Several from POET are in Orlando for the 13th annual National Ethanol Conference. Jeff Lautt, Executive Vice President of Corporate Operations for POET, will be on a panel discussion. Details on his presentation can be found in a release on our web site.
If you're stuck in snowy South Dakota (like me), Chuck Zimmerman of Zimmcomm is at the conference and will be posting regular updates on the conference blog, including interviews and photos. I'll be following along.
In response to the reports in Science Magazine saying that biofuels are worse for the environment than petroleum, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) has started a new blog, Advanced Biofuels & Climate Change Information Center.
After the Science Magazine articles were published, many who were already critics of biofuels took the opportunity for a fresh round of biofuel-bashing. Many clearly did not read the studies because they sought to dismiss biofuels altogether, which is something the studies (as negative as they are) clearly do not support. This new blog is an attempt to have a more serious discussion around biofuels and climate change while pointing out the technological progress in the ethanol industry.
I've added a permanent link to our blog roll in the right-hand column. Since POET is a member of BIO, I will be occasionally posting to the blog and contributed my first post this morning: No land cleared for biofuels.
On the GM Fastlane Blog, GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz posted the transcript of a speech he delivered at the 2008 North American International Auto Show. One of the five topics covered in the speech titled Five Things I think I think was ethanol. Here's the relevant text:
“The best route to a significant near-term reduction in petroleum usage is E85.”
It’s just common sense! As I said, you don’t roll over the whole fleet at once. It takes decades… and the bigger the price disparity between the old ones and the new ones, the longer it takes.
I kept getting the question at the show…if GM is so gung ho on electrified vehicles and hybrids and fuel cells, then why this emphasis on E85? Why the deal with Coskata? They’d ask, “Which of these technologies are you really for?” And I’d say, “Yes!”
As Rick Wagoner said at the show, several times, the answer is we are for all of the above, but ethanol and biofuels are the best near-term solution. Yes, we continue to work on electrically driven vehicles, as fast as we can, but realistically, they are going to take many years to be on the road in volumes that make much of a dent in petroleum usage.
We need to make more of an impact on petroleum usage, more quickly than that. We already have millions of flex-fuel vehicles on the road right now…more than 6 million in the U.S. alone…vehicles that could be running on ethanol, if it were more readily available.
In fact, as Rick said, if all the flex-fuel vehicles that GM, Ford, and Chrysler have committed to have on the road by 2020…were to run on ethanol, we could displace 29 billion gallons of gasoline annually…or 18 percent of the projected petroleum usage at that time.
And if all manufacturers in the U.S. made that same commitment, we could save 53 billion gallons of gasoline annually…or 32 percent of our petroleum usage. Nothing else we can do…gets even close to that kind of impact, that soon. What’s more, ethanol offers a cleaner alternative to petroleum…it’s adaptable to our refueling infrastructure…it doesn’t have to be imported…and it requires little change in that pesky subject I mentioned earlier: consumer behavior. (Emphasis in original).
This is very similar to what our CEO, Jeff Broin, frequently says about ethanol being the only near-term solution to two of the biggest challenges facing our country: dependence on foreign oil and global climate change.
Today, the vast majority of ethanol is E10, or a blend of 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gasoline. E85 a very small percentage of the overall ethanol mix. While other mid-level blends have shown promise and are gaining momentum, all blends of ethanol can help us get to our goal of reducing our nation's dependence on foreign oil. On that, it would seem that POET and GM agree.
Treehugger, the top environmental blog and a top-20 blog overall, gave some coverage to POET last week in a post about cellulosic ethanol. The blog included POET in an interesting discussion about schedule for the commercialization of cellulosic ethanol, which they give the acronym Ceetoh. Their best guess is no sooner than 2020 for broad commercialization of cellulosic ethanol in North America.
I noticed that a couple of the other cellulosic companies had Treehugger posts at some point in the past. Maybe ours is coming soon?
We're coming to the end of the year and what does that mean? Lists! And how do we get lists? Vote! POET was included on the AP ballot a few weeks ago and now we have a place on the Biofuels Digest blog poll for Biofuels Personality of 2007.
POET Founder & CEO Jeff Broin is listed as one of the 23 finalists for the award (no word on how they came up with the list, but they have posted some profiles). As of this post they had 34 votes and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla was leading the way with five. RFA CEO Bob Dineen and President George W. Bush each had four. Voting started on December 20 and runs through the 31st.
POET Project Liberty Director Jim Sturdevant will deliver an online presentation regarding POET's cellulosic ethanol project. The webinar will take place December 11 at 2:00 p.m. central time and is hosted by Biofuels Journal. To register for the free webinar, click here.
Jim will give an update on POET's Project Liberty, which will produce—starting in
2011—25 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year from corn cobs
and fractionated corn fiber. He will also take questions from attendees, but if you have questions you'd like him to address during the presentation, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
Today, we mark the official launch of POET TV. We will be using YouTube to upload coverage of our events, interviews with our people and anything else that gives you a deeper understanding of our company. For starters, we've uploaded a few videos from the ground breaking ceremony for our production facility in Fostoria, Ohio. The video posted here is of Dwayne Siekman, the Executive Director of the Ohio Corn Growers.
Our focus for POET TV is not high production values or fancy bells and whistles. We want to use POET TV as another vehicle to bring you the latest news and information about POET, the largest producer of biofuels in the world. If you'd like to subscribe to the video feed from YouTube, I've added an RSS feed link on the sidebar of this blog.
There's more to come. We hope you enjoy the show.
The reinforcements are here! As you may have noticed with the last post, I'm no longer the only blogger on Rhapsody in Green. Kayla Schlechter, our communications intern, was the first to join and you'll be hearing from more in the near future.
The plan was always for me to start this blog, get it going and then hand most of the day-to-day posting to the people on the front lines at POET who are doing all of the real work. Today, I hosted the first training session for people who are interested in blogging in order to familiarize them with TypePad and the unwritten rules of blogging.
In the future, in addition to my posts, you'll be hearing from people in Research & Development, Operations, Development, Nutrition and more. I'll still add my two cents occasionally, perhaps even contributing some multi-media.
Chuck Zimmerman drove past POET Biorefining - Laddonia yesterday morning on his way to one of the many conferences that he covers for AgWired. He posted some pictures on the blog. Laddonia is one of 20 POET Biorefining ethanol production facilities that are located in five states across the Midwest and one of two in the state of Missouri. The facility produces about 48 million gallons of ethanol per year and employs 42 people.
For some recent news about POET Biorefining - Laddonia, read an article from Missouri Farmer Today on their donation of DDGS to Cattle Producers in Southwest Missouri.
Our announcement last week on cellulosic ethanol stirred up a little conversation in the blogsophere. A post at Green Car Congress elicited 12 responses ranging from This is great news! to Ethanol, whether it be corn based or cellulosic will continue to make a relatively minimal contribution to our fuel supply.
I had to laugh at a post on Mercury Rising that said POET is Making Corn Ethanol A Bit Less Sucky. Hmmm...I can't quite figure out where she stands on corn ethanol. Anyway, the post generated eight comments, one of which was a suggestion that hemp would make a better energy crop. I particularly enjoyed a comment from the communications director of the American Lung Association in Minnesota comparing ethanol to petroleum and citing the improvements to air quality with ethanol.
If you want to know more of what happened at the show, blogging coverage was provided by Domestic Fuel. Let us know what you think about ethanol, cellulosic or otherwise. We'd love to hear from you.
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