There was a recent article in MIT Technology review called What's Holding Biofuels Back? There is a relatively simple answer to the question that I will delve into below, but the short answer to "What's holding biofuels back?" is that we placed unreasonable expectations on them to begin with, ...

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a bank account that automatically filled back up no matter how much you spent? You could just ignore how much you spent. Amazingly, the bioenergy industry has succeeded so far in convincing legislators here in the U.S. and around ...

A study commissioned by MA Department of Energy Resources and released last week reaches the conclusion that burning trees to make electricity is worse for the climate than burning coal at least through 2050. In fact, the study by the ...

The DOE and EPA are taking to steps to bolster the reputation of their ENERGY STAR logo.

Update 8-18-10: For those linking in from the earth2tech article on Range Fuels, that inaccurately reflects my comments on Range. My criticism was not that they added methanol to the mix. To the contrary, I think biomass to methanol is a promising, long-term route to biofuels. My criticisms of ...

I am freshly arrived back on the U.S. mainland, with a couple of stops before I head back to Hawaii. I have been reading about energy developments during my travels, and finally wrote something on the flight from Europe yesterday. What has prompted me to write was a report that ...

By now you have probably heard that the EPA has postponed issuing guidelines on whether to allow ethanol blends of higher than 10% into the gasoline pool. Going up to 15% ethanol blends would allow ethanol producers to put a lot more of their product into the market, which ...

In a move that wasn't really a surprise, today the EPA announced that they are not yet ready to approve ethanol blends above E10 for automobiles:EPA Notifies Industry Group on Status of Ethanol Waiver RequestWASHINGTON – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today announced that it ...

According to the EPA, they are putting together a new rule set that would reduce the amount of metal waste dumped into water supplies.

Last year when the Renewable Fuel Standard was established, the ethanol mandate was increased to 36 billion gallons per year. A big portion of that was to be cellulosic ethanol, but there had to be a demonstrated greenhouse gas reduction in order for cellulosic ethanol to qualify for the ...