Renewable Energy Memo

The folks at Seeking Alpha (a blog for serious investors — not cheerleaders for sustainability or any particular point of view) make the argument that biofuels are beginning to gain momentum.  While these are not the days of wine and roses, it is encouraging to see the investment community looking at the biofuels space.  Some of the deals highlighted in the Seeking Alpha article include:

• Powers Energy of America, an advanced biofuels company based in Evansville, Indiana.  That firm announced that it hopes to build a $285 million waste-to-ethanol plant in Lake County, about 65 miles north of Bloomington. The state of Indiana is now developing more than 12 separate biomass ethanol plants.   The company claims to have a 20-year contract for the supply of municipal waste, which will be concerted to ethanol fuel. They have already received $40 million for the project, but are waiting for additional funding or a bond guarantee for $245 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s renewable grant program.
• Masada Resource Group, based in New York.  Masada claims to be waiting for approval from the the city council of Middletown to proceed with a 10 Mgy waste-to-ethanol plant. The plant, which was originally proposed in 1996, has cost more than $40 million in its development phase, according to Seeking Alpha.  
• Enerkem is said to be building a waste-to-energy plant on the Clover Bar landfill in Alberta, Canada.   The facility is expected to convert 100,000 tons of waste material into methanol, and to develop a process to convert methanol into ethanol for fuel markets. The proposed plant would open in 2010.
• BlueFire Ethanol Fuels (BFRE.OB) announced yesterday that they would build their first second commercial scale ethanol plant in Mississippi instead of Mecca Lancaster, Ca., as originally planned.  BlueFire secured additional financing from a cellulosic ethanol grant from the U.S. Department of Energy last year.  Rumors indicated that BlueFire had run into problems with permitted the site in California, perhaps explaining to move to Mississippi.    [Update: An alert reader noted that the plant at Mecca was actually to be BFRE's second plant, and not its first.] 

Seeking Alpha noted that Ethanol imports to the U.S. increased 198,000 bbl to 702,000 bbl, while product supplied to the market, a proxy for demand, fell 443,000 bbl or 14,290 bpd to 22.466 million bbl or 724,710 bpd, according to the U.S.Department of Energy.