According to this AP story

Alabama Power Co. is exploring the option of making electricity solely by burning wood or other “biomass.”
Under a study to be completed in the second half of this year, the state’s top power provider is looking into converting a coal-fired generating unit at one of its facilities.

Among the sites under consideration is Barry Steam Plant in north Mobile County.

The amount of power involved would be 70 to 80 megawatts, according to a description of the project recently released by the city of Mobile. That’s a fraction of the company’s total output but still enough to light thousands of homes.

…

“I think it’s more of a pre-emptive effort,” Adam Snyder, executive director of Conservation Alabama, said of the Alabama Power study, adding that he considers it “a great move.”
Along the same lines, Georgia Power Co., another affiliate of Atlanta-based Southern Company, is seeking regulators’ permission to convert a small coal-fired plant to biomass, said Anne Blair of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, another advocacy group headquartered in Knoxville, Tenn.

…

“I think they are doing a good job in terms of anticipating what is likely to be coming down the pipeline at the federal level and simply diversifying their energy mix,” said Blair, who is the alliance’s program manager for diesel and biofuels.

One of the new items of the Energy & Environment Agenda of the Obama administration is to “Ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.”  It will be interesting how utilities without access to abundant wind or solar resources comply with new energy regulations.

More on biomass at WikiPedia.

More on biomass at Alabama Power’s Biomass Energy page.

He uses the heated cow poo (using a “manure digester”) to power a modified Chevy 350 engine with the methane.

Plus, it makes him “feel good”.  Which is really all that matter, right?

“I think it’s another piece of the puzzle,” Jennison said. “I think it’ll take a lot of different things to solve our energy problems, and I think this can be part of it.”

Hassan Astaneh’s research concludes MnDOT and the consulting firm it hired could have prevented the collapse. Astaneh is a professor in University of California Berkeley’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department whose work includes studies on the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Science Foundation.

Is the ‘corn boom’ expanding Gulf of Mexico’s ‘dead zone’?

Some fear an ethanol-fueled harvest in the Midwest may be behind the hard times for marine life at the other end of the Mississippi River.

Pioneer Press: The substance is about 200 times as sweet as sugar, contains no calories and has some advantages to the food industry because it doesn’t degrade when heated or when mixed with other foods. Stevia is commonly used in Japan and parts of South America, but it’s rare in this country outside of health-food circles.

Cargill, based in Wayzata, MN, is the nation’s second largest private company, employs 158,000 employees worldwide and is involved in all sorts of agricultural operations: including grain, cotton, sugar, petroleum and financial trading; food processing; futures brokering; health and pharmaceutical products; agricultural services such as animal feed and crop protection; and industrial products including biofuels, oils and lubricants, starches, and salt.

The Wikipedia profile includes this note about Cargill’s political end economic views:

Cargill is an active proponent of free trade policies. It lobbied for China’s membership in WTO, as well as for increased trade with Cuba and Brazil. Cargill’s position is based on its strong support of neo-liberal economic principles. First, lesser trade barriers in countries where Cargill does business will lower prices on Cargill’s products, and likely increase their volume of business. Second, the decreases in the cost of food in developing countries theoretically result indirectly in higher income per capita but lower income for local farmers. Cargill benefits from increases in consumer income, because better-paid consumers become inclined to eat a diet higher in wheat, protein, vegetable oil, and processed foods. This improves opportunities for Cargill to sell its products. Cargill’s economists have reasoned that this is true of the lower income countries in particular. As a developing country grows from $1,000 to $6,000 in mean income per capita, Cargill expects the greatest profit growth from its businesses in that country.

Cargill has maintained a 100% rating on the Corporate Equality Index (CEI) released by the Human Rights Campaign since 2003.

Other random facts:

- It is responsible for 25 percent of all United States grain exports.
- It supplies approximately 22 percent of the United States domestic meat market.
- The company exports more product from Argentina than any other company.
- It is the largest poultry producer in Thailand.
- All of the eggs used in McDonald’s restaurants in the United States pass through Cargill’s plants.

Alabama Power, in partnership with Auburn University (AU), is researching how renewable biomass can be converted to gas and used to generate energy.  The unit will be on display in the Alabama Power Headquarters Visitor Parking Lot, at the corner of 18th Street and Seventh Avenue North, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. See how renewable biomass can play a growing role in meeting Alabama’s energy needs.Learn more about Alabama Power’s sponsorship of the Mobile Biomass Gasification Unit.

PG&E begins tapping into cow power

PG&E customers will get natural gas from cow manure for the first time today.

In a ceremony at Vintage Dairy, a 1,700-acre dairy farm in Riverdale, not far from Fresno, officials from the utility, the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture and the Energy Commission will join David Albers of BioEnergy Solutions to turn a valve that will send the first of 3 billion cubic feet of natural gas a year into a pipeline.

That’s enough gas to create electricity for 50,000 California homes, and comes from 5,000 cows. The potential for turning waste to energy is vast. “There are nearly 2 million dairy cows in California,” said Jennifer Zerwer, a Pacific Gas & Electric spokeswoman.

PG&E calls it “cow power,” capturing methane released from covered lagoons of cow manure and sending the natural gas into pipelines where it’ll be burned to generate electricity. It’s all part of a state-mandated push to get more energy from renewable sources.

Learn more about this and other programs on PG&E‘s Clean Energy Solutions web page.

Swine farm operators in North Carolina can now register to participate in a methane capture pilot program. North Carolina is the second largest hog producing state in the country; in 2006, hog populations topped 9.5 million.

Members of the swine industry first voiced interest in methane-capture programs to state legislators which spurred legislation requiring a percentage of renewable energy to be generated by methane from hog farms.

The Swine Farm Environmental Performance Standards Act of 2007 authorized a methane capture pilot program that will allow up to 50 swine farm operators to sell electricity generated from methane held in onsite lagoons. The program was passed by the state senate in July 2007 as part of Senate Bill 1465.

I would never have guessed that NC is #2 in hog production. Does anyone know who is #1? The 9.5 million hogs slightly outnumber the 9 million humans also living in the state.

Finavera Renewables Inc., is pleased to announce it has been issued a Preliminary Permit for its proposed 100MW Coos County, Oregon wave energy project. The permit approval was granted by the United States Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”). The preliminary permit is valid for a period of three years, and allows Finavera Renewables to conduct various studies, including analyses of oceanographic conditions, commercial and recreational activities, and other impacts potentially associated with the planned project. The company will rely on the studies and stakeholder consultations in framing its application to FERC for a project operating license.

Alla Weinstein, Director and General Manager, Ocean Energy said, “The Coos County project is part of the next step along our path to the commercialization of wave energy. Permitting activities for this project will be based on our experience gained in the Makah Bay pilot project, which is the first wave energy project to file for a FERC operating license. This project is designed to meet the State of Oregon’s policy to invest in and support the growth of clean and renewable energy sources for the people of Oregon. We look forward to working closely with the local community to ensure a successful project.”

The proposed Coos County project would use interconnected clusters of the company’s patented AquaBuOY wave energy devices. The project would have a generating capacity of 100MW, and total annual generation from the project is estimated to be approximately 175 gigawatt-hours per-year, which is sufficient electricity to power approximately 15,000 American homes.

Here’s a video about the technology.

Learn more about Finavera Wave Projecs and Wave Technology.

Algae – easy to grow and an efficient producer of biodiesel.

21 April 2008—Food riots erupting around the world have been partly blamed on the growing use of food products to produce fuels like biodiesel and corn ethanol. But biofuels need not come from food crops. According to some researchers, the best source of biofuel may be algae, best known as pesky green pond scum.

As anyone who has had to clean a swimming pool or fish tank knows, algae grow quickly. All they need is light, carbon dioxide, and a little water to grow like, well, weeds. It turns out that algae produce oil that can be processed to make biodiesel. In some species, this oil represents more than half of the plantlike organism’s mass. Researchers are also trying to genetically alter algae to make them give off copious amounts of hydrogen to meet the needs of future fuel-cell-powered cars.

Algae’s biodiesel capacity compares well with today’s sources, says Glen Kertz, president and CEO at Valcent Products, a Vancouver, B.C., start-up that aims to become a leading algae oil supplier. A single hectare planted with corn will yield about 40 liters of oil per year; a hectare planted with oil palm would yield 1000 L. But according to Kertz, an algae bioreactor occupying the same space could yield more than 48 000 L. “And we think we can do far better than that,” says Kertz. “In a few years, when we come to understand more about this crop we’re growing, we could see bioreactors producing more than [150 000 L per hectare per year].”

In addition to biofuel, algae can also produce hydrogen, which can then power fuel cells, another clean source of electricity.

Meanwhile, other researchers are trying to ratchet up algae’s natural production of hydrogen to make pond scum bioreactors a fuel source for fuel cells. David Tiede, a senior scientist at Argonne, says he and his colleagues are looking to manipulate an enzyme called hydrogenase, which generates small amounts of hydrogen gas during a process that is concurrent with photosynthesis. Tiede hopes to take the part of the hydrogenase enzyme that produces hydrogen and insert it into a protein integral to photosynthesis. Doing so, he says, could yield amounts of hydrogen equivalent to as much as 10 percent of the algae’s mass, or roughly the same as the amount of oxygen they create.

Algae’s fecundity is so great that researchers at the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that algae bioreactors covering less than 40 000 square kilometers—roughly one-tenth of the sun-baked state of New Mexico—could churn out enough biodiesel, bioethanol, and molecular hydrogen to completely replace petroleum as transportation fuel in the United States, the world’s largest automotive market. That’s a lot of pond scum, considering that in 2006, U.S drivers burned through more than 800 billion L of fuel, according to the Energy Information Administration, which is part of the DOE.

Algae awareness! Algae is the Earth‘s primary oxygen source.

But biofuel experts foresee a day when algae bioreactors like Valcent’s will be set up not only in places like New Mexico’s deserts but also in urban areas, atop the smokestacks of industrial plants or coal-burning electric generation plants, and in rural areas where the algae would act as remediators, using human or animal waste streams as a food source. “The reality is that from an ecological standpoint, algae already play a huge role because they’re the primary oxygen source for the planet,” says Kertz. “Most people don’t know that. But I think it’s time for some algae awareness.”

read the entire article

Also from IEEE, researchers are trying to use termites to produce ethanol.

Q:  How much of the US corn crop is used for ethanol?

I was surprised to find out today that about a third of the US corn crop is used to produce ethanol!  That’s according to this USA Today article discussing the expected higher prices for corn this year.  The article fingers biofuels mandates as one major contributor to the higher demand, and thus, the higher price of corn.

High energy prices have increased the cost of production. In addition, the U.S. and other nations have mandated increased use of biofuels, including corn-based ethanol. That has led to competition for acreage, contributed to a doubling of many grain prices and caused food riots in nations such as China and Pakistan.

With ethanol demand surging, U.S. farmers last year planted the largest corn crop since 1944. Even with the predicted decline in acreage, the 2008 crop could be one of the largest on record. Still, with the ethanol industry expected to claim about a third of the corn crop, and the USDA saying that stockpiles are lower than expected, there is the potential for shortages.

“Basically, we’re spending our tax dollars to raise the price of our food so we can subsidize the ethanol and big oil companies,” says Ray Atkinson, Pilgrim’s Pride director of communications.

Which is exactly my point in this post.  Some well-intentioned government farm aid programs produce counter-productive incentives by helping one groups of people (farmers get paid to not plant) and hurt another group (higher food prices for consumers in the US and globally).

This piece in the Guardian discusses why the UK is about to fight the EU’s pending biofuels quota of 10% by 2020. Not surprisingly, the EU’s quota could result in higher food prices. Does anyone actually expect a government quota to produce positive results? Or even, results without unintended negative consequences?