Biodiesel Fuel

Continental Airlines Inc. ratcheted up the race to develop alternate fuel for passenger planes Wednesday as it successfully flew a Boeing 737 twin-engine jet powered partly by algae and weed. The two-hour test flight over Houston, where the carrier's headquarters is located, involved powering one of the two engines with a mix of 50% kerosene and a blend of fuel derived from algae and jatropha, a weed that bears oil-producing seeds. No passengers were on board.

Arnold Klann has a green dream. It began 16 years ago in a sprawling laboratory in Anaheim. This year, he hopes, it will culminate at a Lancaster garbage dump. There, in the high desert of the Antelope Valley, Klann's company, BlueFire Ethanol Fuels, plans to build a $100-million plant to convert raw trash into an alcohol-based fuel that will help power the cars and trucks of the future. It's just the sort of improbable concoction that California is now demanding.

Ben LeBeau pulled up to the Conserv Fuel station in Brentwood on a recent Friday and started filling the tank of his black Chevy Tahoe with a liquid rarely found in California -- E85, an alternative fuel made of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. The station is near his office, and he's been a regular there for more than a month. LeBeau's Chevy, a so-called flexible-fuel vehicle, can run on gasoline, E85 or any combination of the two -- and that's one reason he bought it.

Crawling by it in Sunset Junction traffic, past a scruffy row of mod clothing boutiques, Circus of Books and a gelato parlor, you'd hardly know the black garage on the corner is at the heart of a mushrooming environmental movement. Lovecraft Biofuels is a counterculture Jiffy Lube, where urban pioneers bring aging Mercedes diesels for a conversion to run on vegetable oil.

For as far as the eye can see, stalks of sugar cane march across the hillsides here like giant praying mantises. This is ground zero for ethanol production in Brazil -- "the Saudi Arabia of biofuels," as some have already labeled this vast South American country.

Curtis Raines describes himself as "just a dumb old farmer" who's not afraid to ask an obvious question: Why grow corn for fuel when it could be used to feed hungry people? "That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me," Raines said. The 64-year-old Oklahoma Panhandle farmer is growing a 1,000-acre plot of switchgrass, billed as the world's largest of its type, to test whether the native plant can replace corn in making ethanol.

The air smells clean and sweet off the sprawling corn and spearmint fields, but for this unincorporated town of 156, it is the smell of failure: the failure to reap the rewards of the ethanol boom. Construction crews were scheduled to start digging up the sandy soil next spring to make way for an ethanol distillery plant in San Pierre.

The Environmental Protection Agency, following a congressional mandate, finalized plans for new standards to boost the use of renewable fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. Refiners will be required to use at least 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuel in gasoline by 2012, the EPA said. The rule, authorized in an energy law signed by President Bush in 2005, also requires that 4.02% of gasoline sold or dispensed to U.S. motorists in 2007 be renewable fuel, or about 4.7 billion gallons.

Oil company ConocoPhillips and meat producer Tyson Foods Inc. plan to work together to produce biodiesel from animal fat, the companies said. Beef, pork and chicken fat from Tyson rendering plants will be processed at ConocoPhillips refineries to create transportation fuel. ConocoPhillips, the third-largest U.S. oil company, said it planned to spend about $100 million over a 3- to 5-year period to prepare several refineries to process the fuel.

A $500-million deal between UC Berkeley and oil giant BP to establish a joint energy laboratory has prompted growing protests by students and faculty who fear the arrangement will compromise the university's integrity. Some critics charge that the privately negotiated pact will turn the campus into "UCBP." And they question aspects of the deal that would give the oil company unusual influence at the campus, including exclusive control over some of the institute's expected findings.