Pennycress, french weed, fanweed: by any name, a biofuel rose

BiofuelsDigest
November 24, 2010 Jim Lane

We haven’t heard of anyone making biofuels out of chickens, or eggs, but we hear a lot about the chicken-and-egg problem.

“How do get growers to grow if there’s no market? How do you get a market if there are no growers?” Arvent CEO Sudhir Seth summed up the problem. A few years back, along with a group of Indian investors, he had formed BMI as a biodiesel project, with a goal of constructing a 15 Mgy plant in Peoria.

“It was a $45M project that went all the way through permitting with the Illinois EPA,” Seth recalled, “when suddenly one fine morning the biodiesel tax credit disappeared. Whatever relationships we had formed, started to fall apart. Eventually, we had no other options put that project on hold.”

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