IFB Ethanol Blog

NYT: Obama has close ties to ethanol industry

Surprise, surprise!

U.S. / Politics

Obama Camp Closely Linked With Ethanol

By LARRY ROHTER

Published: June 23, 2008

The ethanol industry has provided some top advisers to Senator Barack Obama, who has delivered ringing endorsements of ethanol as an alternative fuel.

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VeraSun and Enterprise to promote E85 use

VeraSun Energy Corporation , one of the nation's largest ethanol producers, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, the largest rental car company in North America, today announced they will work collaboratively to promote the use of VE85(TM), VeraSun's branded E85, in Enterprise's Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFV). The partnership will concentrate Enterprise's FlexFuel Vehicles near strategic VE85(TM) fueling locations.

Enterprise has the world's largest FFV fleet with more than 41,000 cars and trucks capable of using E85 (85% corn-based ethanol and 15% petroleum). Under the agreement, Enterprise will concentrate FFVs at designated "VE85/FlexFuel" rental branch offices and commit to fuel those vehicles with VE85(TM). Participating Enterprise locations will be located near commercial fueling stations that carry VE85(TM). Today, VE85(TM) is available at more than 90 retail locations nationwide.

Ethanol from Carbon Monoxide

A New Zealand company has developed a fermentation process in which bacteria consume carbon monoxide from steel mills and produce ethanol. This technology could produce 50 billion gallons of ethanol from the world's steel mills alone. Energy Roundup

Stanford: Ethanol Health Risk

A new study out of Stanford says pollution from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. "Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel that will reduce global warming and air pollution," Mark Z. Jacobson, the study's author and an atmospheric scientist at Stanford, said in a statement. "But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which already causes significant health damage."

ADM-Purdue Joint Venture

A joint BioEnergy project of Archer Daniels Midland Company (NYSE: ADM) and Purdue University has been selected to receive funding by the U.S. Department of Energy to further the commercialization of cellulosic ethanol. Specifically, the Purdue-ADM project is focused on commercializing the use of highly-efficient yeast which converts cellulosic materials into ethanol through fermentation.

    "As the global leader in BioEnergy, we are able to leverage our biofuel production and agricultural processing expertise to advance the development of cost-efficient processing technologies, including those that will turn cellulosic materials into ethanol and other co-products," stated Tom Binder, President-ADM Research.

    "One of our goals is to reduce the cost of the process and make it applicable for commercial production," said Nancy Ho, the principal investigator and a researcher in Purdue's Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering (LORRE).

(Source: PR Newswire)

BP Picks Illinois, California for Biofuels Research

British oil major BP Plc on Thursday announced that universities in California and Illinois will join company scientists in a $500 million energy research program focused on cleaner, alternative fuels.

The venture, called Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI), "will perform ground-breaking research aimed at the production of new and cleaner energy, initially focusing on renewable biofuels for road transport," said BP in a press statement.

The University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign were selected for the research, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, operated by the University of California.

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