ethanol

Lines for gasoline could start getting a little shorter on the West Coast, where startup Propel Fuels has raised $20 million to expand its network of biofuel stations. The financing comes just after the Feds set a new renewable fuel standard.

A severe food shortage is on its way, according to famed investor Jim Rogers. Food inventories are the lowest in decades and "[m]any farmers cannot get loans to buy fertilizer now, even though we have big shortages developing," he said.

As a senior analyst in the Division of Strategic Planning at the California Public Utilities Commission, Dan Adler designed California's ambitious clean energy policy, which put a 20 percent target on renewable energy use by the Golden State's utilities by the year 2010. Four years ago, Adler moved...

Vinod Khosla is considered the leading cleantech investor in the world today but many of his peers still wish he would shut up. A founder of computer company Sun Microsystems (JAVA) and former general partner at venture capital powerhouse Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vinod Khosla piled...

The biofuels market is in a funk. Corn-based ethanol has become an environmental pariah to activists and an economic lodestone to people in favor of energy independence. Plant-based biofuel companies seeking to harvest oils from green matter have struggled to reach economies of scale and have...

Driving through the corn forest of western Ohio, I am often struck by how our farmers continue to thrive despite years of undependable weather and erratic markets. In light of the grain price spike of 2008 and the "ethanol vs. food" controversy, I wondered how such farmers viewed their market and...

Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) today reported its first quarterly loss in 16 years. The heavy equipment manufacturer said the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression will cause earnings to be weaker than expected. The first-quarter loss of $112 million, or 19 cents a share, compared with a profit...

This is just one of the Innovative Ways to Stimulate the Economy suggested by DailyFinance contributors. See them all. A local farmer and friend, Chrissie Zaerpoor, is known as one of the new farming celebrities. She raises truly free-range chickens for meat and eggs, and grass-fed dairy cows, and...

Years ago, a teacher forced me to read Fernand Braudel's three volume history of the world. While most of the information contained in Braudel's amazing opus has, thankfully, managed to leak out of my brain, I still remember that he was a huge fan of the potato. In the 40+ plus pages that he spent...

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, this year's flooding in the Midwest destroyed a lot of the corn crop. This, combined with the high existing demand for corn and the emergence of ethanol, sent corn futures soaring into the stratosphere as investors envisioned a massive corn shortage. Analysts...