Industry scratching head over environmental commission ruling.
By Asher Price
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, September 28, 2006
If there's one thing the biodiesel industry wants you to take away from today's Texas biodiesel conference, it's that it makes biodiesel, not ethanol.
In the increasingly crowded renewable fuel industry, where manufacturers and retailers are competing for the attention of environmentally conscientious consumers as well as government dollars, the distinction between different industries has become crucial.
The two fuels bill themselves as cleaner burning, domestically-produced alternatives to petroleum imports.
Biodiesel retails for about the same price as diesel, effectively gets the same mileage and can be used in any vehicle that takes standard diesel without an upgrade. Ethanol is cheaper than standard gasoline but gets fewer miles per gallon, and only some vehicles can run on the stuff.
However, the ethanol industry has one thing that the biodiesel industry is trying hard to shore up: across-the-board state support.
At the sold-out conference, at the Hilton Austin Airport hotel, industry insiders will brainstorm about how to persuade the state's environmental commission to recognize biodiesel emissions as low enough to be truly environmentally friendly.
Texas is the nation's top consumer of biodiesel — government truck fleets and school buses are major users — but the industry was dealt a blow last November when the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality decided that biodiesel emissions exceeded the limits for smog-producing nitrogen oxide under the state's low-emission diesel program.
The industry has until the end of the year to prove biodiesel's emissions are low enough to meet state standards.
Otherwise, biodiesel manufacturers will be forced to stop selling fuel in Texas or mix in an additive that could raise prices.
In July, 19 Austin-area Shell stations announced they would carry a low-emission biodiesel blend, giving Central Texas the highest concentration of biodiesel pumps in the country.
Using B20 — named for the blend of 20 percent biodiesel with 80 percent standard diesel — reduces tailpipe soot, carbon monoxide and toxic compounds by as much as 15 percent when compared with standard diesel, according to Robert McCormick, the principal engineer at the federal National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado.
Though federal Environmental Protection Agency data from 2002 showed that nitrogen oxide emissions went up 2 percent when compared with standard diesel, McCormick said new testing suggests the impact of B20 is zero.
"It's not a position we've gotten the EPA to endorse yet. But I believe the scientific data and analysis we've gotten is strong enough that they'll see it our way."
McCormick said that ethanol production does provide a positive energy balance — the energy you get back is about one-and-a-half times greater than the cost of making it — but that biodiesel leads to more than three times as much energy as it takes to produce it.
Biodiesel producers get a cash incentive of 16.8 cents for every gallon they produce. And biodiesel and ethanol are exempt from a 20-cent state gasoline tax.