Green Plains Bets on Ethanol Recovery
by Debra Fiakas CFA Last week the Chief Executive Officer of Green Plains Renewable Energy, Inc. (GPRE: Nasdaq), Todd Becker, revealed during conference calls following its quarter earnings report that the company has been in discussions to sell ethanol to industrial users in Mexico. It is news that could be music to shareholders ears. U.S. storage tanks are brim full of ethanol as producers like Green Plains stock pile inventories waiting for better selling prices. Green Plains has made claims to Mexico sales before, but has never revealed customer names or volumes. None were named...
Novozymes Ignites Yeast Wars
Novozymes (Copenhagen:NZYM-B; OTC:NVZMY) moved into yeast this week with a new organism, Innova Drive.
It’s saccharomyces cerevisae — the workhouse yeast that has been powering wine fermentation since the days of Noah and the Ark. But here’s a new strain engineered to cut fermentation times up to two hours, and yield boosts of up to two percent.
A 2% yield increase and a 5% faster rate of production — let’s illustrate it — would mean something like 7.1 million gallons per year of more ethanol from the same standard 100 million gallon nameplate plant. Retailing at up to $10 million dollars, per year (yes,...
Ethanol and Biodiesel: Production Cost and Profitability
For a number of years, this (now old and outdated, but) very useful chart has been in circulation in energy circles, mapping the supply of energy to the world by looking not at prices, but at production costs. For one thing, it goes a long way to explaining why the price of oil can tumble so quickly when there is a fall off in demand, and explains why OPEC is troubled by unconventional oil in a way it is not so bothered by other energy sources such as renewable fuels. Renewables not only have been traditionally at the...
Ethanol Stocks: Risks, Challenges, & Opportunities
The Great Ethanol Debate: Shoddy Economics all 'Round. Like many environmentalists, I'm not a big fan of the ethanol industry, especially corn ethanol. From a net energy standpoint, even advocates agree that you only get a little more energy out than the energy you put in (Energy Return on Energy Invested or EROEI of 0.9 to 1.5, depending on whom you ask... some say it's much lower.) At this point, most environmentalists simply decide that ethanol isn't sustainable enough for them, and go back to talking about photovoltaics (EROEI around 8, PDF) and wind (EREOI 30-70, PDF). The last...
Should Ethanol Subsidies be Renewed?
Jeff Coombe The Ethanol industry has only responded tepidly to the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit in the past, so why should it be renewed? The U.S. ethanol industry is nearing a major deadline. The industry's primary subsidy mechanism, the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), is set to expire on December 31, 2010. Federal ethanol subsidies were worth roughly $5 billion in 2009, a figure large enough to create vigorous debate over their renewal. Some call the credits a boondoggle, others a vitally important lifeline for an industry still in its formative years. ...
The Other Cellulosic Fuel
by Debra Fiakas CFA In an article posted in November I incorrectly named the product of Kior, Inc. (KIOR: Nasdaq) as cellulosic ‘ethanol’. Kior does indeed use cellulosic biomass - wood chips to be exact - but the company’s catalytic pyrolysis technology turns out crude oil that can be further refined into gasoline or diesel. Ethanol, on the other hand, is the product of a fermentation process. There is nothing new about catalytic pyrolysis - superheating in a container with no oxygen. Oil refiners have been fracturing large, complex hydrocarbons using heat and catalysts for...
Green Star Products to Construct Total Bio-Refineries
Green Star Products Inc (GSPI) announced its plans to construct total Bio-Refinery Complexes for production of both biodiesel and biomass ethanol at each facility. The first Bio-Refinery is planned to be in North Carolina (see GSPI press release dated April 20, 2006) and the location of the second facility is to be announced soon in the northwestern sector of the United States. Each GSPI-designed Bio-Refinery will have a start-up production of between 10 or 20 million gallons per year with quick expansion capabilities. The facility infrastructure will be capable of expanding to 60 million gallons per year...
Beyond ZEVs: The Negative Emission Vehicle
by Jim Lane
Wandering the halls at the BIO World Congress and later to be seen again at ABLC NEXT this November, we ran across one of the most interesting technologies relating to ethanol production and markets we have seen in a month of Sundays, perhaps two months’ worth.
The problem
First, let’s revisit the problem. There’s simply too much ethanol being produced for the markets to absorb, given the Trump Administration’s massive cutbacks in US ethanol targets —In the resulting massively oversupplied market, the inevitable has happened, ethanol producers, growers and the Midwestern economies are being crushed. And they thought they...
Greenshift Corp: Putting the Squeeze on Corn
Debra Fiakas After a series of bankruptcies laid the U.S. ethanol industry on its back a few years ago, the survivors got the message - become economically viable or go out of business. The industry has been scrambling to adopt new processes that utilize other non-food materials or at least get more out of the corn that has been the mainstay feedstock for the U.S. ethanol industry. Enter Greenshift Corporation (GERS: OTC/BB) with its corn oil extraction process and a new step in the corn-ethanol production process. Greenshift may change the economics of corn-ethanol production by...
Ethanol Blends: High Octane, Low Carbon, High Controversy
by Jim Lane, Biofuels Digest
For every ethanol blend everywhere these days, there seems to be a war on.
A war in India over 22% blends. A war in Brazil over exactly what baseline blend ratio (somewhere int he 20s) is ideal. A war on in Europe to roll back first-gen ethanol to around 2% blending. A war in New South Wales, Australia over whether there should be any ethanol mandating at all. A war in the US as conservatives aim to haul belnding down to 9.7% while ethanol producers have clearly aimed at a 15% baseline blend.
And so on and...
Green Plains to Adopt Syngenta’s Enogen Corn Ethanol Tech Across Fleet
by Jim LaneGood news arrives from Minnesota that Syngenta has partnered with Green Plains (GPRE) to expand its use of Enogen corn enzyme technology across GPRE’s 1.5 billion gallon production platform.
The Enogen backstory
Enogen corn enzyme technology is an in-seed innovation available exclusively from Syngenta and features the first biotech corn output trait designed specifically to enhance ethanol production. Using modern biotechnology to deliver best-in-class alpha amylase enzyme directly in the grain, Enogen corn eliminates the need to add liquid alpha amylase and creates a win-win-win scenario by adding value for ethanol plants, corn growers and rural communities.
We reported in January that Syngenta had reached...
Throwing Corn off the Green Bus
Dana Blankenhorn I am a big booster of alternative energy. Harvesting the wind, the Sun, the heat of the Earth, the tides – I'm there and NIMBYs be damned. But I am increasingly having second thoughts about one type of green energy. Corn-based ethanol. (I would toss in sugar cane, too, but America doesn't grow enough to matter here.) Corn ethanol was one of the first biofuels to find a market. Pushed by companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) and Cargill, corn ethanol is now an integral ingredient in many blends of gasoline. It is...
Clearfish Research Profiles Pacific Ethanol (PEIX)
Pacific Ethanol (PEIX) is building a refinery in California for corn based ethanol production in the heart of the California agricultural and dairy land (the biggest agricultural and dairy producer in the country). The refinery is supposed to come on line in Q4 2006, and there are plans for 4 more subsequent refineries. As there is unlikely to be any increased ethanol demand in California (see background above), the supply capacity they are bringing online must be able to disrupt the current out-of-state supply and/or undercut the current prices. They are one of the biggest distributors of that alternate...
Corn Ethanol Emissions Savings Skyrocket
Jim Lane In Washington, an explosive new peer-reviewed report from ICF found that greenhouse gas emission reductions from typical corn-based ethanol production have soared to 43 percent compared to 2005-era gasoline. The report projects that by 2022, corn-based ethanol will achieve a 50 percent reduction, and could reach “76 percent in 2022 if there is more widespread adoption of optimal crop production and biorefinery efficiency.” The report, issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, based its revolutionary emissions math on a November 2014 study by researchers at Iowa State University, which found that farmers around the world have...
Mascoma’s IPO: The 10-Minute version
Jim Lane No appetite for 200 pages of IPO-speak in Mascoma’s S-1 registration statement? Here’s our 10-minute version. In Massachusetts, Mascoma Corporation announced that it has filed an S-1 registration statement relating to a proposed $100 million initial public offering. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined, and the company has not indicated yet which exchange it will apply to for a listing of its shares. Here’s the S-1 registration, in a conveniently downsized 10-minute Digest version – with some commentary along the way...
Fortunately, Unfortunately: The Spring Saga of American Ethanol
by Jim Lane
The ethanol signals from Washington DC are more inexplicably mixed than cocktails with names like Sex on the Beach. Let’s parse through the wigwagging over the future of American biofuels supply and demand — ethanol and otherwise.
Fortunately: Trump backs year-round E15 ethanol blends
In Washington, President Trump endorsed year-round E15 ethanol availability as an emerging compromise between oil refiners and US farm sector.
The Renewable Fuel Standard is a federal program that requires transportation fuel sold in the United States to contain a minimum volume of renewable fuels. The RFS originated in a bi-partisan Congress with the Energy Policy Act...
