Biodiesel Plant put on Hold Due to High Soybean Prices
This has all the signs of becoming a mess.
High soybean oil prices have halted construction of the North Prairie Productions biodiesel plant in Evansville, making the end product too expensive compared with the pump price for regular diesel.
The going rate for soybean oil, the raw material for biodiesel, is about 45 cents a pound or $3.60 a gallon, more than double the price when the plant was proposed, said John Sheehy of Sun Prairie, board chairman of North Prairie Productions.
He said biodiesel would have to sell for $4.50 a gallon to justify the current price of soybean oil. Regular diesel fuel was selling for $3.49 a gallon Monday in the Madison area, according to MadisonGasPrices.com. A gallon of soybean oil makes a gallon of biodiesel, Sheehy said.
So basically, they need gas prices to go up by another dollar to just to be on an even footing. But while gas prices are rising, so are soybean prices. It will be quite a gamble by those investors to see if soybean prices will get to a place where they are consistently equal to or less than gas prices.
Aren’t you glad that the taxpayers sunk $4 million into helping this operation out?
Planning continues for an $85 million soybean crushing plant next to the proposed Evansville biodiesel facility. The crushing plant, which received a $4 million grant in the new state budget, would produce soybean oil for biodiesel and soybean meal for animal feed.
What idiotic group of people would cook up their food for diesel fuel?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 13, 2007 at 2034 hrs
Well obviously we should raise taxes on regular diesel fuel a couple dollars a gallon to have this make any sense at all….....We must, We should and we can raise taxes
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 13, 2007 at 2111 hrs
You can laugh all you want at bioenergy, but the Bush administration has bet $125 million that Wisconsin researchers can figure out how to make fuel out of plants. Corn and soybeans are just the start. Once the infrastructure is in place, these plants can be converted to different crops.
Major bioenergy initiative takes flight in Midwestby Terry Devitt
UW News Service
June 26, 2007
A consortium of universities, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories and businesses led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison to explore the vast potential of bioenergy was awarded one of three major new DOE bioenergy research centers, it was announced today (June 26).The award, in the neighborhood of $125 million during five years, establishes the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC), where scientists and engineers will conduct basic research toward a suite of new technologies to help convert cellulosic plant biomass — cornstalks, wood chips and perennial native grasses — to sources of energy for everything from cars to electrical power plants.
The other two DOE Bioenergy Research Centers are the DOE BioEnergy Research Center, led by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the DOE Joint BioEnergy Institute, led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
“These centers will provide the transformational science needed for bioenergy breakthroughs to advance President Bush’s goal of making cellulosic ethanol cost-competitive with gasoline by 2012 and assist in reducing America’s gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years,” Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman says. “The collaborations of academic, corporate and national laboratory researchers represented by these centers are truly impressive, and I am very encouraged by the potential they hold for advancing America’s energy security.”
Switchgrass, a native North American prairie plant, is pest-resistant and adaptable, holds soil well and produces high yields with little applied fertilizer. For these reasons, it has become a focal point for bioenergy research. Michael Casler, plant geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working to improve the economics of biofuel production by developing switchgrass varieties with higher yield and energy content.
“The funding of this center provides a unique opportunity for Wisconsin and the Midwest to be leaders in the process that transforms the way we produce and use energy,” says Tim Donohue, the UW-Madison professor of bacteriology who, with Michigan State University (MSU) professor Ken Keegstra, helped orchestrate the initiative to secure the new award.
The new grant, the largest formal grant in the university’s history, is part of a larger Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative, a statewide effort focused on the development of fuel and energy resources from non-food sources in ways that promote regional economic growth in the context of good environmental stewardship.
“We need to develop an energy future that’s good for our environment and good for our agriculture and forestry-based economies in both the short and long run,” says Molly Jahn, dean of UW-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “This award from the Department of Energy will advance our ability to contribute to our energy supply in new and very exciting ways that could be fundamental for our future.”
The new DOE center, which will be based in Madison, will bring together scientists from Wisconsin; MSU; Lucigen, a Madison-area biotechnology company; the Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories; and the University of Florida, among others.
“If we are going to start using plants in significant ways beyond food, there are a lot of issues that come into play that we need to figure out,” says Keegstra, who is an MSU distinguished professor of plant biology and biochemistry and molecular biology. “Sustainability, competition for food, environmental issues — our universities already have a head start in studying these from many angles. There is a tremendous compatibility between UW-Madison and MSU, and we have assembled with others a strong and exciting partnership.”
Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region will be “ground zero” for research efforts aimed at clearing the technological bottlenecks that prevent plant biomass from being used efficiently as a source of energy, Donohue explains.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 13, 2007 at 2225 hrs
Here’s the rest of the press release:
“In the last 100 years, we’ve gone through a significant fraction of the oil it took hundreds of millions of years to create,” says Donohue, “so we have to come up with some new strategies.”
The Great Lakes region and the American Midwest, Donohue notes, represent the third-largest economy in the world (after the U.S. as a whole and Japan), have a rich scientific and technological legacy, have ample corporate muscle and harbor one of the world’s great concentrations of biomass in its agricultural and northern forest landscapes.
“We have that biomass on the land in the form of cellulose already,” says Donohue. “We don’t have the ability to process it for energy now. Cellulose is a part of the plant we can’t get to.”
Cellulose makes up the walls of plant cells and is the main constituent of plant tissues and fibers. It is used to make paper and textiles, but vast quantities of material containing now unusable cellulose — ranging from cornfield stubble to paper pulp waste — are readily at hand. What’s more, the new center will enable research into the use of switchgrass, a native perennial that some view as an important and environmentally friendly source of cellulose for energy.
The research portfolio of the DOE GLBRC will focus on breeding new varieties of biomass plants, developing new processing techniques and agents from microbes for breaking down cellulose, improving the microbial and chemical processes that convert biomass to energy products, providing an environmental and economic framework for sustaining the biomass-to-fuel pipeline, and integrating new technologies — including genomics and new computational methods — into bioenergy research.
At least 12 new faculty will be hired in the area of bioenergy at UW-Madison and MSU. The proposal for the new center, according to Jahn, drew strong support from Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, various state agencies, Congressional delegations from Wisconsin and Michigan, and Midwest businesses and utilities.
UW System campuses and Wisconsin companies, Jahn notes, also stand to gain from this award, both directly and through state support for Wisconsin’s energy future.
“Our proposal has been brought forward by world-class scientists, and our concept for this center was judged innovative and far-reaching,” says Jahn. “But we know that the support from Gov. Doyle, who is providing key leadership in the state and regionally, and state agencies including the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, the Public Service Commission and the Office of Energy Independence were also critical for our success. This kind of big science is a team sport, and we have a great team based in a state poised to be a leader in innovative and sustainable renewable energy technologies.”
Both the new center and the larger Wisconsin Bioenergy Initiative, Jahn notes, will put Wisconsin and its partners in the vanguard of bioenergy research nationally and internationally.
“This is very exciting news for all of us,” says Jahn. “We now have the means to provide key leadership as we shape the energy future of our country, make our economy and communities stronger, and forge new knowledge. We can’t wait to get started.”
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 13, 2007 at 2227 hrs
Wally,
That is all well and good. However, it doesn’t change the fact that it is downright stupid to turn our current food stock into a substandard fuel using taxpayer money to make it “cost effective” while in turn driving up the cost of, well, FOOD!
Let them research. I wish them the best. But for now, corn ethanol and soy diesel are assinine. After the past year, I’d rather EAT US-grown corn and soy rather than importing them from China.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 14, 2007 at 0015 hrs
Owen, biodiesel does not have the same negatives as ethanol in energy value and engine wear. There is a little bit of cold-weather viscosity problem but it is easily solved.
Also, don’t confuse the biodiesel plant with the soybean crushing plant. They are two different companies doing two different procedures for the market. Either one could operate without the other. Now we’ll have to see what the timing works out to be.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 14, 2007 at 0731 hrs
I made this remark on another BS post, but farmers in my home state of Kansas (known as the nation’s breadbasket) are starting to convert wheatfields from wheat to corn and soy production because of the bio-diesel and ethanol industry.
With less wheat, corn and soybeans being grown for food use, this will result in higher food prices. So people will pay more for a loaf of bread just so we can have ethanol and bio-diesel.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 14, 2007 at 0815 hrs
How on earth do you harvest switch grass? Obvoiusly people that talk about doing so spend little time in the field.
Do we plan to import coolees from China, illegal immigrants? This stuff grows in impossible places to get to. You would have to use manual tools to cut it, then put it on haywagons to haul it out.
Do people plan to turn corn fields into switch grass fields?
These theories are incredulous. The cost would be outragwous.
Our future lies in coal and oil shale plus nuclear plants to charge people’s car batteries at night in little cars.
Switch grass is as lame an idea as windmills.
It would take one windmill 1,000 miles in diameter to replace Point Beach or 1,000 windmills 1 mile in diameter.Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on November 14, 2007 at 0917 hrs
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