Asia Global Energy Issues Lawmaker urges probe of possible energy market manipulation 

Biodiesel production rising amid fraud concerns
HOUSTON — Biodiesel production has soared in recent months, although concerns about fraud in the market remain.
Reported production of biodiesel, which is made from discarded animal fats, used cooking oil and other materials, jumped 74 percent in October, compared with production in October 2012, according to the most recent survey data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Production in July, August and September also jumped by at least 40 percent compared with the same months in 2012, the agency reported.
Texas is the nation’s leading producer of biodiesel, with a capacity to make 408 million gallons of the fuel each year.

Fraud concerns
Despite the growth in reported production, the biodiesel market remains plagued by concerns over fraud.
Biodiesel is heavily supported by the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, which requires fossil fuel refiners to buy biodiesel and blend it into their oil-based diesel. Refiners also can purchase credits from biodiesel producers if those producers sell the fuel on their own. Biodiesel commonly is used by machines like bulldozers and generators.
Biodiesel: Troubles roil biodiesel credit-trading market
Of the 132 million gallons of biodiesel produced in October, for example, 92 million gallons were sold as full biodiesel, whereas the remainder was blended into diesel made from crude oil, the agency said.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has accused four companies of selling the credits without producing any biodiesel to back them up.
The owner of one company simply generated fake credits on a computer in 2009 and sold them to traders, which then sold them to refining companies. He made $9 million during a 16-month period of the scheme.
‘Penalizes the victim’
The latest fraud incident was revealed in September, when regulators charged e-Biofuels, which had been purchased by Imperial Petroleum, with selling fraudulent credits, known officially as Renewable Identification Numbers or RINs.
In total, more than 170 million biodiesel credits have been sold fraudulently, according to EPA data. That is a sizable number considering 1.7 billion credits were generated in all of 2012.

Fraud: Fake biofuel credits prompt push for better screening system
The agency informed companies on Dec. 18 that credits bought from e-Biofuels would not be valid. Companies that bought e-Biofuels credits will have to purchase new ones and will face fines for buying fraudulent credits.
The latest fraud allegations renewed questions about the biodiesel market and calls for the Environmental Protection Agency to change its requirements for refiners that have to buy credits.
“The industry remains unfairly exposed to a system that actually penalizes the victim of fraud rather than focusing on the perpetrator of the crime,” said Charles Drevna, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, in a statement.

Plan Calls for Renewable Energy to Power NY State and More

NEW YORK — As worry grows over climate damage caused by carbon-based fuels like gas, oil and coal, some environmental engineering experts, such as Stanford University’s Mark Z. Jacobson, are offering new plans for energy independence via renewable power sources.
Jacobson became the rare engineering professor to appear on a network TV talk show when he was a guest on the Late Show with David Letterman on CBS in October. He was there to discuss his studies finding that wind, water and solar energy could rapidly replace all but a tiny fraction of fossil fuels, both in the U.S. and worldwide, and in a relatively short two or three decades.
“The technologies we’re focusing on are the cleanest, and therefore the most sustainable, in terms of improving human health, reducing climate impacts, reducing water supply impacts, but also providing energy-price stability,” Jacobson said in an interview. “The fuels we’re looking at, like wind and sunlight, have zero cost, and as a result, the only costs really are the installation costs.”
In their latest report, published in the journal Energy Policy, Jacobson and co-authors at Cornell University and the University of California, Davis, map out how New York State could transition to wind, water and solar power by 2030. They calculate there would be enough energy left over to power every vehicle in the state as well, and that 4,000 fewer people would die each year from disease caused by air pollution in New York State.
The plan calls for producing electricity with thousands of new wind turbines, most of them offshore in the Atlantic Ocean, in addition to solar and photo-voltaic power plants, rooftop systems on 5.5 million buildings, geothermal plants, devices for capturing tidal and ocean wave power, and additional hydroelectric plants. All together, 1 percent of New York's land would be used.
“The electricity would be used directly, but also used to produce some hydrogen, so instead of having vehicles run on gas or diesel, they would be electric vehicles or some hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles,” Jacobson said. “Instead of having heating by natural gas or oil, we’d have air-source and ground-source heat pumps, and the same thing for water heating. Also, industrial processes would be run by electricity and some hydrogen, and this would eliminate all the emissions associated with fossil fuels.”
Jacobson earlier issued a detailed transition plan for California, and plans to produce similar analyses for all the states. They follow his 2009 proposal for a worldwide conversion, A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet With Renewables, published with co-author Mark A. Delucchi in Scientific American and Energy Policy.
“That was a nice theoretical study,” he said, “but for the whole world and the whole U.S., trying to do a conversion on those scales is not so tractable, and that’s why we started going into the state scale.”
Columbia University’s Vasilis Fthenakis, a senior research scientist in the department of Earth and Environmental Engineering, published a similar plan for the U.S. in Scientific American in January 2013. His study emphasizes building solar and photo-voltaic power plants in the sunniest parts of the U.S., and using new high voltage direct current lines to transmit power long distances.
Overall, Fthenakis said, Jacobson’s is a good “aspirational” plan, and in New York State, he said, it made sense to focus on wind energy.
“We don’t have a fundamental difference in what he proposes,” he said, but added that massive offshore wind technology has not yet been tested over the long-term. Such a plan likely also would face public resistance from beachside communities, he noted, and the initial costs would be high.
Jacobson, however, believes the obstacles lie mainly in vested political interests.
“There are a lot of industries that look unfavorably upon this plan, because they don’t benefit from it,” he said. “We’re excluding fossil energy, so gas, coal and oil, but we’re also excluding nuclear power and biofuels, even technologies such as coal with carbon capture, because they’re not as good as what we’re looking at.”

Nuclear energy is excluded, Jacobson said, because of the growing energy costs in mining and refining uranium, a non-renewable resource, and the risk it could add to nuclear weapons proliferation.
“Plus, one-and-a-half-percent of all nuclear reactors ever built have melted down to some degree, and this results in risk for another type of disaster, which you don’t have with wind or solar power,” he added.

City approves project to turn organic waste into energy to heat homes

Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway announced at a press conference Thursday the city's approval of a plan to convert organic waste and wastewater from schools and as many as 100,000 homes into a biogas that is mostly methane, which is already being used to power thousands of homes in the city.

Organice waste from schools and homes, such as old fruits and vegetables, will be converted to house-heating energy through a program introduced by the city on Thursday.

The city's new scheme for getting rid of food waste is a gas, gas, gas.

It works like this: Collect banana peels, apple cores and other organic waste from city public schools and haul them to the Waste Management garbage treatment facility in Williamsburg to be turned into a soupy bio-slurry.

Ship that to the nearby Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint and mix it with wastewater sludge to create a biogas that is mostly methane, the main component of natural gas.

Renewable energy - Rueing the waves

Britain is a world leader at something rather dubious

SINCE October sightseers on the hills above Edinburgh have gawped at a brand new landmark. Across the Firth of Forth, on a test site, stands the biggest wind turbine in Britain. The tips of its blades rise 196m above sea level. Its rotor sweeps an area twice as large as the London Eye. This monster and others like it are bound for the North Sea—part of the biggest and most ambitious offshore wind programme in the world.

Britain gets more electricity from offshore wind farms than all other countries combined. In 2012 it added nearly five times more offshore capacity than Belgium, the next keenest nation, and ten times more than Germany. Its waters already contain more than 1,000 turbines, and the government thinks capacity could triple in six years. Boosters think Britain a global pioneer. Critics say ministers are flogging a costly boondoggle.

Two things explain Britain’s enthusiasm for offshore wind turbines. First, the country is committed by European law to generate about 30% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, up from about 13% now. Nuclear energy does not count and Britain is well behind on solar power, which means lots more wind turbines and biomass plants (mostly wood-burning power stations) will be required.

The Economist explains - Why is renewable energy so expensive?

MOST people agree that carbon emissions from power stations are a significant cause of climate change. These days a fiercer argument is over what to do about it. Many governments are pumping money into renewable sources of electricity, such as wind turbines, solar farms, hydroelectric and geothermal plants. But countries with large amounts of renewable generation, such as Denmark and Germany, face the highest energy prices in the rich world. In Britain electricity from wind farms costs twice as much as that from traditional sources; solar power is even moredear. What makes it so costly?