(automatically updated/inserted from The Big Biofuels Blog)

A Karl and Helen Rehberg from Florida committed a biodiesel scam in Florida the 1990s and pocketed around $20m from investors, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigations. The Rehbergs were sentenced on 22 August.

This is the first case of its kind that I’ve come across.

Hattip to Bizopnews.

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hey to all.

i have been playing with the idea of using a hand pump to help filter my oil. it the oil has already been prestrained with shopping bags, then through a 5mn filter down into a upflow system. i wish to try and hurry this up a bit.

would one of those drum pumps have enough pressure behind them to push oil through a 1mn filter bag. i thought about one of those drill pumps on a battery drill? but has not seen a decent one that would last.

i have no power out where my filter systems is, so hand power is the only way.
any other ideas?

cheers

Hobie

(automatically updated/inserted from The Big Biofuels Blog)

Enterprise-rent-a-car appoints Dr Richard Sayre as academic biofuel director at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. The position was created by the family which owns Enterprise (and also Alamo and National Car rental brands) with a $25m donation to the Danforth Plant Science Center. Nice.

He’ll be studying third generation biofuels… that’s algae to you and me:

“Extracting oil from algae to produce a more sustainable biofuel is one of the most promising and exciting areas of biofuels research today,” said Sayre, formerly a professor in the Department of Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology at The Ohio State University. “Algae have significant potential as a clean, renewable, and economical fuel source. And, because algae are not used as food, they are a biofuel source that does not compete with the food supply.”

I’ve asked Enterprise if it has any details of the average fuel efficiency of its fleet of cars over the past five years and how it has changed over that time. Rental companies with large fleets could have some power in getting car makers to produce vehicles which are more efficient… I’ll be asking other rental firms.

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OK, so my algae project is not going to make me rich in the short term.

So I am doing due diligence on a proposal on my desk at the moment.

Part of this is pressing 35 000 tons of soy beans every day, 5 days a week to make 8000 litres of oil. If I turn this into Bd it is already sold to a local distributor.

What I would like some feed back on is whether I would be able to sell the raw oil as SVO. I am still guessing on costs but I think it would work out at around 80 cents a litre to give me some profit.

What do you guys think?

(automatically updated/inserted from The Big Biofuels Blog)

US this year diverted 24.5% of its corn crop into ethanol production and replaced 2.65% of the total US demand for road transportation fuels — assuming that the 2007 figures for fuel use will be around the same as 2006, according to figures from the US Department of Energy which has issued preliminary ethanol production figures for 2007. These show that in 2007 the US produced 6485 m gal ethanol — 49.6% of the world total — and imported 361 m gal. Total consumption was 6846m gal. This displaced 4642 m gal of gasoline, based on preliminary data.

The US used 24.5% of the corn crop (3200m bushels) in the process.

According to the US department of Transportation, American road vehicles consumed 174 930m gal gasoline in 2006. Those numbers are likely to be updated in April 2009 for 2007.

All of this helps to put the current US pro-corn lobby lunacy into perspective. It also shows how little difference incremental planting and incremental improvements in crop yeild will make in the short- to medium-term. The last thing the world needs is the demand for grains to be getting close to the production levels of grains.

This also shows just how massive the demand for fuel is and how pathetically small attempts at growing our way out of oil dependency based on one type of technology are. If the entire corn crop were diverted to make ethanol, it would only replace 10% of demand.

We all need to be a lot smarter about the kinds of things that we use for fuel, things like food waste and municple waste should be examined quickly and thoroughly. We should throw less away without getting the additoinal benefit from it. We should, through taxation if necessary, price gasoline at a level which reflects its true economic value and then we’d have an incentive to make all road vehicles much more efficient. That’s easy for me to say, I’m not standing for office. .

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