Author Archives: John

BECCS keeps on truckin’ in IL

Posted on January 13, 2015 by John

A quick update on ADM’s Illinois ethanol plant w/ carbon capture and storage (previously discussed here): ADM Carbon Capture Reaches 1 Million Metric Tons Apparently they’ve geologically sequestered 1,000,000 Mg CO2 fixed from the atmosphere by corn plants since 2011.  … Continue reading →

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New UT study pessimistic on future of US fracking boom

Posted on January 2, 2015 by John

This interesting recent Nature News Feature caught my eye: Natural Gas:  the Fracking Fallacy Researchers at the University of Texas recently conducted a study of the reserve size of the four most productive US shale gas formations, and came up … Continue reading →

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BD agrees- EISA targets were realistic, but timelines were crazy

Posted on October 12, 2014 by John

In the wake of one commercial-scale facility (POET-DSM Project Liberty) having come on line, and just days before the grand opening of the next one (Abengoa’s Hugoton facility) Biofuels Digest has posted the first part of a two-part review of … Continue reading →

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3.5 M new cellulosic RINs in August?!? Or did EPA just sink the 2nd-gen biofuel market?

Posted on September 29, 2014 by John

What drove the registration of 3.5 million new cellulosic RINs in August, after less than 5,000 the month before??  Looks like EPA recently changed the rules in a huge way: http://bakken.com/news/id/218997/new-biogas-rules-renewable-fuel-standards/ Now, bio-methane produced from all sorts of sources (wastewater … Continue reading →

Posted in biofuels, energy | Tagged , | 2 Comments

New cellulosic RINs – torch passing from KiOR to POET?

Posted on September 8, 2014 by John

Anyone keeping an eye on our Cellulosic RIN Volumes page will have noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while.  That’s not just laziness on our part- the glimmers of US cellulosic biofuel production that emerged this past winter … Continue reading →

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Does an interdisciplinary focus distort a journal’s IF?

Posted on August 4, 2014 by John

An interesting read about the trajectory of the impact factor (IF) of PLoS ONE: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/06/20/the-rise-and-fall-of-plos-ones-impact-factor-2012-3-730/ There has been a lot of criticism towards the over-reliance on IF as a quantitative metric for researcher evaluation purposes.  This article touches on a … Continue reading →

Posted in bioenergy journals, research, science | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

2014 a big year for clean coal too

Posted on June 6, 2014 by John

We know that 2014 is supposed to be a make-or-break year for cellulosic ethanol, with multiple new biorefineries recently or soon-to-be completed in order to fulfill RIN demand mandated by the Renewable Fuel Standard.  According to a recent Bloomberg article, … Continue reading →

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US climate policy in 2008 vs. 2014

Posted on June 3, 2014 by John

From Vox: Obama’s climate change regulations are less ambitious than what Republicans were proposing in 2008 Makes for some very interesting & depressing reading about how much the right side of the Overton Window on this issue has moved in … Continue reading →

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EcoPress guest post on basic data analysis in Python

Posted on May 20, 2014 by John

I have a guest post up on the CSU Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory’s EcoPress blog about transitioning from doing basic data analysis in Excel to writing simple programs to do so in Python: http://nrelscience.org/2014/05/19/repeatable-and-transparent-data-analysis-making-the-leap-from-excel-to-python-with-tutorial/  It’s very basic, laying out some … Continue reading →

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PSA- there’s no such thing as % temperature change (unless you’re working in K or R!)

Posted on May 8, 2014 by John

Public service announcement- there is NO SUCH THING as a percent change in temperature, unless you happen to be working in absolute temperature units like Kelvin or Rankine degrees.  If you’ve using degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit, those are relative scales … Continue reading →

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