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USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today at the National Press Club in downtown Washington that his agency would give a boost to biofuel producers through a Biomass Crop Assistance Program (BCAP). Vilsack said the USDA will soon publish the BCAP's final rule, and that means eligible biomass ...

The U.S. Renewable Fuels Standards (RFS2) becomes effective Thursday, July 1 and it describes a whole lot of changes for the biofuels industry in the U.S in the coming decade or so. To prepare for the changes and to figure out just what's even possible, the USDA issued a "Regional Roadmap to ...

Given that the United States military spends a large amount of its resources fighting to secure regions of the world that are most important as a source of crude oil, it would certainly make tactical sense to reduce its dependence on those fuels. Some small scale tests of biofuels in military ...

America, your apparent hatred for disfigured fruit means we may have a big, untapped biomass source to make ethanol. Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Oklahoma has been testing ways to make the simple sugars found in watermelons into ethanol, and the USDA is now reporting some success on that ...

Even with all of GM's problems, the big Project Driveway endeavor continues. The latest addition to the ranks hydrogen-fueled Equinox test vehicle drivers is the USDA, which took delivery of an Equinox this week. The USDA will drive the fuel cell vehicle for the next six months "to transport top ...

Representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy and the USDA were present at the Platts Cellulosic Ethanol conference in Chicago last week and put the national government's biofuel efforts into perspective. Valri Lightner, of the Biomass Program at the DOE, and William Hagy ...

Dale T. Decker, industry and government relations director for Decker Truck Line Inc., has got a new pet project: testing the potential of biodiesel. Now when a company states it's going to conduct real-world testing, you rarely get an accurate control group and conversely, lab conditions offer ...

The Department of Agriculture predicts that the U.S., which exports 45-50 million tons of corn yearly, will instead convert 50 million tons to ethanol next year. Last year alone the country exported over 40 million tons which is enough to feed over 130 million people. Federal requirement to double ...

In a good news, bad news sort of story, the USDA announced yesterday that they awarded almost $4.2 million worth of grants to companies who are working to turn woody biomass into affordable, useable fuel. The USDA defines woody biomass as “trees, woody plants, limbs, tops, and needles that ...