FTC Ruling on Biodiesel and other Renewable Diesel Fuels

I came across a document that I thought was interesting. Rather than save to my desktop I figured this blog would be a better place to save the file.

The Federal Trade Commission promulgated a rule around the labeling and standard for biodiesel and "biomassed based diesels" (a description I have never formally heard referred to before).

Biomass-based Diesel Defined From the Rule Making:
Biomass-based diesel means a diesel fuel substitute produced from nonpetroleum renewable
resources that meets the registration requirements for fuels and fuel additives established by the Environmental Protection Agency under 42 U.S.C. 7545, and includes fuel derived from animal wastes, including poultry fats and poultry wastes, and other waste materials, or from municipal solid waste and sludges and oils derived from wastewater and the treatment of wastewater, except that the term does not include biodiesel as defined in this Part.

This is significant for two reasons. One, I never knew that the FTC had any part in the labeling or distribution of fuels. Second, this is the rule I recently saw mentioned by a PMAA newsletter about new biodiesel labeling requirements.

See the rule making here.

CO2 + Sunlight = Liquid Fuels

Saw this bit of news over at Wired.com.

Described as "Sunlight to Petrol" or S2P, this project essentially reverses the combustion process, recovering the building blocks of hydrocarbons. This technology has been demonstrated to create methanol and gasoline. On the drawing board this technology can make a host of other liquid fuels as well.

Originally conceived as a way to generate hydrogen the research took another turn recently. Moving from steam as a feedstock (the source for hydrogen) to CO2. The research and development work is being done at the Sandia National Laboratory. Their press release on this technology is available here.

According to the Wired article this is not a new concept. In fact moving CO2 to CO and then forcing hydrogen into the mix to make a hydrocarbon has been around for some time. The technology and process is described below:

The prototype will be about the size and shape of a beer keg. It will contain 14 cobalt ferrite rings, each about one foot in diameter and turning at one revolution per minute. An 88-square meter solar furnace will blast sunlight into the unit, heating the rings to about 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, cobalt ferrite releases oxygen. When the rings cool to about 2,000 degrees, they're exposed to CO2.

Since the cobalt ferrite is now missing oxygen, it snatches some from the CO2, leaving behind just carbon monoxide -- a building block for making hydrocarbons -- that can then be used to make methanol or gasoline. And with the cobalt ferrite restored to its original state, the device is ready for another cycle.

Fuels like methanol and gasoline are combinations of hydrogen and carbon that are relatively easy to synthesize, Stechel said. Methanol is the easiest, and that's where they will start, but gasoline could also be made.

The team researching this project are looking to field it in connection with coal fired electricity. This is the market these researchers forsee for the technology. The target market being a CO2 scrubbing application that creates a usable off-take of liquid fuels.

Yet another technology that requires CO2 be regulated to be viable in the US. Seems a great deal of smart people are betting on this assumption. I seem to be seeing alot of those these days. Makes you wonder if all these big DOE dependent mucky-mucks know something I don't.

Fischer-Tropsch and Jet Fuel Research

Recently, there seems to be quite a bit of news around aviation grade biofuels. Primarily the highest profile being Virgin Atlantic Airlines and The U.S. Department of Defense (see Syntroleum).

A biofuel meeting jet fuel specifications is starting to become a holy-grail technology of sorts. On par with ethanol produced from corn-stover. There is a very simple argument that a bio-jet fuel can be classified as a paradigm shifting technology. That if perfected would allow one of the largest energy uses in the first world economies to leap frog beyond petroleum.

The big stumbling block to this paradigm shifting concept is the low tolerances required to operate a plane a mile in the sky. If you can make a jet fuel, as the logic goes, you now can make any fuel. The scale, scope and specifications required offer up aviation as the pinnacle of what a biofuel must be to truly arrive on the world stage.

Essentially its pretty simple. If there is a fuel problem while airborn, as we used to while I worked as a flightline refueler in the Air Force, the crew has the rest of their lives to figure it out. Being the solution development time in this situation is minutes instead of the typical "five years out" a DOE grant holder gets away with the stakes become a little higher.

These are the constraints of aviation fuels (commonly called either Jet-A or the military nomenclature of JP-8). A biofuel/syn fuel must operate at extremely varied altitudes and temperatures (typically -30 degrees Fahrenheit and lower). It must store well and be predictable when aging (i.e. we must be able to give it a shelf life and quality assurance system). The fuel also must have better emissions than petro-Jet A, a similar cost per Btu, and of course the basic consistency regardless of the feedstock the fuel is derived from. You also have specification constraints as well to operate in existing jet turbine engines (i.e. it must look like Jet-A to existing engines; this being expressed typically in specific gravity, cetane, ingrained water content, etc.....).

Enter good old Fischer-Tropsch as the hoped solution. With a product typically called "syn-diesel" this technology is proven but expensive. It also pulls a consistent product out of such feedstocks as coal, agricultural waste, solid waste, and just about anything with a significant Btu content. So like most issues of energy, the issue becomes who can commercially demonstrate the better iteration of a technology invented by old dead Nazis.

A story covering the basics of this ongoing endeavor of the search for a bio-aviation-fuel popped up this morning. Check it out in the Aviation International News online.

Plastics back to Petroleum - Plas2Fuel

Want to see something cool? Plas2Fuel out of Kelso, Washington.

They have a technology currently demonstrated that takes any type of plastics (type 1 through 7) and can turn it back into a crude petroleum state. Once liquid this recycled plastic product is ready to be refined into any number of higher value petroleum products.

I was lucky enough to take a tour of their facility and even have a sample of their product sitting on my desk. What makes their process exciting is that most plastics have a chlorine in their make up. This chlorine then becoming problematic any time you burn or attempt to melt plastic in a recycling process (chlorine corrodes most processes). Making the end product of any plastic to petroleum process acidic. They have overcome this.

As they explain their process it seemed pretty simple in concept and complex in application. I may be wrong but I believe Plas2Fuel is using a process similar to "Thermal Depolymerization."

They essentially fill a cartridge container with a mix of any type of plastic. This cartridge is then loaded into their demonstration plant which starts heating up. The process vessel is then turned into an oxygen depleted environment which causes the plastic to return to a crude petroleum state ready for refining into other products.

They get a two grade product out of the process. A thicker crude and a product that looks like petroleum distallate (but they tell me is closer to a gasoline product).

Its always exciting to see technologies like this in my own backyard. Its even better having an inventor living within a phone call to ask questions as well.

Also worth mentioning, a little known fact. The plastics we pay good money to sort out at solid waste transfer stations are typically shipped to Asia. From what I've been told by several reliable sources we pay brokers to move it over seas where our sorted plastic waste is recycled into heat (i.e burned as cheap and dirty fuel).

Question to those reading the blog. If you had a small, low sulfur, high grade feedstock as described above. What would be the highest and best use for the product? Where do you think market development should be.