Biofuels’ 10 scariest challenges: Part 1 of 2

8. Runaway feedstock costs

It’s a common tale these days, as we reported last week in the Digest — used cooking oil biodiesel producer FL Biofuels has shut down due to rising feedstock costs and doesn’t have immediate plans to reopen. It was costing upwards of $3 per gallon to produce the biodiesel, without taking into account payroll and other overheads.

Why scary? Just a few years ago, used cooking oil was available at negative cost. You could collect as much as $25 per week, in the old days, to take waste cooking oil off a restaurant’s hands. Now, used oils are, as we see, priced north of 40 cents per pound. That’s more than soybean oil itself cost just six years ago when the problems of cost erupted.

As we wrote last week in the Digest, “the search has been on for a) low-cost sugars, b) gasification-based technologies that use a broader array of feedstocks, or c) novel feedstocks that are so odious and valueless that they can be aggregated at low- or even negative cost – such as flue gas, brown grease, rendering fats and oils, or municipal solid waste.

The solution? Take a page from gasoline’s story. That is, find a feedstock so abundant that the marginal cost of adding supply remains low even when demand rapidly increases.

For that reason, it is not surprising that technologists are turning to carbon dioxide and non-potable water — since they are available in such tantalizing abundance. The problem to date? Developing organisms that can turn CO2, water and sunlight into biofuels; and developing the engineering at scale.

We looked at the challenges in that field just last week in “Quantum Dots: a new nanohighway to renewable Fuels,” here.

In today’s Digest, follow the page links below for each Scary Challenge – and potential solutions.