As usual Europe gets it - the US is slow to come around.

[suziedemocrat]

from http://www.fortune.com/fortune/smallbusiness/articles/0,15114,1018747,00.html

SMALL & GREEN
A Turkey In Your Tank
Could poultry scraps be the next big source of fuel oil?
By Ellyn Spragins

One solution to america's energy crisis just may be gobbling away at a poultry farm near you. Changing World Technologies has developed a working system to convert turkey guts and scraps into fuel oil. But CWT's tribulations show how hard it is for even the most innovative green company to compete in the energy business.

CWT's improbable alchemy is based on an idea that scientists have been kicking around for three decades: mimicking the earth's process for creating oil and gas. By subjecting organic materials to extreme heat and pressure, CWT produces in minutes what the planet takes thousands of years to make. The company says its process works on tires, various hazardous wastes, and plastic as well as heavy metals.

The key question is whether the end products are pure enough and cheap enough to compete with other biofuels and petroleum. Until recently it seemed that turkey fuel would score big on both counts. CWT saw opportunity in the mad cow scare of December 2003. Expecting U.S. authorities to ban the feeding of animal offal to livestock—a practice linked to mad cow disease—CWT and ConAgra formed a joint venture that built a $30 million plant in Carthage, Mo. The venture assumed that nearby turkey processors would provide lots of free turkey waste. Last year the Carthage plant began selling its output to a Midwestern manufacturer, which buys it for roughly $40 a barrel (25% less than conventional fuel) and uses it to run its plant. The Carthage factory now produces 400 barrels a day.

That's a drop in the ocean of U.S. oil consumption, currently running around 20 million barrels a day. But making more turkey fuel isn't as hard as nailing down its costs. It turns out that feeding animals to animals remains standard practice in the U.S., despite a modest tightening in the regulations last year. So instead of being free, turkey leftovers cost $30 to $40 a ton, a hefty expense considering that one ton of turkey yields just two barrels of oil.

And turkey fuel has so far been excluded from biofuel tax breaks. In October, Congress passed a bill that gave biodiesel, which is also derived from biological material, such as soybean oil and animal fat, but has a different chemical composition, a tax incentive that translates into a $1-a-gallon break on production costs. "The good news is that the government finally gave an incentive for producing fuel from waste," says CWT chairman and CEO Brian Appel. "The bad news is that it narrowly defined the kind of fuel receiving the incentive."

As a result of those two setbacks, CWT's production costs have doubled, to nearly $80 a barrel, a crippling blow given that conventional diesel sells for about $50 a barrel. CWT is staying afloat, thanks to a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. But the company's next operation is likely to be in Europe, where food processors will pay to have CWT dispose of animal offal and where most governments offer tax incentives to biofuel producers. Appel is negotiating to license CWT's technology to Irish Food Processors, one of Europe's largest, which plans to build a biofuel facility by the end of 2006.

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[brindis_desala]

1. This is something the US should be leading but unfortunately

because of our banking system i.e. the Federal Reserve we won't. Progressives have the answers just can't convince the public to make the sacrifice. Better soon. Trouble looms for the planet.

Biodiesel Breakthrough in India By Seema Singh

Renewable fuel source made from inedible shrub

29 September—Next month, a sports utility vehicle or SUV—the very symbol of disregard for the environment—will roll out of a DaimlerChrysler assembly plant in Toledo, Ohio, but this one will be powered by an environmentally friendly fuel blend that includes diesel derived from locally grown soy beans. The main general attraction of so-called biodiesel is that in principle it is carbon-neutral and therefore has no net impact on the climate—when the plants from which it's made are regrown, they consume the carbon dioxide emitted when the fuel is burned.

Globally, edible oil is the predominant source of raw material with soybean and rapeseed providing more than 90 percent of the 95 million liters of biodiesel used in the United States and 80 percent of the 163 million L of biodiesel used in the European Union. But countries like India cannot spare food for use in its automobiles. So a federal Indian laboratory has now shown that biodiesel can be made relatively cheaply from the nonedible seeds of a tropical plant, with the quality matching stringent biodiesel standards of Europe. DaimlerChrysler has already test-run two C-class Mercedes-Benz cars on this lab-produced biodiesel for a total of more than 5000 kilometers