March 2, 2009 – The New Fuels Alliance (NFA), one of the nation’s leading advocates for advanced biofuels, is warning that California’s efforts to reduce carbon emissions from gasoline may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions and worsen the state’s dependence on dirty fossil fuels.

Biofuels are being wrongly penalized by the California Air Resources Board’s (CARB) Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) which requires oil companies to reduce the carbon sold in their fuels by 10 percent by 2020. Under this proposal, all fuels are assigned a “carbon score” to reward the least carbon intensive fuels. But only biofuel is being singled out for so-called “indirect effects” thereby giving petroleum products a better carbon score and a competitive advantage. For drivers in California, it means they will be buying more dirty petroleum products and less of the cleaner renewable fuels.

“This proposal encourages oil companies to sell dirty fossil fuels like Canadian tar sands instead of renewable fuels including advanced biofuels like cellulosic ethanol,” said Brooke Coleman, head of the New Fuels Alliance. “Ironically, CARB’s proposal to reduce carbon will just result in more carbon in our environment.”

Even more alarming to the Alliance, CARB’s proposal puts up serious roadblocks to the development of more advanced biofuels from green sources like switchgrass. “These regulations will stifle advanced biofuels investment and derail the industry. California is moving the opposite direction of President Obama who stated in a recent speech it is critical to support advanced biofuels.”

Over 100 of the nation’s top scientists are also questioning CARB’s plan. In a letter sent to Governor Schwarzenegger, the scientists warned that: “this proposal creates an asymmetry or bias in a regulation designed to create a level playing field. It violates the fundamental presumption that all fuels in a performance-based standard should be judged the same way …Enforcing different compliance metrics against different fuels is the equivalent of picking winners and losers, which is in direct conflict with the ambition of the LCFS.” Click here to see the letter signed by 111 scientists from research labs such as the National Academy of Sciences, UC-Berkeley, Sandia National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and MIT.

Go here to see the letter: http://www.arb.ca.gov/lists/lcfs-general-ws/28-phd_lcfs_mar09.pdf

CARB is scheduled to make their decision public in the next few days, and then there will be a public comment period before their decision is made final between April 23rd and 24th.

DuPont and Genencor of Palo Alto, CA have announced they are working together to create the World’s-Leading Cellulosic Ethanol Company. Why is this important? Well as you may have read lately there is a large debate over making ethanol from existing food stocks and causing shortages and price in creases for those items such as corn and sugar.

If these companies can create viable ethanol product using no food stock sources then it will mean a boom to our economy of energy production and not a bust.

Here is the announcement of the joint venture:

DuPont and Genencor, a division of Danisco A/S, today announced an agreement to form DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC, a 50/50 global joint venture to develop and commercialize the leading, low-cost technology solution for the production of cellulosic ethanol — a next generation biofuel produced from non-food sources – to address a $75 billion global market opportunity.

The partners plan an initial three-year investment of US$140 million, which will initially target corn stover and sugar cane bagasse. Future targets include multiple ligno-cellulosic feedstocks including wheat straw, a variety of energy crops and other biomass sources.

“With food and gas prices surging at double-digit rates, there is an imperative for sustainable biofuels technologies. This joint venture addresses this issue head on,” said DuPont Chairman and CEO Charles O. Holliday, Jr. “By integrating our companies’ strengths and expertise in this new venture, we are significantly increasing the potential to make cellulosic ethanol from multiple non-food sources an economic reality around the world.”

“By combining the world-class capabilities of DuPont and Danisco, our joint venture will offer the technology standard for cellulosic ethanol production,” said Danisco CEO Tom Knutzen. “This joint venture will be a powerhouse of discovery, development and engineering. It represents a major step forward in Danisco’s new strategic intent to be a leading force in the field of industrial biotechnology.”

Through the scientists and technologies of both companies, DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC will launch an accelerated effort to integrate the unique cellulosic processing capabilities of both companies to economically produce ethanol from non-food sources. The parent companies will license their combined existing intellectual property and patents related to cellulosic ethanol. The goal is to maximize efficiency and lower the overall system cost to produce a gallon of ethanol from cellulosic materials by optimizing the process steps into a single integrated technology solution.

In the United States, the joint venture will scale up an optimized technology package for corn cobs from integrating the proprietary DuPont pretreatment and ethanologen technologies with the innovative enzyme technology of Genencor, while DuPont continues to analyze the collection and storage of cellulosic feedstocks. The global joint venture expects its first pilot plant to be operational in the United States in 2009, and its first commercial-scale demonstration facility to be operational within the next three years. The joint venture will be headquartered in the United States and will be formed after receipt of required regulatory approvals.

The joint venture will license its technology package directly to ethanol producers for deployment in the United States and around the world, as well as through the establishment of regional cellulosic ethanol affiliates. The regional ethanol affiliates will invest in equity interests with strategic partners, including ethanol producers and energy companies, to enable the rapid deployment of the joint venture’s cellulosic ethanol technology at commercial scale. The joint venture’s technology package can be used both as a “bolt-on” to an existing ethanol plant — expanding its capacity to accept cellulosic feedstocks — or as the design basis for a stand-alone cellulosic ethanol facility. The joint venture expects to enable production of commercial volumes of cellulosic ethanol by 2012.

A video primer on Cellulosic Ethanol: