News

Closure of the UK’s largest ethanol plant in the face of government inaction on policies signals the severity of an increasingly competitive ethanol marketplace. The price of ethanol commodities futures has fallen significantly this year, from $1.603 to $1.356 as of 6 December, a fall of almost 0.25. Vivergo said in a statement that these low prices and the UK government’s failure to…
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A (CDN) $76.8 million (€50.7 million) industrial scale advanced biofuel demonstration plant will be constructed at a former pulp mill in Tofte, Norway. The new facility is apparently a step towards the creation of a commercial scale project. Danish-Canadian clean-fuel company Steeper Energy is partnering with Silva Green Fuel, a Norwegian-Swedish joint venture, on the project. Steeper will…
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Canola grown in Australia is eligible to enter the EU market as an environmentally-friendly biodiesel feedstock, opening up a potential $1 billion export market for Australian farmers of the crop. The European Commission has confirmed that the Australian canola meets the EU’s strict new feedstock requirements for biodiesel. Stringent EU greenhouse gas reduction targets could have seen the…
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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 reached 23.661…
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The European renewable ethanol association ePure has responded to the European Union’s third State of the Energy Union report. A key finding of the report is that thanks to progress in 2017, the EU is on track to implement the Energy Union project and deliver jobs, growth and investments. Enabling actions are being put in place to support a socially fair clean energy…
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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 plans through Parliament,…
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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 representing the biodiesel…
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One of Europe’s largest private sector forest owners and a major player in the bioeconomy, Bergvik Skog is undergoing structural changes as part of a plan to acquire new forest assets and secure its supply of feedstock. Bergvik Skog owns approximately 2.3 million hectares of land in Sweden and about 0.1 million hectares in Latvia. As well as certified wood fibre sales and leasing out land…
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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 than previously…
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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 in the Official…
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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 years. The bill has yet to…
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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 fuels as all non-fossil,…
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Sweden increased use of hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) diesel is helping to boost its biofuels industry, according to new research. HVO diesel is a renewable diesel made from different bio-based raw materials. Sales of HVO diesel increased by 24% during the third quarter of 2017 compared with the corresponding period for 2016, according to preliminary figures from Statistics Sweden (SCB)…
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