According to a press release from Tri Delta, a bus company who conduct 3 million journeys a year, the switch has meant lower emissions and a better customer experience. Tri Delta says that the new fuel will mean a more comfortable experience for riders due to reduced fumes from the new fuel, which is replacing petrol. According to the company, there have been no complaints... [Read More]

Vivergo Fuels has stopped production at its Hull ethanol plant in response to ‘legislative uncertainty’, according to a statement from the bioethanol producer. The company’s plant in East Yorkshire is the UK’s largest, and Europe’s second largest producer of bioethanol. The £350 million plant can produce up to 420 million litres of bioethanol... [Read More]

US President Donald Trump is set to meet representatives of the oil refining industry and their legislative backers to discuss the US biofuels programme, Reuters reports, citing two sources briefed on the matter. According to Reuters, the White House meeting could set the stage for negotiations over possible legislation to overhaul the US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS),... [Read More]

Scientists in Japan claim to have developed a solution to a problem that has long plagued the creation of second generation biofuels from non-food biomass like weeds, waste, and paper. The solvents needed for the creation of second generation biofuels tend to be highly toxic to microorganisms, necessitating complex process such as washing with water, separation by centrifugation... [Read More]

Miguel Arias Cañete, the European Union Commissioner for Energy and Climate Action, has inaugurated the new phase in the All-Gas project in the El Torno treatment plant in Chiclana, Cadiz. Co-financed by the European Commission with the Seventh Framework Programme, the All-Gas Project aims to demonstrate the large scale production of biofuels and biogas based on... [Read More]

The Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (MOECC) has published draft amendments to Ontario’s Ethanol in Gasoline regulation which would double the mandated volume of ethanol in regular gasoline. If implemented, the changes would increase the mandated volume of ethanol in regular gasoline from 5% to 10% by 2020. On top of that, new standards have... [Read More]

US ethanol producer United Ethanol will use a modular membrane system at its plant in Milton, Wisconsin, to boost production. According to a statement, the bolt-on system from Whitefox Technologies will increase the annual production capacity of the facility to over 60 million gallons by freeing up capacity in the distillation-dehydration section. As well as increasing... [Read More]

Major US biofuel trade associations have responded to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement on final required volume obligations (RVOs) under the Renewable Fuel Standard. EPA has set a total renewable fuel blending obligation of 19.29 gallons, of which 4.29 billion gallons should be advanced biofuels including 288 million gallons of cellulosic... [Read More]

Biomass and waste derived fuels contributed 2% of total US electricity generation in 2016, according to figures recently released by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA figures, included in its recently released annual electric power data, reveal that biomass and waste fuels produced 71.4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2016. EIA defines biomass... [Read More]

Brazil’s lower house of Congress has given the green light to a bill to set up a programme to beef up the country's biofuels industry, according to a report in Reuters. The programme, called RenovaBio, will give fuel distributors in Brazil targets to cut carbon emissions, which they will meet by selling increasing volumes of ethanol and biodiesel over the coming... [Read More]

100 members of the US National Biodiesel Board (NBB) headed to Washington DC on 28 November to participate in the biannual ‘fly-in' to the country’s capital. According to a statement, NBB members plan to ‘storm the hill’ to encourage the reinstatement of the biodiesel tax credit that expired in December 2016. The NBB is the US trade association... [Read More]

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has used one of its modelling scenarios to predict that bioenergy will provide nearly 17% of final global energy demand in 2060, compared with 4.5% in 2015. In its latest Technology Roadmap, entitled ‘Delivering Sustainable Bioenergy’, the IEA provides the technology milestones and policy actions needed to unlock the potential... [Read More]

Argentina’s energy ministry has partially backtracked on a price cut on ethanol introduced earlier this month for refiners who mix the biofuel into gasoline at a 12% ratio, according to Hellenic Shipping News. The price cut has been shaved to 7.5% from 15% for sugarcane-derived ethanol, and to 10.5% from 21.1% for supplies made from corn, the ministry said in a resolution... [Read More]

An engineer at Washington University in St. Louis has refined the process of engineering pathways of microbes for biofuel production. Fuzhong Zhang, an associate professor at the School of Engineering & Applied Science, has ‘stitched together’ the best bits of several different bacteria to synthesize a new biofuel product that matches current engines better... [Read More]

Brazil’s Union of Sugarcane Industry (Unica) has issued a harvest update for the country’s South-Central region from April to 16 November. Brazil’s sugarcane crush for the 2017-18 harvest was down 1.61% from April to 16 November, 2017, compared to the same period a year ago, totalling 552.948 tonnes, according to figures from Unica. Total ethanol production... [Read More]

The European Parliament’s energy committee ITRE has adopted changes to the EU’s renewable energy directive (RED) to include a new binding 35% green energy target for 2030 as well as a new set of principles on future financial support to renewable energy sources. Spanish S&D member José Blanco López, who is responsible for steering the... [Read More]