) grant from the US Department of Energy (DOE) to pursue an integrated, high-yield algae biofuel feedstock production system at their Kailua-Kona, Hawaii demonstration facility. Cellana's research efforts have led it to use algae to produce various products including a new form of renewable…
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Crop company Agrisoma Biosciences has finished the first closing of its Series A financing round, expected to total $8 million through 2014. Cycle Capital Management led the financing round, which included participation of BDC Venture Capital, one of Agrisoma's current equity investors. Certified sustainable by the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB), Carinata is the world's first…
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Boeing has completed the world's first flight using 'green diesel', a sustainable biofuel that is widely available and used in ground transportation.The airline powered its ecoDemonstrator 787 flight test airplane in December with a blend of 15% green diesel and 85% petroleum jet fuel in the left engine.'Green diesel offers a tremendous opportunity to make sustainable aviation biofuel more…
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In Lagos, Nigeria, biodiesel technology supplier Florida Biodiesel has completed the sale of a biodiesel plant to Avandith Energy in Lagos, Nigeria.   Avandith Energy chose the processor from Florida Biodiesel for its pilot transesterification facility. The technology will allow Avandith Energy to produce four batches of the biofuel every 24 hours.   In a statement, Florida Biodiesel…
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Renewable fuel producer Crimson Renewable Energy is retrofitting its Bakersfield, California, US biodiesel plant. Retrofitting the plant will modernise its capabilities, increase the plant's capacity to 75,000 tonnes a year and ensure waste materials are processed efficiently and sustainably into low carbon biodiesel transportation fuel. The plant, which has been operating since 2010, uses…
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SGB, an agricultural biotechnology and seed company, has successfully created a hybrid jatropha which has both high yield and rapid time to maturity. In conjunction with these results, the company has closed an $11 million (€8.5 million) Series C financing to drive commercial rollout. With its latest generation of jatropha hybrids, SGB has reduced the time to maturity from five years to one…
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Scandinavian airline Norwegian has operated its initial biofuel-powered flight. On Tuesday 11 November, the aircraft flew from Bergen to Oslo with close to 50% biofuel. The airline hopes to contribute towards making aviation carbon neutral by 2050 through developing new technologies and frameworks. Bjørn Kjos, CEO, Norwegian, says: 'We have a clear goal to reduce CO2 emissions by 30% per…
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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has confirmed rules that create a programme to control fraud and adopt new technologies. The programme will tackle fraud in biodiesel credits and will also add new technologies to its list of approved renewable fuels. As the fraud rule aims to prevent biofuel refiners from becoming the victims of fraud, an auditing system has been set up to ensure the…
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