Category: Archive

For detailed information about this poll, and for matters relating to wind farms, go to www.thewind.info

The Sydney Morning Herald, 27/2/2007, p. 5

Source: Erisk Net 

The Australian Financial Review, 23/2/2007, p. 49

Source: Erisk Net

Reference: Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives, Votes and Proceedings, Hansard Proof, 27 February 2007, p. 8-9.

Erisk Net, 28/2/2007

“Corn-based ethanol is already playing a key part in reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and mitigating the growth of greenhouse gases, but we cannot increase our use of corn grain indefinitely,” Mr. Bodman said.

Ethanol made from corn has a small effect on greenhouse gases, but ethanol from cellulose cuts those gases sharply.

But cellulosic ethanol is still twice as expensive as corn-based ethanol, which has relied for many years on a 51-cent-a-gallon subsidy to be competitive with gasoline. For that reason, no company has yet to construct a commercial-scale cellulosic plant.

Mike Muston, executive vice president of Broin Companies, which won one of the awards, said Broin could produce cellulosic ethanol for $2.25 to $2.50 a gallon and expected to cut those costs to under $2 a gallon when it started its plant around 2010. Mr. Bodman said the long-range goal was to get costs down to $1 a gallon, which he said would put cellulosic ethanol in position to compete with “any technology in the world.”

Yesterday’s grants will help accelerate the nascent cellulosic industry, Mr. Muston said, allowing Broin, which is based in Sioux Falls, S.D., and its partner, DuPont, to push up construction on an expansion to its Emmetsburg, Iowa, plant by two to three years.

Lawrence J. Goldstein, an energy consultant and critic of corn-based ethanol, said the administration had no choice but to push hard to commercialize cellulosic ethanol. “They are throwing money where they ought to be throwing it because they know they can’t get within shouting distance of their goal without a major, quick breakthrough in cellulosic,” said Mr. Goldstein, a board member at the Energy Policy Research Foundation.

The awards will finance up to 40 percent of the projects, which are expected to total more than $1.2 billion. The projects, which are scattered from Florida to Kansas to California, aim to produce more than 120 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol a year.

The winning companies, in addition to Broin, are a Spanish company, Abengoa Bioenergy; Alico Inc., of LaBelle, Fla.; BlueFire Ethanol, based in Irvine, Calif.; the Iogen Corporation, of Canada; and Range Fuels, of Broomfield, Colo. Range Fuels is partly financed by Khosla Ventures, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm run by Vinod Khosla, an influential voice on ethanol in Washington.

The plants would use low-value materials like switch grass, wheat straw and wood chips.

Even with the new push by the Energy Department, Mr. Bodman said ethanol’s future was not assured.

“We are unclear whether ethanol will be the winner,” he said yesterday, referring to the search for a renewable energy source to replace petroleum. Bio-butanol, a crop-based fuel that is to be commercialized later this year by DuPont and the oil giant BP, “is an inherently better fuel,” he said, because, unlike ethanol, it has as much energy for each gallon as gasoline does.

Matthew L. Wald contributed reporting.

Unclear handover period: Georgiou asked: "Is that time bound?" Espie said: "There will be a time associated with that, perhaps—a handover period, maybe as short as a couple of years".

BP angling into near-zero-emissions position: Georgiou asked: "How do you see your balance of interests in the energy area? Do you have some sense of how they are going to evolve, one against the other, in terms of balances? You have just spun out a new area. Do you have any insight into how you think they are going to weigh against one another?" Espie said: "As a company, I think we are certainly of the belief that clean energy, near-zero-emissions energy, is something that is going to become increasingly important. Formation of alternative energy is a deliberate move to test the timescales over which this is likely to be deployed and to position ourselves. So, yes, we expect near-zero-emissions power of various sorts to become increasingly important as we go forward".

Climate change scepticism evaporating: Dr Espie added: "We are seeing an extremely fast movement in perceptions both from governmental policymakers and from the public. I think the general public are becoming increasingly aware of the issues. We are starting to get some feedback through into the policy arena. Over the last one to two years we have seen substantial movement in a number of places around the world that were previously expressing degrees of scepticism around the climate issue".

BP wants public and regulatory framework: Espie said: "There are two things which policymakers can provide. One is the public framework for supporting these sorts of projects. That does not have to be technology specific. It can be a general low carbon energy support mechanism. The other one is around the regulatory framework. This is an area in which Australia is right in the lead position. We have certainly been interacting with the DITR people on the development of that framework and we are very supportive of their actions".

Reference: Commonwealth of Australia, House of Representatives Standing Committee on Science and Innovation, Re: Geosequestration technology, Monday, 30 October 2006, Canberra The internet address is: http://www.aph.gov.au/hansard To search the parliamentary database, go to: http://www.aph.gov.au

Erisk Net, 24/2/2007

The Australian Financial Review, 8/2/2007, p. 24

Source: Erisk Net