News

May 15, 2008

Higher Feedstock Prices And Lower Sales Prices Are Piling The Pressure Onto Biofuels Companies

By Ivor Watt

The woes that have obliterated the UK biofuel sector have been well documented. Biofuels Corporation has gone to the wall and D1 Oils has withdrawn from its biodiesel refining activities. In the US, though, where ethanol production has dominated the biofuels sector, until recently the outlook had seemed much brighter.

But the headwinds facing the US sector are growing stronger all the time as the ethanol industry has run into an ever-growing storm of criticism. The industry is also facing increasingly tough pressure on margins from high input prices and weak sales prices. Less than two years ago ethanol appeared set fair to become the dominant biofuel in the US, after even George Bush, possibly the most oil-soaked President ever, championed its cause and set ambitious targets for expanding the use of ethanol...