Reporters’ Notebook: The 10 Most Overlooked bioeconomy stories of the week

Amidst a tsunami of wall-to-wall ‘Rona coverage, a series of storylines have been lost in the shuffle that will have impacts near and wide-ranging for the bioeconomy, some of them relating directly to testing, scale-up and deployment of health remedies — some in the broader bioeconomy.

Out of reporter’s notebook and into your hands, here are the Top 10 Stories That Went Overlooked.

It’s not just demand destruction on the fuel side, there’s some demand shifting also from gasoline to diesel. And we understand that the impact of gasoline markets in the US alone could be up to 230 million gallons a week. How does that happen, exactly?

For starters, consider that there are about 128 million households in the US and 88 percent of them use a car to do the shopping, says this source. And shoppers, it says, make 6-7 trips per week and drive just under 4 miles each way, to visit groceries, shopping clubs, pharmacies, and other retail outlets. They’re getting about 25 miles a gallon, it says here.

Put that together and it’s not the lion’s share of US sedan transport, but it’s not nothing. Something like 230 million gallons of E10 gasoline a week, or around 23 million gallons of ethanol each week (as much as a billion gallons a year of renewable fuel).

Where’s that headed? A whole lot of ordering is moving from “customer loads at the store and brings home, using gasoline” to “customer orders delivery by truck, using diesel”. We’ll keep looking for more data on actual demand destruction, but here’s a heads up that the bad news for ethanol in some cases means good news for renewable diesel and biodiesel.

More on the story, here.