The higher share of heavier crudes in U.S. feedstocks only exacerbates the refining constraints.
Energy and feedstocks accounted for half of Dow's operating costs last year, and it's only getting worse.
Unlike corn and other feedstocks, Arenga pinnata is too finicky to be farmed on an industrial scale.
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And the Gulf producers enjoy feedstocks of oil and especially gas at far below the market price.
Industry insiders say the EPA decision will also advance the arrival of next-generation biofuels produced from non-agricultural feedstocks.
The reason: Hydrogen engines can run on fuel derived from natural gas more cheaply than other currently available feedstocks.
Simply put, there are incentives to produce things more efficiently, as long as energy feedstocks respond to supply and demand.
But the long-term prospects for biomass are best with non-food based feedstocks such as switchgrass, wood chips and forest residues.
Dow contributes the technical know-how for producing plastics and chemicals, while its partners provide low-cost feedstocks and access to new markets.
Cobalt Technologies says it can succeed where others have so far failed and produce a chemical called biobutanol using cellulosic feedstocks.
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However, too much public focus on these opportunistic feedstocks has presented a misleading picture that free raw materials are widely available.
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That makes for higher recycling rates and more homogeneous feedstocks that make conversion by burning or a more advanced method easier and cheaper.
Or it can produce chemical feedstocks, at a lower cost than natural gas, as at the 15 gasification plants being built, using Shell technology, in China.
In addition to financial resources, extractive companies could provide knowledge and technical capacity while at the same time gaining insight into new and potentially profitable feedstocks.
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In China, Shell technology is at the center of 15 coal gasification plants being built to produce chemical feedstocks at a lower cost than using natural gas.
While second generation biofuels are produced from non-edible feedstocks like wood chips or methane gas emitted from landfills, currently available biofuels are generated almost exclusively from corn.
Typically, companies in this industry manage complex and interrelated decisions that span the entire value chain, ranging from the procurement of feedstocks to production, marketing, logistics and distribution.
However, beyond the smokestack, looking at the full life-cycle accounting for carbon of various biomass feedstocks, other reports have found that the source of the feedstock matters.
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For Glenstrata it is whether the rise in price and increases in demand for copper, iron and coal and all those other feedstocks of the still fast-growing Chinese economy can go on forever.
Upon reflection, policy is best defined using current-period accounting of carbon stocks and flows, ideally with direct, measurement-based, verifiable tallies of GHG emissions from the production and use of all fuels and feedstocks.
Complex refiners, like ConocoPhillips, have flexibility around their choice of crude feedstock and therefore are well placed to benefit from the use of lower priced crude feedstocks, which often sell at a discount.
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The advantages over biofuel feedstocks are somewhat apparent.
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The microbe, discovered by microbiologists from the University of Massachusetts at the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts, digests and ferments a wide variety of feedstocks, including corn stover, corn cobs, switchgrass, and sugar cane bagasse.
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As noted in previous posts, current consumption figures do not reflect the expected growth in areas such as chemical industry feedstocks, or power generation (where most new fossil-based supply will come from highly efficient gas-fired generators).
Even if the country did increase its bioenergy crops and started doing a better job of collecting agricultural wastes for use as cellulosic ethanol feedstocks, the cost of biofuel production is still higher than the market would likely tolerate.
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Unlike Freeport, which must bring in some of its natural gas and liquid feedstocks by ship and railcar, Ras Tanura's chemical plants will get their daily diet of some 40, 000 barrels of oil-derived naphtha and 70 million cubic feet of natural gas by (very short) pipelines.
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