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Under investigation

Feature

The European Commission has begun investigating the possible illegal entry of US biodiesel from Singapore and Canada to the EU, following a complaint lodged by the European Biodiesel Board (EBB) in June. The EBB says that since early 2007, the profitability of EU biodiesel producers had been severely affected by heavily subsidised and dumped biodiesel from the US, known as B99. In March 2009,... [read more]

Taking a different approach

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Singapore may be Asia’s petrochemicals hub, but the same cannot be said for renewable fuels. The government does not offer any subsidies for biofuels, nor does it mandate that a certain amount are blended into traditional fuels. So building a successful production plant is not easy. Despite a series of plans, only one company is producing and supplying biodiesel to the local market at the moment.... [read more]

Moving in the wrong direction?

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Biofuel production in southeast Asia has experienced a sudden drop in 2010. High palm oil prices and government failure in several countries to ensure biofuel consumption mandates are met have caused many biodiesel producers to suspend production rather than risk producing at a loss. The slump in profitability producing biofuel has come at a time when new production capacity is being added... [read more]

Thai biofuels: feedstocks and opportunities

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The Government of Thailand is committed to developing the country’s biofuels infrastructure and production capacity to serve both the domestic and export markets. Through price mechanism support for feedstocks, ethanol production in Thailand is set to rise to 3 million litres a day in the next two years.1 Domestically, due to legislatively mandated replacement of traditional petrol with at least... [read more]

The same but different

Feature

Renewable diesel uses renewable feedstocks, similarly to biodiesel, yet it is produced through traditional fractional distillation rather than transesterification. This means it can use existing infrastructure for distribution, but the costs involved with building the production plants are much higher. Dynamic Fuels, reported to be mechanically complete, is the first renewable diesel plant in the... [read more]

Exceeding expectations

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The Brazilian ethanol market had been predicted to face a deficit in 2010/11, notwithstanding a large surgarcane crop, as result of strong demand growth and severely reduced stock levels. In reality demand has remained weak due to high prices caused by producer stockpiling, coupled with a difficult export market. The Brazilian market could find itself with larger than expected ethanol stocks at a... [read more]

Less is more

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The Netherlandsbased BioMCN officially opened its biomethanol production plant in June. The plant has a capacity of 250 million litres of biomethanol, of which most is used for the production of bio-MTBE. A versatile chemical Methanol is a versatile product and an important chemical building block for many different applications. As biomethanol is chemically identical to regular methanol, it can... [read more]

Partnering for success

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In June Danish industrial enzymes producer Novozymes and Lignol Energy, a company in the cellulosic ethanol sector, signed an R&D agreement to make biofuel from wood chips and other forestry residues. Their ultimate goal: to develop a commercially viable process for making ethanol from forestry waste at a production cost of $2 (€1.5) per gallon, a price competitive with petrol and starch ethanol.... [read more]

Enabling sustainability claims

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The Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels (RSB) is an international initiative coordinated by the Energy Center at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, that brings together farmers, companies, non-governmental organisations, experts, governments, and intergovernmental agencies concerned with ensuring the sustainability of biofuels production and processing. Although the RSB had been developing a... sustainability standard since 2007, it was not until July 2009 when it began to develop the corresponding verification of compliance systems, or RSB Certification Systems. Whereas the standards contain the social and environmental requirements, the certification system houses the infrastructure that make it possible for credible compliance claims to the RSB standards to be made. A unique aspect of the RSB Certification Systems is the flexible system of recognised participants. Any legal entity aiming for certification must apply for participation in the RSB systems beforehand to become a participating operator. Unlike many other certification schemes, which only allow discrete individual entities to apply for certification, the participating operator concept applied in the RSB standard allows for great flexibility in the types of entities that may apply to the system, such as groups of related companies and/ or organisations. Groups applying to be recognised participating operators may be groups of ‘like’ operators (e.g. feedstock grower groups), groups of companies that work together as a totally or partially integrated supply chain, or other grouped entities, as well as discrete individual ones. Another novel aspect of the RSB Certification Systems is the integration of a risk management system in which auditing frequency and intensity, as well as the types of communications and claims allowed, are impacted by a risk class assigned to the participating operator. As the level of risk to the system brought by the participating operator increases, for example by having more complex operations or poor management structures, the operator’s risk class also increases, leading to more frequent and intense auditing requirements. The better management systems a participating operator has in place and the better the quality of data delivered are, the lower the risk class tends to be. Hence there is a strong incentive in place for high quality of processes and information. The flexibility of the system allowed for by the participating operator concept is thus balanced with the need to prevent too much risk from entering into the system through highly complex or poorly organised operators. [read more]

Eliminating ethanol emissions

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During the process of ethanol transportation and storage harmful vapours are created as the ethanol evaporates. Approximately 0.1kg/m3 of ethanol is lost between transportation from the factory to the storage tank, 0.1kg/m3 between the storage tank and the service station and 0.1kg/m3 when the ethanol is being pumped from the service station to a vehicle. Vapour losses also accumulate in the... [read more]

Seaweed: a new wave of investment

Feature

For more than 100 years, China and Asian nations have grown seaweed also known as macro-algae at a large industrial scale for the production of food, animal feed, pharmaceutical remedies, and cosmetic purposes. An emerging rise in investment from petrochemical majors and governments for projects in Asia, Europe and the Americas aims at extracting sugars from seaweed for ethanol, bio-based diesel,... [read more]