Questionable Funding? | Green Energy News

January 29, 2006 – Vol.10 No.45

QUESTIONABLE FUNDING.

The President’s Advanced Energy Initiative he is now promoting is spending package included in his 2007 budget proposal.

Budget proposals are really guidelines. Congress takes months to hash out the details and the amounts to be spent. For now, however, the President is asking for $335 million for clean coal and carbon sequestration research, $148 million for solar research (up by $65 million for 2006), $44 million for wind energy research (up by $5 million in ‘06), $150 million for biofuels, particularly cellulosic ethanol research (up by $59 million in ‘06), $30 million for better batteries (up by $6.7 million), and another $289 million for hydrogen and fuel cell research (up by $53 million).

As much as additional research might be beneficial to improve some technologies, industries developing green power products seem to be doing just fine without taxpayer dollars to help.

Some of what Bush wants more research money for are fully commercialized, competitive industries. Solar energy is already a money maker, as is wind. New battery companies with new chemistries seem to pop up on a regular basis. Money from federal government, taxpayer-filled coffers might be better used finding ways to get more people and businesses to buy more of these technologies than endlessly trying to improve them.

The news from industry is generally encouraging.

Shell, for instance, with partner Iogen of Canada has announced that with Volkswagen they will explore the possibilities of building a cellulosic ethanol plant in Germany. This is commercialization, not research.

Shell, too, already has an existing partnership with CHOREN Industries of Germany to build a plant there to turn biomass waste, such as wood chips, into a synthetic gas that, in turn, can be converted to a kind of biodiesel fuel.

Novozymes, the 60-year enzyme division of Novo Nordisk, has announced it has cut the cost of enzymes that can be used to make ethanol from wood chips and stalks, or switch grass as the President suggests. Those enzymes are now only 10 -18 cents per gallon of cellulosic ethanol, down from over $5.00.

SunOpta, of Toronto, Ontario says it is moving along with its Biomass Conversion Technology that will be able to make ethanol from wood chips, etc. The company already sells a process to pretreat biomass-to-fuel feed stocks.

New York-based Xethanol says it should be ready to go by 2007 to make ethanol from a wide variety of waste feed stocks.

And finally, another New York company Veridium, wants to make the existing ethanol-from-cornstarch industry even more profitable or reduce cost of ethanol at the pump. The company wants to squeeze the last bit of oil out waste kernels of corn and use that corn oil to make biodiesel.

The company says that each year one-billion bushels of corn yields about 3 billion gallons of ethanol and 300 million gallons of corn oil. That corn oil can be sold at the pump at a high price rather than as a component of animal feed at only 3 cents a pound.

Visit Shell at http://www.shell.com/ , Novozymes at http://www.novozymes.com/ SunOpta at http://www.sunopta.com/ , Xethanol at http://www.xethanol.com/ , Veridium at http://www.veridium.com/ .