By Sybille de La Hamaide
PARIS (Reuters) - Production of biodiesel in the European Union rose by more than 35 percent in 2008 and capacity will grow again this year although half the plants are idle due to poor demand, the EU producers group said on Wednesday.
The Brussels-based European Biodiesel Board (EBB) said the European production of biodiesel, by far the main biofuel made in the bloc, had reached 7.76 million tonnes last year putting the EU's global market share close to 65 percent.
However, the EBB qualified the 2008 rise as "moderate" compared to the jump of 65 percent in 2005 and 54 percent in 2006 but the rise was only at 17 percent in 2007.
"In line with the trend initiated in 2007, the year 2008 saw a relatively small increase in EU biodiesel production, and even a reduction in two major producing Member States, Germany and Austria," the EBB said in a statement.
For detailed statistics of biodiesel output per country and estimates for the 2009 capacity, please click on
"This situation has to be understood primarily against the background of unfair international trade competition which has severely affected the profitability of EU biodiesel producers since early 2007," it added.
The EU last week endorsed a proposal by the Commission, the 27-member bloc's executive arm, to extend for five years its anti-dumping tariffs against cheap U.S. biodiesel imports. The move was welcomed by the EBB, which had complained that EU producers were being hammered by U.S. subsidies.
"This decision will help re-establishing EU producer's legitimate right to operate in a level-playing field," it said.
HALF EU PLANTS IDLE
In addition to a fall in demand mainly linked to strong U.S. competition, EU producers have also suffered from slumping margins as the fall in crude oil prices over the past year was not compensated by a similar drop in vegetable oils prices.
Even if the EU will have total biodiesel production capacity of close to 21 million tonnes this year -- a rise of 31 percent on the year -- the EBB said 2008 and 2009 statistics showed that at least 50 percent of existing plants remain idle.
"Unfair international competition has been the main driver of this trend, while the political discussions in 2008 on adoption of the Renewable Energy Directive have added to market uncertainty," it said.
In an interview with Reuters late May, the EU's largest biodiesel maker, France's Diester Industrie, said it was pausing in its investments until it knew the details, expected next year, of the implementation of the EU's target of 10 percent renewable energies in transport by 2020.
The share that will be allocated to biofuels to reach this target is still unclear.
The Rest @ Reuters
(Editing by Peter Blackburn)
Wood Biomass Gasification Combined Heat and Power in the UK
Posted by Editor on Wednesday, July 8, 2009I pulled this from a Alfagy's website: They are developing wood mass gassification in a high heat low oxegen invironment, the burining the clean gas. Very interesting...
-CTE Editor
The range of fully automated Wood Gasified Heat and Power Plants are as follows:
The ENERCARB wood gas technology offers customers a turn-key automated solution for heat and power generation from wood. We can provide a complete solution covering the full value chain from wood preparation to power generation in the 250 kW to 1,000 kW range. This is a gap in the market where the company believes there is a potential £725m market worldwide.A full scale 500 kW wood gasification plant was built for a client and has been operating since April 2009.
Over the next 3 years sales of wood gasification plants are expected growing rapidly with the introduction of new support structures.
Biomass accounts for around 5 per cent of total energy consumption in Europe. In countries such as Finland, Sweden and Austria its contribution reaches 15-20 per cent as biomass is supported with specific policies.
It is primarily used for both production of electricity and heat in cogeneration plants and as a fuel in municipal district heating facilities.
Biomass is likely to have an important role in Europe's ability to meet its targets for renewable use by 2020, according to Frost & Sullivan. There are five accepted technologies for converting biomass fuels into electrical energy; the Schmitt ENERCARB plant is focussed on addressing the second technology:
1. Conventional steam cycle – biomass is burned to produce steam which is then used to drive a turbine
2. Gasification – biomass is converted to a gas using a high temperature oxygen starved environment
3. Pyrolysis – biomass is converted to a liquid rather than a gas
4. Anaerobic digestion – typically sewage sludge is digested to produce methane
5. Landfill gas – collection of gas from landfill sitesGasification is possibly the most attractive of the technologies, but also one of the least developed.
There are a number of practical and engineering issues with gasification which, until now, have been a barrier to full commercial roll out of this technology.The particular issues are:
• Quality of feedstock – can a system be developed to work with a range of different biomass fuels.
• Supply chain – can the fuel be provided in an efficient consistent way.
• Consistency of gas produced – can a plant produce gas of a standard quality that can be burned cleanly.
• Tar free gas production – can the resulting gas have low tar levels which will allow it to be burned for extended periods without maintenance.
The gasification plant has been developed to address all these issues. The Alfagy gasified heat and power plant offers a highly efficient solution to producing electricity from biomass in the 250 kWe – 1,000 kWe range.
Through careful engineering of the gasifier and scrubbing of the gas output, Schmitt has developed a virtually tar free wood gasfier. Specific aspects of the Alfagy Woodgas CHP system that give us a competitive advantage include:
• Improved process for automated fuel feeding
• Effective automated gas scrubbing and filtering systems to produce tar free gas.
• Modular approach offering a simple scalable solution with operational security
• Well engineered, automated, turn-key product giving customers an easy to implement plant.The benefits of producing tar free wood gas include:
• Increased running time between maintenance, in some cases from 24 hours to 8,000 hours
• Higher Return on Investment (ROI)
The Rest @ Alfagy
Nano wires are essential for the increase in efficiency of Photo Voltaic Technology. Since the PV effect can occur on wires one 1000th of the diameter of a human hair. The ability to build a mesh of nano wires within a PV cell or PV material is important toward increasing PV Materials.
Now a Company has created a mapping machine that can find a sugar cube in 25 square kilometer of three dimensional space....
Read this article to fin out more.
-Editor
Nano Measurement In The 3rd Dimension
ScienceDaily (July 6, 2009) — From the motion sensor to the computer chip - in many products of daily life components are used whose functioning is based on smallest structures of the size of thousandths - or even millionths - of millimetres. These micro and nano structures must be manufactured and assembled with the highest precision so that in the end, the overall system will function smoothly.
See also:
Because of this, details are important. Scientists at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) have now developed a meteorological scanning probe microscope into a micro and nano coordinate measuring instrument.
This allows dimensional quantities with nanometer resolution also to be measured on three-dimensional objects in an extraordinarily large measurement range of 25 mm x 25 mm x 5 mm. The new device is already extensively being used at PTB - to a large part for calibration orders from industry and research.
Often, such small dimensions can be grasped only when they are transferred to everyday life. If we assume, for example, that someone lost a cube of sugar within an area of 25 square kilometres – the new micro and nano coordinate measuring instrument would not only be able to find it, but it would also be able to determine its exact position and shape. This does not only apply to plane surfaces, but also to three-dimensional landscapes, for example if the cube of sugar were stuck to a steep wall.
As increasingly, components with structures in the micro- and nanometer range are being used in industry, dimensional metrology on such structures is becoming increasingly important. To meet the increasing requirements for 3D measurements of micro and nano structures, 3D measuring probes newly developed at PTB were incorporated in a metrological scanning probe microscope based on a commercial nano-positioning system with integrated laser displacement sensors of the company SIOS Messtechnik GmbH. The new functionalities given by the measuring probe and the software extend the scanning probe microscope to a metrological micro/nano coordinate measuring machine (CMM) which also allows 3D measurements conforming to standards to be performed on micro and nano structures.
International intercomparisons on step-height standards and lattice structures have shown that the measuring system is worldwide one of the most precise of its kind. For step heights, measurement uncertainties in the subnanometer range - and for measurements of the mean structure spacing on extensive lattice standards even in the range of 10 picometers - have been achieved and confirmed in comparison with optical diffraction measurements.
The new measuring instrument is available for dimensional precision measurements with nm resolution on 3D micro and nano structures such as micro gears, micro balls, hardness indenters and nano lattice standards as well as for comparisons of measures; moreover, it serves as a platform for research and development tasks. It is an important link between nano, micro and macro coordinate metrology.
The Rest @ Science Daily
Matter & EnergyNanotechnology
Materials Science Detectors
Computers & MathMobile Computing
Statistics
Computer Graphics
Reference
Confocal laser scanning microscopy
Scanning tunneling microscope
Nanorobotics
Scanning electron microscope
Plug Power, seem to be building one system at a time, they have participated in some US goverment military housing projects, and a few others.
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