The Environmental Protection Agency said new data showed that, even after taking into account increased fertilizer and land use, corn-based ethanol can yield significant climate benefits by displacing conventional gasoline or diesel fuel.

The new renewable-fuel standard issued by the EPA drew criticism from some environmentalists as well as oil industry representatives, who accused the Obama administration of catering to farm interests. In an earlier draft of the standard, the administration had said that corn-based ethanol output should be limited because its direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions exceeded renewable fuel standards.

“The numbers are inconsistent with the great bulk of analyses by others, which consistently find that emissions from indirect land-use change for crops grown on productive land cancel out the bulk or all of the greenhouse gas reductions, but I will have to study the results,” said Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University and an author of articles critical of corn-based ethanol.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson defended the new guidelines, saying that she was “confident” that “we weren’t dumbing down the standard to favor any particular industry or . . . outcome.” She said revised projections about crop yields and land productivity helped drive the new guidelines.

The biofuels announcement added to growing tension in the coalition of environmental, climate and renewable-energy groups that has supported President Obama’s push for a comprehensive climate bill. On Wednesday, Obama again tried to promote such a bill and discourage lawmakers who favor simpler energy legislation instead.

“I don’t want us to just say the easy way out is for us to just give a bunch of tax credits to clean-energy companies,” Obama said. “The market works best when it responds to price. And if they start seeing that, you know what, dirty energy is a little pricier, clean energy is a little cheaper, they will . . . think things through in all kinds of innovative ways.”

With the climate legislation stalled in Congress, however, many of Obama’s allies find themselves divided by the president’s push for new offshore drilling, his budget’s tripling of loan guarantees for nuclear power plants, and his repeated use of the phrase “clean coal,” which the coal industry uses as shorthand for still unproven and uneconomic technologies that could limit carbon-dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants.

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The tax credit is set to expire at the end of this year and supporters say without it, petroleum marketers will be unwilling to purchase the more expensive biodiesel and demand for biodiesel will evaporate. Some industry analysts predict many biodiesel plants will be forced to shut down this week.

The biodiesel tax credit was enacted in 2004 and, in October 2008, it was extended ’til the end of this year. “Within the Obama Administration, the president tasked myself, (Energy) Secretary (Stephen) Chu and (EPA) Administrator (Lisa) Jackson to put together a task force report on biofuels generally which we will probably be issuing next month — (outlining) ways in which we can be even a better partner with the industry than we’ve been. You know, I think we’re going to see a significant emphasis on biofuels, on second and third generation feed stocks,” Vilsack says.

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O. Kay Henderson
Radio Iowa

State Ag Secretary Bill Northey says you can run a combine through a corn field that has a couple of inches of snow on the ground, but the winter storm that swept through the state and dumped over a foot of snow in many places has put a halt to harvesting.  

 ”You can certainly harvest on frozen ground.  You can harvest with a little  bit of snow. If it’s cold enough, it blows on through the combine.  If it gets too warm, it goes ahead and melts in that combine and doesn’t let the mechanism run like it should,” Northey says. “But if you’ve got drifts like this where it’s up around the ears of the corn, that’s going to cause some real problems.”

According to the U.S.D.A., there’s about 800,000 acres of corn still standing in Iowa — and it’s worth about half-a billion dollars.  Depending on weather conditions for the next few months, some farmers may not be able to reach their fields until spring.  Northey says, generally, the quality of the corn won’t change much after the first snow flies.

“If folks aren’t able to get out to that field until spring, usually where the corn goes ahead and dries down and so areas where it was too wet, it’ll dry down.  This cold weather will keep any mold from happening, but you are likely to lose some of that yield,” Northey says.  “If you have high winds like we’ve had, that can knock the stalk over or shake the ear off.  If you have drifts out in those fields and those drifts melt, they really melt down in a way such that it will either pull the stock down, or at least pull the ear off the stock, so likely whatever is out there, some of it will be lost.”

RadioIowa
O. Kay Henderson

“Properly constructed” was defined in the study as allowing for multiple offset practices such as energy crop production, reduced soil tillage, methane capture, efficient fertilizer application, the planting of perennial grasses or trees on marginal land and keeping good farmland in crop production.

Overall, the study examined how the agricultural sector might be impacted by various climate change policy scenarios, according to lead researcher Daniel de la Torre Ugarte. Ugarte said the study “Analysis of the Implications of Climate Change and Energy Legislation to the Agricultural Sector” didn’t try to analyze any particular piece of legislation that has been proposed so far, but rather identified some key components that could make up sound climate change legislation while determining climate benefits, regional impacts and the impact on feedstock prices.

The scenarios proposed in the study, which assumed implementation of the renewable fuels standard in the Energy Independence & Security Act of 2007, are based on five different characteristics, including the level of feedstocks produced, carbon prices, the number of offsets included, the level at which crop residues can be collected, and whether or not fertilizers are going to be exempt from the impact of any carbon prices or carbon charges.

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BioMass Magazine
Anna Austin

Lower Your Carbon Footprint
All ethanol production is no longer created equal. Several states have rules on the books to require a lower carbon fuel standard (LCFS) than the national renewable fuels standard. California going from E5.7 to E10 on Jan. 1, represents a market of 1.2 billion gallons of ethanol that requires a lower carbon fuel standard than other states.

California won’t be alone in setting tougher limits, and like so many trends in emissions and sustainable business practices, what starts in California inevitably washes east to the rest of us. Nor is the U.S. alone; Canada is seeing similar moves with British Columbia working on lower carbon fuel legislation with updates expected in the next few months. All this indicates the door is wide open to new markets for plants that can produce to a more carbon efficient standard.

To move with that market, in 2010 we’ll see more plants:

>Move from distillers dried grains to wet distillers grains (saving one-third of the cost)

>Replace natural gas with renewable biomass. (Biomass is carbon neutral—natural gas is not.)

Overall, this will produce greater energy per Btu consumed, and result in a reduced carbon footprint.

Farmer-owned Siouxland Energy and Livestock Cooperative in Sioux Center, Iowa, is a case in point. What started out as a 15 MMgy plant grew, and now produces at 70 MMgy. The plant never included a dryer, which from a carbon footprint position, means sustainable plant production that will see value either from qualifying for more renewable identification numbers (RINs) or selling at a premium into LCFS markets, or perhaps both.

“A lot of Midwestern farmers resorted to drying beans last harvest because it was so wet in the Midwest,” says Bernie Punt, general manager of SELC. To take grain moisture down for a dry distillery, Midwest farmers saw costs hover around 70 cents per bushel. Punt’s facility has a bunker about the size of three football fields and processes corn from local farmers at high moisture, which saves almost one-third the processing cost, he says.

Cleaner Fuel Facilities Cash In
Destilmex S.A. de C.V., a Mexican ethanol facility owned and operated by Zucarmex S.A. de C.V., in Navolato, Sinaloa, is among the trend-setting businesses positioning themselves to be clean fuel facilities.
Normal fuel facilities get one RIN per gallon of ethanol. But reducing a company’s dependence on fossil fuels, will facilitate generating more than one RIN per gallon of ethanol, thanks to its “clean fuel facility” status with the EPA. To achieve this standard, last fall Destilmex tore out its fossil fuel boiler and put in a fluid bed boiler.

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Ethanol Producer Magazine
Doug Haugh

In his opening statement, Rajiv said that an increase in corn acreage has supported greater ethanol output. In response to this remark, Peterson said the agricultural industry cultivates virtually the same number of corn acres today that it did in 1977. While each acre of corn produced only an average of 90.8 bushels of corn at that time, Peterson said today’s farmers produce an average of 164 bushels of corn per acre.

During his opening statement, Rajiv also said he believed in order to meet the mandates of the renewable fuels standard the federal government needs to expand its focus in the area of third-generation, drop-in fuels that can be used as direct substitutes for gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. However, he also noted that the production of 9 billion gallons of first-generation biofuels has been a significant accomplishment, and a compliment to American farmers and the ethanol industry. In addition, Rajiv said that although the federal government has funded many worthy projects, not enough has been done to effectively integrate these efforts across government research agencies and there has been a lack of focus when it comes to developing biofuel supply chains.

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Ethanol Producer Magazine
Erin Voegele

The conference features perspectives on global ethanol development from industry leaders in countries such as the United States, Brazil, India, France, Germany, Demark, Belgium and Nigeria.

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Domestic Fuel
Cindy Zimmerman

In May the EPA released its proposed rule for the RFS2, which lays out the agency’s strategy for achieving the renewable fuel mandates and compliance standards established by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA). EISA ultimately requires the use of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel by 2022.

The proposed rule specifies four unique categories of renewable fuel, each with its own respective mandate and greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction threshold. In order for biofuel producers to generate renewable identification numbers (RINs), renewable fuels must meet their respective GHG reduction thresholds and be manufactured from feedstock that meets the definition of renewable biomass. The rule would also require all biofuel producers to re-register with the EPA and complete a third-party engineering review. The engineering review would need to be repeated every three years.

Under EISA, renewable biomass is defined to include planted crops and crop residue, planted trees and tree residue, animal wastes, algae, and yard and food wastes. The definition also limits these feedstocks according to the management practices of the land they are produced on. In the case of crop and crop residues – such as corn and soybeans – in order to qualify as renewable biomass, the feedstock must be harvested from agricultural land that was cleared or cultivated prior to Dec. 19, 2007. In addition, the land must be actively managed or fallow and non-forested. Feedstocks that don’t meet this definition of renewable biomass cannot be used to produce fuel that complies with the RFS2.

In order to ensure compliance with this element of the proposed rule, the EPA would require documentation that feedstocks used to produce fuels that are used to meet the RFS2 mandates are cultivated on the correct type of land. In the proposed rule, the EPA lays out a variety of ways this could be accomplished. Some of these options include establishing a third-party reporting system. Other options would rely on a verification system established by each ethanol producer. In addition, it is possible a system could be put into place in which tracking and reporting is only required once a certain acreage benchmark is reached.

According to the study published by Informa, a trigger system would be the most efficient and least expensive option for tracking feedstocks. Under this option, the need to verify feedstock origin would only be triggered once enough new land is brought into production to exceed the acreage that was already being farmed in 2007. The study states that long-term agricultural land trends in the U.S. suggest it is unlikely this baseline acreage will be exceeded through 2022.

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“We do not want to be largely dependent on foreign dictatorships who at some point down the road could blackmail us, basically giving us the choice of an economic catastrophe or doing what they want,” Gingrich told workers and executives at Green Plains Renewable Energy at 9420 Underwood Ave.

Green Plains began operating its first ethanol plant in Shenandoah, Iowa, in 2007 and has grown to become the fourth-largest ethanol producer in the country, with two plants in Iowa, two in Nebraska, one in Indiana and one in Tennessee.

It employs about 50 people in Omaha and 400 nationwide in 10 states.

The company’s Omaha office handles the marketing and distribution of corn, natural gas, ethanol and ethanol byproducts for its plants, emphasizing risk management and margin expansion.

Green Plains also markets ethanol made by other producers, it owns a grain and farm supply business in northwest Iowa and is a majority owner of a biofuels blending and terminal company.

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Omaha World-Herald
Joe Ruff

The Nebraska Democrat has put his name behind one measure intended to boost ethanol consumption and another that would prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from implementing a rule he says could hinder biofuels production.

The first measure — introduced Tuesday by Nelson, Sens. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., John Thune, R-S.D, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa — would direct the EPA to allow gasoline to contain up to a 15 percent ethanol blend. Ten percent is the current maximum allowed to be sold in the U.S.

E85 fuel, which consists of up to 85 percent ethanol, would not be affected because it is used only in “flex-fuel” vehicles equipped to handle it.

Boosting allowable ethanol percentages could mean an economic boost to Nebraska and other Corn Belt states, as corn is the preferred base for making ethanol in the U.S.

Nelson said the measure also could help fulfill federal rules that call for as much as 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be used annually nationwide by 2022 to meet clear air targets. It also would prevent ethanol production from outpacing the amount of ethanol-blended gasoline allowed, he said.

Although some have suggested higher ethanol blends could affect automobile performance, Nelson said many experts believe vehicles that can operate on E10 also can run on 15 percent blends.

Nelson said the EPA has been dragging its feet on the idea.

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Chicago Tribune
Margery A. Gibbs