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Volume 3, Issue 3
Published: April 22, 2009
Positive outlook for EU ethanol
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Last year was a far from normal for the European bioethanol fuel sector. It was a year characterised by record prices for raw materials, record prices for DDGS, an all-time high price for crude oil and...
Continued controversy
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The US trade body the National Biodiesel Board (NBB) has submitted some official comments in relation to the EU Commission’s decision on anti-dumping (AD) and countervailing duties (CVD). From 13 March...
Future shock: new paradigm in algal biofuels
In 1973 the world experienced the first major supply shock from OPEC, leading to petrol shortages, and a sustained period of economic stagnation, and rampant inflation. As a response, the National Renewable...
Supply outstrips demand in Malawi
Ethanol Company (ETHCO) in Malawi is one of southern Africa’s most experienced ethanol producers, but is struggling to get optimum use out of its plant. Commissioned in 1982, the plant was originally...
Reducing import costs through biofuels
Suffi cient bioenergy in southern Africa, which mostly depends on petroleum products from the Middle East and southeast Asian countries, is expected to drastically reduce fuel import costs by almost 25%...
Outlook for southern Africa
South Africa’s biofuels mood could hardly be more muted as the country’s elections approach. Maize is still excluded from the government’s biofuels strategy and only a handful of projects still proceeding....
No appetite for renewable risk
Many of the investors who showed initial exuberance in backing the biofuels industries and other clean energy projects have been burned. They were with companies like Aventine Renewable Energy, of Pekin,...
Jatropha – the future or disaster in the making?
A perfect biofuel crop would grow where food crops cannot, need no irrigation, no fertiliser and little care. It would grow fast, converting almost all the solar energy it soaks up into biomass and would...
Sustainable production of jatropha
While jatropha certainly has potential as an oil crop, most of the interest to date has been driven by the short term commercial need to establish plantations, capture market share and begin developing...
Enzymes to ethanol
Straw, along with the many varieties of tall grasses that grow naturally in Africa and Asia; sugarcane bagasse, corn stover, and hard wood chips from trees such as willow and poplar, can all be used as...
From unwanted fats to valuable fuel
It is well-documented in technical literature that enzymatic processing of oils and fats into biodiesel is technically feasible, but still very few plants use this technology for commercial-scale production....
The US stays positive
Demand for biodiesel in the US remains constrained, with the annual production pace currently gauged somewhere within 200 to 300 million gallons – a fraction of installed capacity. The export market...
Consumption to rise this year
The world economic and financial crisis is having a huge impact on economic activity, and especially on transport. The consumption of diesel, the preferred fuel for trucks in the EU, decreased during the...
Saving money from the outset
Some biofuels plants have sunk in the global economic downturn, projects have been cancelled and assets have been sold off. Instead of simply being beaten by expensive feedstocks set against the cheaper...