Bioenergy France 3, the French arm of Spanish biofuels producer Ambene, has obtained permission from local officials to build a 41MW biomass-fired cogeneration plant in the south of France. According to SeeNews, the plant will be constructed in the Torremila industrial zone of Perpignan. At the end of December, the Pyrenees-Orientales prefecture gave the green light to... [Read More]

Kolmar Group, a Switzerland-based petrochemicals specialist, has acquired a biodiesel plant in Connecticut, US. The company bought the Greenleaf Biofuels facility via its US arm and hopes to expand into the renewable energy sector, according to Bloomberg. The plant, now called American GreenFuels, marks Kolmar's first foothold in physical production. It is expected that... [Read More]

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has announced that the share of liquid biofuels consumed in road transport, in the UK, fell from 4.2% during the third quarter of 2014 to 3.3% during the third quarter of 2015. DECC unveiled the statistics in its latest 'Energy Trends' publication. Figures from DECC also showed that biodiesel consumption was 35% lower... [Read More]

Oasis Group, an India-based technology, engineering and construction company, will build a wheat-based ethanol plant in Punjab. The facility is worth around £51m (INR 500 crore), according to news agency Press Trust of India. The ethanol will be producing wheat which is unfit for human consumption, the media outlet stated. Currently, India relies mainly on sugar... [Read More]

Z Energy, a New Zealand energy producer has moved towards completing New Zealand’s first commercial scale biodiesel plant in Wiri, Auckland, with the installation of a biodiesel distillation column. The plant, which will move into the testing phase early next year, will turn inedible tallow, a by-product of the New Zealand meat industry, into 20 million litres of... [Read More]

The Port of Seattle, Alaska Airlines, and Boeing are partnering to move toward powering all flights by all airlines at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport (Sea-Tac) with sustainable aviation biofuel. Sea-Tac is the first US airport to lay out a long-term roadmap to incorporate aviation biofuel into its infrastructure in a cost-effective, efficient manner. The three... [Read More]

A new contract between the State of California and Golden Gate Petroleum may help the state make a huge leap towards meeting its aggressive emission goals. The emission targets were mandated by Governor Jerry Brown’s executive order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 40% lower than 1990 levels by the year 2030. The agreement will convert one of the largest... [Read More]

Scientists from the US Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have discovered that a metabolic pathway previously only suggested to be functional in photosynthetic organisms is actually a major pathway and can enable efficient conversion of carbon dioxide to organic compounds. The discovery shines new light on the complex metabolic network for... [Read More]

New Heaven Chemicals, a US-based subsidiary of the TSS Group, is preparing to open its chemical production facility in Manly, Iowa. After 17 months of construction, New Heaven Chemicals (NHC) plans to begin production of sodium methylate, a biofuel catalyst, by February 2016. The Manly plant is NHC’s first plant in the US, and it will supplement the company’s... [Read More]

Co-op Power, a consumer-owned sustainable energy cooperative, expects its new biodiesel plant in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to come online in early 2016. The plant will take in used cooking oil (UCO) from local restaurants, schools, and institutions and convert it into millions of gallons of biodiesel. According to Co-op Power CEO Lynn Benander, the Northeast Biodiesel... [Read More]

The Indonesian government expects the country’s biodiesel consumption to have diminished by nearly half this year compared to 2014. Government officials say that in 2015 the country is expected to have consumed a total of 825,000 kilolitres of biodiesel, which marks a dramatic 49% decline from the 1.6 million kilolitres consumed last year. According to Bayu Krisnamurthi,... [Read More]

A team of experts from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) and the University of Cambridge in the UK are embarking to research renewable energy and to develop biofuels for use in small machines like lawnmower. The research project also attempts to discover the most cost effective and low-emission biofuel source for its purposes, such as jatropha or a mixed source. According... [Read More]

Bioethanol and petrol blends lowered CO2 emissions from road traffic in Germany by around 1.2 million tonnes in the first three quarters of 2015, a new study says. According to the findings of a study in German on the economic importance of the largest site of German bioethanol production in Saxony-Anhalt, every litre of bioethanol reduced greenhouse gas emission by 1.1kg. ‘This... [Read More]

An initiative by Scion, a New Zealand Crown Research Institute for wood and biomaterials, to understand the future potential of biofuels in New Zealand has attracted attention from ‘serious players’. Scion reports that actors in industry, government, and sector interest groups in addition to the research community have expressed interest in its New Zealand... [Read More]

The US Grains Council’s ethanol export promotion programme has seen an early success with a US exporter confirming significant sales of US ethanol to Peru. The 10 million gallons of ethanol, valued at more than $15 million (€13.7m), were sold after the US Grains Council (USGC) led a team of Peruvian ethanol buyers and producers to participate in the International... [Read More]

Scania Malaysia and the innovation agency Agensi Inovasi Malaysia are to collaborate in exploring viable commercial opportunities for biofuels from municipal waste in Malaysia. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) has been signed between the two parties in line with Malaysia’s National Biomass Strategy 2020 (NBS2020). The MOU will see Scania and Agensi Inovasi Malaysia... [Read More]