So I may be late to the party on this one...

but have you heard of Biomass to Liquid fuels? I mean, Fischer-Tropsch fuels have existed for a long time (since the 1920's) however, the emissions from the process where considerable and I think in today's environmentally sensitive political and social climate, would be unacceptable.
I've known about BioDiesel for a long time but this seems to be different. It's synthetic diesel made from a different process than transesterification that is used by biodiesel from veggie oil and animal fats.

That brings me to Carbo-V process used by CHOREN Industries.

Shell has invested in CHOREN Industries to produce SunDiesel which has the following advantages:

• has a high cetane number and therefore much better ignition performance than conventional diesel fuel
• has no aromatics or sulfur and significantly reduces pollutants from exhaust emissions
• can be used without any adjustment to existing infrastructure or engine systems
• is largely CO₂-neutral

SunDiesel is a BTL fuel - that is, it's a Biomass to Liquid fuel.

Biomass, in the energy production industry, refers to living and recently dead biological material which can be used as fuel or for industrial production. You can read about Biomass in it's wikipedia entry.

From the CHOREN website, there's a page that talks about the potential of biomass. Here are some of the highlights:

• Biomass is a sustainable resource that it is constantly being formed by the interaction of air, water, soil and sunlight.
• There are almost no limits on how much biomass can be grown. The continuous growth of plants on our planet exceeds our primary energy requirements many times over.
• Only 50 % of this unused annual potential would be enough to supply the raw materials for eleven large-scale industrial SunFuel production units i.e. for producing approx. 2.5 million t/a of SunFuel.
• In theory this amount could be used to produce 30 million t of SunFuel. This would be enough to meet 50% of the total automotive fuel consumption needs in Germany – including air traffic. And there would be no restrictions on the supply of foodstuffs either.

CHOREN is a German company but it's still very relevant to us here in North America. I had link to and read an article on this type of process (and I believe I blogged on it too) but I guess I just viewed this as some future potential, not a here and now possibility.

Anyway, I've used up a lot of work time reading about this stuff this morning so I'm gonna go for now but I'd love to hear about what your thoughts are on BTL fuels and if you know of any other information on this topic. Does anyone know if there is fuel being produced here? From another perspective, does anyone know of any company that I could invest in that is poised to start producing BTL fuels that are environmentally friendly?

Have a great day everyone!

g.