New study shows carbon footprint of corn ethanol shrinking

Quincy Journal


January 16, 2014


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Climate Change is Leading to Rapid Boiler Innovation According to Boiler Guide

The Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch
press release

May 18, 2012, 12:04 p.m. EDT

LEICESTER, UNITED KINGDOM, May 18, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Changes to the world's climate and the ongoing activity surrounding climate change has had a significant impact upon boiler innovation according to Boiler Guide, the UK's leading online resource for homeowners and heating engineers regarding all boiler replacement issues.

There is now a multitude of new boiler technologies available to home owners as a way of reducing the carbon emissions of a home. These measures can also save home owners money as well as being better for the environment, and with 2012 set to bring a big government push for sustainability and carbon neutrality, manufacturers in the heating industry have had to be more innovative than ever before.

One of the best carbon neutral ways to heat a property is through the use of a biomass boiler. Biomass consists of organic matter such as plant or wood, which is often reduced to pellet form. The carbon produced through the burning of biomass is offset by the carbon taken in by the organic matter during its growth, making it entirely carbon neutral as well as a sustainable source of energy providing that more trees are planted as replacements.

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Swedish researcher Wins Nordic Bioenergy Prize

AZOCleantech.com


Associate Professor Göran Berndes from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has been awarded the Nordic Council of Ministers' Bioenergy prize. The Bioenergy prize consists of DKK 50,000 and a diploma. He was awarded the prize by the Swedish Minister of the Environment, Andreas Carlgren, at the Swedish Energy Convention in Stockholm on Tuesday 16 March.

The prize goes to an individual or organization for an outstanding contribution to the promotion, use or production of bioenergy.

Göran Berndes does research into development of energy systems and of land use, and of interactions between these respective developments. His focus is on how biomass can be used to reduce the energy system's carbon footprint and the impact of large-scale use of biomass for energy. He is the third recipient of the Nordic Council of Ministers' Bioenergy prize

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Corn ethanol curse strikes again? Algae fuels have large footprint

GreenBang.com
By Greenbang on Jan 21, 2010 in Energy and Fuel

Could algae-based biofuels suffer the same fate as the now much-discredited corn-based ethanol? They might, if we don’t find ways to reduce algal fuel’s environmental impact, according to a new study.

After the race to turn corn into fuel helped spark a global spike in food prices, clean-energy proponents turned their sights to so-called “second-generation” biofuel stocks. These include non-food crops like switchgrass and algae, as well crop waste and lumber waste. Algae have been widely considered to have especially great potential, since they can be grown in marginal areas that don’t compete with prime food-growing farmlands.

But there’s a problem — or, rather, several problems — with that idea, according to a team of researchers from the University of Virginia. Their new study finds that growing algae for fuel is more energy- and water-intensive than other biofuel crops, including switchgrass, canola and corn. Oh, and it also produces more greenhouse gas emissions than those other sources.

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Biomass Utilization, Rain Forests and Their Effect on the U.S. Carbon Footprint

Biomass Magazine December 2009
By Bruce Folkedahl

Biomass for heat, power and fuels is certainly not without its challenges. Recent editorials by Bruce Dale1 have illustrated the hypocrisy through which biofuels are being held to much higher standards than traditional fuels when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.

The issue that carries the most damaging effect on the carbon footprint of the production of biofuels is indirect land-use change. This is essentially a method of accounting for increased greenhouse gas emissions from the supposed increase in agricultural lands to offset the amount of agricultural lands utilized in biomass for biofuels production. The theory goes that if 1,000 acres of corn previously used for food is now going to biofuels production, then 1,000 acres of new agricultural lands, such as clearing rain forests for agriculture, will be brought into production.

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Wood chips, grasses to be burned in coal plant test

JSOnline.com (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)
By Thomas Content of the Journal Sentinel
Nov. 10, 2009

A Madison electric utility last week launched tests to burn wood chips, native grasses and other forms of biomass in coal boilers at its 50-year-old power plant in Cassville on the Mississippi River.
The tests by Wisconsin Power & Light Co. are designed to help the company explore cost-effective strategies to reduce its carbon footprint and prepare for a national system to reduce emissions linked to global warming, utility spokesman Steve Schultz said Tuesday. Coal-fired power plants are a leading contributor of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

The tests are taking place in southwestern Wisconsin, at a site where the utility had proposed to build a $1.3 billion new power plant fueled by coal and biomass. State regulators rejected that proposal a year ago.

The state Department of Natural Resources granted a one-year research and testing exemption to the utility to conduct test burns of a variety of biomass fuels over the next 12 months. Testing began Thursday and Friday with burning of wood chips.

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25X’25: Kerry-Boxer proposal needs more ag emphasis

Drovers.com
Tuesday, October 27, 2009

The Kerry-Boxer measure, (S. 1733) will need serious modification before it can maximize the role of farms, ranches and forestlands in reducing the nation's carbon footprint and combating global climate change, says the 25X’25 Alliance.

Among the current shortcomings in Kerry-Boxer (S. 1733) is the measure's failure to explicitly exclude the U.S. agriculture and forestry sectors from rules that cap emissions, and to allow the sectors to deliver quick, low-cost, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions in a volume significant enough to help meet the national goal established in the bill, which starts at 20-percent below 2005 emission levels by 2020.

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Is Corn Ethanol Cleaner than Crude Oil?

Wall Street Journal Blogs
Environmental Capital: Daily analysis of the business of the environment by The Wall Street Journal.
August 4, 2009, 11:42 AM ET
By Ana Campoy

How green, really, is corn ethanol? It depends how you count.

It’s anything but an academic question—it could determine, in part, how America fuels its cars in the future.

The Environmental Protection Agency dealt a big blow to the ethanol industry earlier this year when it decreed that the corn-based fuel doesn’t have a much better carbon footprint than gasoline made with crude oil.

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Tennessee to create community network to track energy needs, distribute biodiesel technology

BiofuelsDigest.com
June 12, 2009

In Tennessee, 75 mayors, businesses and state officials met at Fall Creek Falls for updates from the University of Tennessee/ Dupont Danisco Switchgrass Ethanol Demonstration Plant; the Tennessee Valley Authority Solar Energy Program; Arcadis Wind Energy Development; East Tennessee Clean Fuels Coalition; Biodiesel Logic; and StrataG biomass logistics planning.

Warren Nevad, Executive Director of the Tennessee Renewable Energy and Economic Development Council, said “At the meeting, we agreed to create a regional network of local communities that will assist communities in understanding and tracking their energy needs, costs and usage so that we can reduce their carbon footprint. Participating communities will cooperate and share data on usage and receive both financial and technical assistance for the purchase, setup and operation of biodiesel production equipment in their local community.”

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Agriculture: A necessary complication in the climate negotiations

grist.org
Posted 12:43 PM on 10 Jun 2009
by Letha Tawney

Despite a sense that the international climate change negotiations, convened in Bonn, Germany this week, are grinding forward at a painfully slow pace, there is a momentum to the process that makes adding new ideas very difficult. It took several years of behind the scenes technical work and at least two years of carefully planned campaigning to get the deforestation issue substantively on the table. While we know that agriculture can make a vital contribution to addressing climate change, it lags behind the forest discussion and effectively including it in the Copenhagen deal at this late date will be no easy thing.

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EPA responds to vocal ethanol rating critic

Agriculture Online
Dan Looker
Successful Farming magazine Business Editor
5/12/2009, 3:09 PM CDT


The Environmental Protection Agency has responded to an Iowa senator who says it shouldn't be rating the carbon footprint of ethanol based on estimates of how farmers are planting virgin timber and grasslands in other nations.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) a long time advocate of ethanol production, repeated his criticism of the EPA's methods Tuesday.

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Will a phony carbon footprint crush the biofuels industry?

AgricultureOnline
Dan Looker
Successful Farming magazine Business Editor
4/17/2009, 3:41 PM CDT

Biofuel supporters are worried that the EPA is going to use convoluted logic to make ethanol and biodiesel look worse than petroleum when it updates the 2007 Energy Bill's Renewable Fuel Standard this year. The snag is a theory that every U.S. corn or soybean acre devoted to ethanol or biodiesel means an acre of tropical rainforest is being cut down somewhere to offset it and grow food. Deforestation puts greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Under the law, biofuels have to show that they reduce greenhouse gases compared to petroleum-based fuels. Biodiesel has to be 50% better than diesel fuel, says Ray Gaesser, a Corning, Iowa, farmer who is a vice president of the American Soybean Association.

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California plan scares supporters of ethanol

ArgusLeader.com (South Dakota)
Peter Harriman • pharrima@argusleader.com • April 20, 2009

S.D. interests call environmental tracking unfair

A California environmental agency this week will consider a controversial new way to evaluate the carbon footprint of biofuels.

At stake for the ethanol industry is continued unencumbered access to the state that uses the most motor fuel in the country, and the prospect that other states could follow California's lead.
Ethanol industry leaders fear the proposed Low Carbon Fuel Standard stacks the deck against corn-based ethanol. Some scientists are concerned that attempts to project the effect of growing corn for ethanol around the world exceeds the ability of science to measure such changes. South Dakotans are coming down on both sides of the issue.

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Biofuel Economics: Future of renewable energy is secure

FarmForum.net The Green Sheet
By Cole Gustafson, Biofuels Economist, North Dakota State University Extension
Published on Friday, December 26, 2008

On Dec. 11, the California Air Resources Board passed sweeping new legislation that secures the future of renewable energy. As part of the scoping plan that implements the goals established in their 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, new key provisions include:
- 33 percent of all energy must come from renewable sources by 2020.
- New homes built after 2020 must be energy self-sufficent.
- Greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced to 1990 levels.

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Modern Ethanol Industry Has Superior Environmental and Economic Profile Versus Gasoline

MarketWatch - The Wall Street Journal

Ethanol production creates smaller carbon footprint than gasoline - Increase in corn supply will meet food demand and stimulate renewable fuel growth
Last update: 10:23 a.m. EDT Oct. 28, 2008

CHICAGO, Oct 28, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- The Illinois Corn Growers Association announced at a press conference Tuesday that the state has become a technological and commercial leader in corn-based ethanol while unveiling two landmark studies that concluded that production of the biofuel leaves a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline and has substantial room for growth without affecting corn supply to the food and feed sectors.

"The conclusions of these two scientific studies are historic," said Rob Elliott, vice president of the ICGA. "Amid the long and sometimes heated debate between ethanol proponents and detractors, these studies indicate that modern ethanol plants have a superior carbon footprint and net energy benefit when compared to gasoline refineries. And, the Korves study provides compelling data that ethanol production can grow substantially at no risk to food supplies."

The ICGA said that the state's total ethanol output has surpassed 1.5 billion gallons annually which is about one third of total gasoline use in Illinois thereby playing a significant role in helping the country wean itself from imported/non-renewable carbon-based fuels. The growing ethanol industry is creating new jobs in rural communities.

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