by Ron Kotrba (Biodiesel Magazine) Since its commercial inception in the 1990s, the biodiesel industry has faced obstacles from all sides. The technical merits of the fuel have been challenged time and time again. Manufacturing costs and fuel pricing have been used to discredit biodiesel. Free marketeers have tarnished its reputation because government mandates and subsidies attempt to level the playing field with the petroleum industry, which still today after more than a century of domination, receives billions of dollars of government handouts a year. And the oil lobbies have waged smear campaigns on all fronts. Even the federal government—and certainly the current administration that has used biodiesel for its own political gains—has seemingly caved to the pressures of Big Oil and Big Food. This became evident last fall when the U.S. EPA suggested stalling the biomass-based diesel quota and shrinking the advanced biofuel mandate in its 2014-’15 renewable volume obligation (RVO) proposal for the renewable fuel standard (RFS). But perhaps the most referenced hindrance to biodiesel growth is global availability of fats, oils and greases (FOG).
“The constraints to biodiesel growth aren’t really from the feedstock side,” says John Kruse, one of the owners and directors of quantitative analysis at World Agricultural Economic and Environmental Services LLC, a firm contracted by the National Biodiesel Board to analyze feedstock markets and different scenarios to better understand how the market reacts with different policies. WAEES also does exploratory work with NBB to look at what the potential for the market is, depending on what EPA does with RFS volumes year-over-year. “Flipping it around a little, the constraints are where the market has to pay a high price for distribution and infrastructure to move biodiesel into the marketplace,” he says… READ MORE