My Top 10 Energy Related Stories of 2009

Here are my choices for the Top 10 energy related stories of 2009. Previously I listed how I voted in Platt’s Top 10 poll, but my list is a bit different from theirs. I have […]

Biofuel Pretenders

Note This article was initially titled “Pretenders, Contenders, and Niches.” However, the section on pretenders grew to the point that I have decided to split the essay up into three parts. The first part, Biofuel […]

Answering Reader Questions 2009: Part 2

In this installment, I continue to work my way through the list of questions recently submitted by readers. This post picks up where Part 1 left off, and covers coal-to-liquids, technology hype, green gasoline, refining […]

Congress Kills a Biofuel Project

If we are to seriously encourage a move to biofuels, incentives are going to be required because the economics of biofuels just can’t compete with petroleum (regardless of what Vinod Khosla thinks). Eventually depletion will […]

Tariff Turnabout

This is a timely story, coming on the heels of the previous story on the tariffs the U.S. applies to Brazilian ethanol: European tariffs stun U.S. biodiesel industry The U.S. biodiesel industry will suffer from […]

The Prospects for Algal Biodiesel Dim

As I noted in my earlier essay More Reality Checks for Algal Biodiesel, I initially had high hopes for the idea that we might make significant amounts of biodiesel from algae. A few years ago […]

The Potential of Jatropha

The previous post provided an introduction to Jatropha curcas, a tropical, oil-producing shrub. In this essay I want to get into why I believe there is great potential for jatropha to make an impact on […]

Repost of TDP: What Went Wrong

The is Part II of my look at Changing World Technologies’ thermal depolymerization process. This essay came from a reader, and was originally posted on April 12, 2007. But I also want to add some […]

Renewable Diesel Primer

Given the recent news that biodiesel has caused buses in Minnesota to malfunction in cold weather, I thought this would be a good time to review the differences between diesel, biodiesel, and green diesel. In […]

Biodiesel, Green Diesel, and Jet Fuel

It is annoying to me that the definition of cellulosic ethanol has now been officially coopted in last year’s energy bill to include gasification processes. To me, that’s like redefining the definition of ‘birds’ to […]