More state vehicles in Minnesota are able to use up to 85 percent ethanol in their tanks, according to the American Lung Association in Minnesota.

So far this year, state agencies used 437,063 gallons of E85, a 25 percent increase over last year. Those figures come from the state’s SmartFleet Committee, a group tasked with helping agencies comply with Executive Order 04-10, issued by Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

The Faribault Academies, a campus of educational facilities serving deaf and blind Minnesotans, topped all others in the SmartFleet quarterly report, using E85 75 percent of the time they bought fuel. Another standout was the Minnesota Office of Higher Education, which reported 73 percent E85 use during the first half of the calendar year. In terms of sheer volume of E85 used, the state Department of Transportation used 170,617 gallons of cleaner-burning E85 in six months, compared to 376,312 gallons of gasoline and 690,798 gallons of B5 biodiesel blend fuel.

“This continued progress shows that the State of Minnesota is serious about its stated goal to reduce its petroleum consumption,” said Kelly Marczak, director for the American Lung Association in Minnesota’s clean fuel and vehicle technologies program and a member of the SmartFleet Committee. “In just six months, the state’s use of E85 in 2010 prevented more than 1,745 tons of lifecycle carbon dioxide emissions and harmful pollutants from entering our air.” In addition, the 5% biodiesel blend prevented 290 lbs of particulate matter, 400 lbs of hydrocarbons, 3,000 lbs of carbon monoxide and 700,000 lbs of carbon dioxide emissions.

The American Lung Association in Minnesota supports the use of E85 and biodiesel fuels in both public and private vehicles, as part of an overall strategy to reduce and prevent air pollution.

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The California Air Resources Board (CARB) is far from over on discrediting biofuels as part of their mandated policy known as the Low Carbon Fuels Standard (LCFS). For the past year, the ethanol industry has been embroiled in a fight for proper reflections of biofuel’s indirect greenhouse gas emissions, aka indirect land use. Now, CARB has created a working group to study soil sustainability provisions of biofuels. The specific crops under review at this time include corn ethanol, sugarcane ethanol, wood based fuels, palm oil, and soy biodiesel.

Today, CARB held a meeting to discuss this topic. In the proposed agenda, CARB offered several “loose” categories to be considered including carbon content, erosion, crop rotation, nutrition/chemical use, productivity, and crop expansion. I’ll kick myself for saying this, but I’m surprised they didn’t include water.

While I’m not sure what exactly has driven this new LCFS dimension of discussion, I can speculate that several recent events have in part led to this recent course of action. One is the Dead Zone/hypoxia issue which resurfaced when several scientists began calling the Dead Zone a bigger environmental catastrophe than the BP Oil spill. Corn and corn ethanol are being charged for creating the Dead Zone through its use of pesticides and fertilizers used in production.

Second, Friends of the Earth has been vocally opposed to how corn is produced and to corn ethanol (actually, to all current and future biofuels) and is currently engaged in a national campaign to end production of corn ethanol and reassess corn production methods.

While I do believe that soil sustainability is an area to be reviewed in general, I do not agree that you can regulate biofuels policy on this issue. Not only that, but like indirect land use, a theory not based in sound science, petroleum is not being held to the same standards. No where on the agenda is a discussion of the soil, or land implications of global petroleum production.

Last week, the University of Nebraska finally acknowledged that there are in fact, “indirect land use” effects of petroleum. Mainly transportation and war and released a study that examined these possible effects. More studies need to be conducted on this topic and I think they will.

As California moves to create more LCFS provisions on biofuels, consumers must call for CARB to consider the environmental implications of petroleum production. For the past three months, we have seen, first hand, some of the implications of oil with the Gulf of Mexico oil spill compliments of BP.

But we don’t need a spill to have land impacts of petroleum. Drilling, chemicals and water are all elements of production. What about the emissions spewing from our refineries? CARB has created a list of hazardous chemicals that can’t be used in biofuels production, but where is the list of chemicals that can’t be used in petroleum production as part of these provisions?

I realize that I sound like a broken record when I say this, but you cannot hold biofuels up to a standard that can’t be achieved, and not hold petroleum up to the same standard. If our goal is to produce more environmentally and sustainable fuels, then let’s do just that.

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USDA researchers are studying the use of butter as a feedstock for biodiesel.

According to a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, scientists with USDA’s Ag Research Service looked into the concept of making butter that would otherwise go to waste into biodiesel.

Michael Haas and colleagues cite rising global demand for biodiesel, and the desire to expand the feedstock base, as motivating factors for their research. The United States alone has committed to producing 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022, a major increase from the current annual production level of about 11 billion gallons. Most of that was ethanol. Biodiesel production, now approaching 1 billion gallons annually in the U.S., is also slated to increase. As researchers seek additional and affordable feedstocks for biodiesel production, these scientists turned to butter, one billion pounds of which are produced annually. Could surplus, spoiled, or nonfood-grade butter be used to make biodiesel at competitive prices?

In an effort to find out, the scientists recovered the fat from a quarter-ton of butter and converted it into the fatty acid esters that constitute biodiesel. They found that the resulting material met all but one of the official test standards for biodiesel. The study concluded that with further purification or by blending with biodiesel from other feedstocks butter biodiesel could add to the supply of biobased fuel for diesel engines.

Read more here.

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One agricultural economist is disputing the findings of another when it comes to the impact on the domestic ethanol industry of removing the existing blenders tax credit and the associated tariff on imported ethanol.

In dueling commentaries posted Tuesday on “The Hill’s Congress Blog,” Iowa State University’s Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) director and professor of economist Dr. Bruce Babcock, and ENTRIX technical director and agricultural economist John Urbanchuk share differing opinions about the impact of allowing allowing the current 45-cent-per-gallon ethanol blender’s tax credit (Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit, or VEETC) and 54-cent-per-gallon ethanol tariff to expire at the end of this year.

Babcock did a study, funded by the Brazilian sugarcane industry, that found there would be only a “modest” impact on the industry if the VEETC and tariff went away. Urbanchuk, who has done numerous economic studies for the U.S. ethanol industry, disagrees. “That’s true only if you take a “Field of Dreams” view of the ethanol industry: If we mandate that Americans use more ethanol, then someone, somewhere will produce that ethanol,” Urbanchuk writes. He says that “removing the tax credit would encourage the export of another U.S. industry.”

Meanwhile, Growth Energy notes in a blog post that the Babcock study assumes that the U.S. market will be able to utilize intermediate ethanol blends, such as E15, that will increase demand. According to the Babcock paper (top pg 12), “The key assumption here is not EPA approval, but rather, that EPA approves implementation of intermediate blends in a manner that increases the market demand for ethanol enough to sell 15 (billion gallons) at 75% of the price of gasoline.” Growth Energy says, “That is the essential contribution of the paper: if the ethanol industry gets access to a bigger share of the market, the government supports aren’t as important.” So, in other words, both views could be right, depending on whether or not the market is increased to 15 percent.

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Ottawa-based Plasco Energy Group says its energy-from-waste technology is now proven and it’s time to move to commercial delivery. To help in that effort, it announced today a $110 million private equity placement led largely by Ares Management LLC of Los Angeles. Since 2005 Plasco had already managed to raise $135 million in equity, so this latest haul bring the total to $245 million — not bad in today’s markets. Another $25 million in government grants rounds out the total to $270 million.

Plasco chairman and CEO Rod Bryden called the latest investment in the company “a remarkable expression of confidence.” The company is targeting its efforts at North America, Europe and China. It has two pilot facilities already — a 100-tonne-per-day plant in Ottawa and a much smaller plant in Spain — but a 300 tonne-per-day facility is in the works in Red Deer, Alberta, and is expected to be completed in 2012. One can only assume that the Ottawa facility has worked out its kinks, otherwise I can’t see any responsible investor throwing down $100 million to pursue commercial projects.

This is good news for Plasco and another shot of confidence in the emerging market for new energy-from-waste technologies. Montreal-based Enerkem is another Canadian company riding this wave with its ethanol-from-waste systems, having recently raised nearly $54 million from Waste Management and a number of venture capital firms. Don Roberts, vice-chair of CIBC World Market’s clean technology and green energy team, recently told me that energy-from-waste was one of three main areas to watch over the coming years, along with energy efficiency and water. He may be right.

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The Ethanol Report podcast received a Golden ARC award this week from the Ag Relations Council in the newly revived competition that includes new social media categories. Chuck Zimmerman, president of Domestic Fuel’s parent company ZimmComm New Media received the award Tuesday, presented by ARC President Deron Johnson, during the Ag Media Summit (AMS) in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Matt Hartwig of the Renewable Fuels Association attended the summit of agricultural journalists this week and exhibited at their Info Expo for the first time. In this edition of the Ethanol Report, he talks about how RFA has been successfully using social media tools like Twitter and Facebook to communicate, and also about a new blog they recently launched called the E-xchange. Matt also discusses the Export Exchange event they are hosting with U.S. Grains Council in October to promote exports of the ethanol co-product DDGs for livestock feed.

Listen to or download the Ethanol Report podcast here. AMS Ethanol Report

Subscribe to this twice monthly podcast in iTunes by following this link.

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I’m calling the environmental movement out for supporting nothing and opposing everything.

Not too long ago, I was proud to call myself an environmentalist. Today, I’m bordering on embarrassed to admit that I support sustainability programs. The cause of my distress is what is happening under the carpet among environmental groups. On the surface, they look squeaky clean, but when you pull back the carpet you find years of dust and dirt.

The result is crippling the system so that the status quo remains unchanged.

Are they doing this unknowingly? It’s hard to imagine a community founded on integrity and steeped in the honorable tradition of academia could blatantly miss the truth on the intellectually definable myths about renewable energy.

For example, for more than 30 years, environmental organizations have attacked the oil and gas industry in the name of environmental integrity. During this same time, these same groups have aided Big Oil in its attack of the biofuels industry in the name of subsidies. The irony is that ethanol subsidies such as the ethanol tax credit (VEETC) and the ethanol tariff are subsidies that actually go to the oil industry – not the ethanol producer.

Until recently, the oil industry was not attacked for the hundreds of billions of subsidies they receive nor were they held accountable for their greenhouse gas emissions until the University of Nebraska conducted an indirect land use emissions study from petroleum transportation and protection – mainly war.

How did everyone miss this?

Environmentalists shout that we must stop using oil and gas. Their solution—that everyone seems to have missed – more oil and gas. This is supported through their claims that biofuels are bad. Hydrogen? Ha. Plug in? Patience? Natural Gas? Never. In essence, the environmental movement is preserving our dependence on dirty fossil fuels.

In the last decade, environmental organizations that have been heralded as the watchdogs of the planet are now taking money from the same industry they are purporting to be saving us from – oil. In case you didn’t notice, this is a conflict of interest. Google some of the top biofuel critic studies by academia and you will likely find a trail of gifts and grants by major oil companies.  Look at the board of directors and you will find a tangled and interconnected web of renewable energy foes.

Many consumers revere and monetarily support these groups, but beware. They have won our trust. Now they are using it carte blanche to hide their true intent: halting the recovery of our economy and placing our national security at risk.

But wait. Aren’t these organizations policing environmental criminals on our behalf?

Who is policing them?

In the past two years, Congress has dragged the oil, biofuels, banking, agricultural, and auto industry to Washington, D.C. for a series of Congressional hearings to probe into their transgressions. They have even dragged in baseball players accused of abusing steroids. Yet they have never called environmental organizations to the halls of justice and asked them to defend their funding and research shenanigans.

We don’t have a decade to determine our future strategy. Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not advocating that we move forward blindly – as our country appears to be doing now. That would be an injustice. What I am proposing is an across the board analysis of all the potential strategies and solutions on the table. This means we must start vocally questioning the actions of environmental organizations. They need to become more transparent.

On behalf of American consumers, I am making an official request for Congress to hold a Congressional Hearing, this year, to look into the actions, funding, research, and programs of the most influential environmental groups. It’s high time we see what’s behind the curtain so we can make more educated policy decisions.

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If you have an iPhone and would like to get Domestic Fuel posts fast and easy on it, there’s now an app for that. ZimmComm New Media this week introduced the Agwired iPhone app that allows quick access to all of ZimmComm’s on-line publications, including DomesticFuel. The app is now available for iPhone users to download, free of charge, in the http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/agwired/id382820712?mt=8“>Apple iTunes store.

The app offers one-touch access to all the latest news and information in the agribusiness and agricultural marketing world posted on Agwired.com, including audio, photos and video, and connections to other ZimmComm news sites. The AgWired App features a news tab drop down menu to select ZimmComm News Network feeds as well as individual news on AgWired.com by category.

“Apps just make on-line access from an iPhone quicker and easier,” said ZimmComm president Chuck Zimmerman. “We wanted to be the first to develop an iPhone application to show that it can be done and that there is a demand for this new technology tool in the agricultural world.”

ZimmComm owns and operates four web-based news sites that are now accessible from the new iPhone app: Agwired, focused on news from the world of agribusiness; Domestic Fuel, which is all about renewable energy – from ethanol and biodiesel to wind and solar; World Dairy Diary for the dairy industry; and Precision Pays, which focuses on information about precision agriculture technology.

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New ethanol blender pumps from Dresser Wayne and Gilbarco Veeder-Root have received final safety certification from Underwriters Laboratory, which will help fuel retailers meet increasing demand for renewable fuel by dispensing mid to high ethanol blends along with conventional gasoline, according to ethanol industry group Growth Energy.

“We want to simplify alternative fuel adoption so retailers can feel more confident about embracing this developing energy segment,” said Scott Negley, Dresser Wayne director of Alternative Energy Products. “With this approval, our entire eco fuel product portfolio is now UL certified. This helps our customers achieve and maintain regulatory compliance as they add eco fuels to their product offerings.”

Growth Energy CEO Tom Buis notes that final certification for this fuel dispensing equipment is an important step toward providing higher level blends of ethanol directly to consumers to help decrease our dependence on oil. “Every blender pump we install will help make our country more energy independent and more secure, all while giving consumers a choice at the pump that includes domestic, renewable ethanol,” said Buis.

The Dresser Wayne dual hose ethanol blender blends gasoline and ethanol in both dispenser hoses enabling it to offer low blends on one hose for conventional vehicles and mid- to high-level blends on the other hose for flexible fuel vehicles. UL has also extended certification to include Gilbarco Encore blenders with the flexible fuel option.

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