I expect that it may not please the National Biodiesel Board, but the big newsmaker in the biofuels arena this week is clearly one of the old line fuel companies. No doubt it makes it a lot easier to be a TOP newsmaker when you have hundreds of billions of currency to spend, thus traditional petroleum companies are very likely to be major players in the biofuels fields whenever and wherever they choose. At the same time the National Biodiesel Board is whining about ConocoPhillips stepping on their toes by making renewable diesel, the Europeans are crying foul that the American biodiesel industry is killing them because of the same tax advantaged provisions in the US. This week it was BP's turn to take the spotlight.

BP (formerly known as British Petroleum) has announced several deals in the past week. Some are just extensions of existing deals and relationships. At least one has tentacles that reach to the far corners of the earth. (I have always wondered where the "corners" are on a semi-spheroidal planet, but never received an adequate explanation. After all if a two-dimensional map shows the whole world, aren't the top left and right corners the same place? Since the same would be true for the bottom corners, doesn't that make it the "two corners of the world" at most?)

BP, who are already partnered with British Sugar and DuPont (or du Pont, if you prefer) in a plant to produce biobutanol from sugar beets have announced another plan. This one is for bioethanol, a whole lot less "exotic" than biobutanol (hold that thought, for it is not true). This deal involves Associated British Foods (ABF), which, not coincidentally is the parent to British Sugar (as I understand it). It also involves duPont (or any other spelling you wish to apply to the great chemical company). It seems that this plant will be built on land already owned by BP, near the city of Hull (no, not in Quebec, this one is in Great Britain), according to the story in the Telegraph last Sunday. What makes this a little different is that they plan to ferment ordinary wheat. The Telegraph story says that Frontier Agriculture, a division of ABF, will be responsible for supplying the "feed grade" wheat. That's where they stepped in it a little. Stepped into the muck of the, "you're inflating the cost of food," argument. Sorry, but that argument doesn't wash. In fact, regardless of the small percentage of British wheat production that will be consumed by this plant, like America, the British government has an agricultural policy that has "set aside" land that would otherwise be used to grow wheat in order to keep wheat prices (artificially) high so that farmers can "afford" to grow wheat in the first place. So even if the amount consumed by this new bioethanol plant did impact the availability of wheat, this "set aside" land could be brought back into production and the effect would disappear. Another opportunity is being created, however, because although it is being handled by AB Agri, yet another division of ABF, they are going to be selling the "distillers grains" (the grain left over from the fermentation process) which can be used as cattle feed (and some other interesting uses as well). Indeed, American studies have shown that pigs gain more weight when the distillers’ grains have been processed to remove the remaining oils, which, of course, is the feedstock for biodiesel production. And the grain remains saleable, as well as full nutritious for the animals.

Oh, yes, the Telegraph reports that the bioethanol plant will be held 45% each by BP and ABF, while the "middle" 10% will belong to duPont. Ethanol is just C2H6O. Butanol is hardly more “exotic” since it is just C4H10O, but is somewhat higher in energy content. From http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Butanol in BTU/gallon

1. 64,000 Methanol

2. 84,000 Ethanol

3.105,000 Butanol

4.114,000 Gasoline

5.120,000 Biodiesel

6.130,000 Petrodiesel (which of course is virtually indistinguishable from “renewable diesel”)

The second BP deal is almost more interesting. BP has committed to investing some £80 million over the next five years, starting with £32m this year in a deal with British biofuels firm, D1. (Yes, that's the name of the company, "D1", not to be confused with the Disney movie about hockey playing kids called, "D2", of course.) This deal covers the planting of approximately one million hectares of land with jatropha plants. D1 says they have developed their own strain of high quality jatropha curcas and are doing some kind of cloning process (which may or may not simply be conventional cuttings to produce planting sets). The version of this story that appears in the online version of The Northern Echo indicates that the plantings will be in, "South East Asia, southern Africa, central and South America, and India." The version of this story carried by Reuters says that, "Evolution Securities analysts said in a note the D1 plantations should produce around 3 billion litres of crude jatropha oil per year when mature which equalled 25 million barrels."

BP also gets 1.9% of D1's net assets and an option to subscribe for an additional 16% of its shares at some future date. Production of jatropha oil is expected to begin as soon as 2008.

Did you see my previous suggestion that Bruce "Bruno" Willis' newest episode in the "Die Hard" series was likely to be worth catching? I saw it this week. It was. My hands were clenched, my palms were sweating with anticipation of the next twist or turn, and I was not disappointed. I grant that not everyone will love it. One of the people who accompanied Maggie and I to the movie said the tension never got to him because he found it all so far beyond believable, but nevertheless he enjoyed it immensely too. If you've seen the trailer (or probably even just the television ads) you know there is a sequence in which Willis' Detective McClane takes down a helicopter with a police car. My wife loved his line at the end of that scene, when Justin Long (the "Mac" character in the Apple commercials where “Mac meets PC”) comments that he's never seen anyone take out a helicopter with a car before, Willis deadpans, "I was out of bullets."

Frankly, that is about the only time in the movie that anyone is ever out of bullets. The gunfire and explosions are virtually non-stop. It was a thoroughly entertaining couple of hours. And yes, lots of it, most of it, strains credulity most of the time, but "willing suspension of disbelief" is at the heart of theatrical entertainment (according to all of my Drama Professors) since the time of Sophocles, so if you can go with the flow, you can enjoy this wild and funny cinematic game of snakes and ladders.

Just incidentally, David Hodgson, who plays PC on the Apple “Mac meets PC” commercials, appears frequently on The Daily Show with John Stewart as himself (posing as a news correspondent).

I saw a couple of "science" programs in the past couple of weeks. One was the rather interesting "Beyond Invention" that contained some truly unbelievable (literally, not believable) stories about so-called "scientific" claims. One was a gentleman in British Columbia who claimed that he had been first courted by government agents, then haunted by them, including having his equipment confiscated by Canadian government officials. They had video of some objects apparently floating in mid-air in what appeared to be a gravity defying manner. Both metal and non-metal objects were made to levitate when bombarded with some combination of radio waves. The conditions under which this was demonstrated were less than rigidly scientifically controlled. It may or may not be what the inventor purports it to be.

What makes that stick in my mind was the fact that shortly after seeing this item on television, I was pointed to a video on the internet that shows a gentleman bombarding "ordinary" sea water with microwaves. Exactly how the process works this man did not claim to know, but for some reason, this ordinary sea water emitted a burnable gas. Again, not ridgidly controlled scientific conditions. It might well be that the net amount of energy required to produce the microwaves may far exceed the energy made available in the gaseous fuel that comes from the sea water, but is was certainly an interesting process to observe.

What it suggests to me is that the action of cavitations, the formation of empty bubbles in the liquid, that then implode at tremendous speed may be capable of amplifying the amount of energy entering the water. (That is to say, the implosion of the bubbles happens far more rapidly than the formation of the bubble caused by the energy from the microwaves, thus the small slow force that causes the expansion is, in effect, amplified and accelerated by the gravity and air pressure.) Remembering that sea water usually contains substantial amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide, it suggests to me that perhaps the disruption of the microwaves in what amounts to a complex soup of highly ionized particles might be causing hydrogen ions to dissociate from the hydroxide ions that make up water (H+ + OH- = H2O) and recombining into some combination like CH4 + O2 (don't ask me to balance the equation, I'm just mulling it over). Something interesting is going on in any case, and it looks like it might bear further investigation.

Back to the "fuels" field, however, there is the unrelated story, but related technology that a US company called "Global Resource Corporation" (GRC) has just sold a device they call a "Hawk-10" to Gershaw Recycling. This device uses a combination of microwave frequencies (reported at environment.newscientist.com as 1200 various frequencies) to "dissolve" plastics into biodiesel and combustible gases. Indeed, not unlike the Changing World Technologies claims, they say they have demonstrated this using finely chewed automobile tires to produce biodiesel, combustible gas, steel (from the steel belts) and raw carbon. Gershaw is experienced in metal recovery, especially from junked cars. Reportedly Gershaw intends to use it on residual "autofluff" as they call it. Again, this is one of the markets CWT has been exploring with the cooperation of major Detroit automakers. It appears, however, that the scale of the Hawk-10 may need to be expanded to make it a viable contender for any major market share in the "autofluff" recovery world.

Love

Stafford "Doc" Williamson

p.s. I have found some folks cultivating algal biodiesel in Africa, who also do several other interesting things in the biofuels field. I hope to talk to them this week and unless they insist on confidentiality, I'll report more on that next time.