The May/June issue of Biodiesel Magazine has been completed, and I would like to share some of its contents with you.

The theme is Feedstock, and we’ve got an array of articles hitting that theme from several different angles.

My featured article, “The Distillers Corn Oil Craze,” looks at biodiesel production margins for small plants with and without the tax credit, product availability, and processing considerations for biodiesel producers who may want to start incorporating distillers corn oil into their production facility. Interestingly, Poet Nutrition President Jim Ringo tells me if every single ethanol plant in the U.S. were spinning today, and considering that 4.5 billion bushels of corn are expected for use in U.S. ethanol production this year, minus 500 million bushels from wet milling, and using the industry average of 0.65 pounds of oil per bushel, the maximum amount of corn oil that would be available is about 2.6 billion pounds, or about 347 million gallons. When you consider 30 to 40 percent of this material is going into animal feed, we’re talking only about 208 million gallons. Distillers corn oil is not quite the answer to all of biodiesel’s feedstock needs, but, like the myriad of other materials available, it’s a small part of the larger solution.

Another interesting aspect is the addition of sorghum as an ethanol feedstock now that grain sorghum has an advanced biofuel pathway under RFS2. No one really knows how this would affect biodiesel producers since there is no pathway for sorghum oil to biodiesel, but Ringo and others say they are actively investigating the issue. Ringo says the Poet plants that may begin incorporating sorghum are in feed-heavy markets where the oil mostly already goes to animal feed, and this would likely continue going to animal feed so it may not have an effect on the biodiesel industry.

I also wrote a featured article on a very impressive high school student from Salt Lake City who has won various awards and even an $80,000 college scholarship for her work in making biodiesel from algae (as a freshman) and used coffee grounds (sophomore). You won’t soon forget Zerina Ocanovic once you read about her. In 9th grade she grew algae, fertilized it with various media and then made biodiesel from it. A year later she toiled to extract oil from used coffee grounds, had the oil analyzed to show its properties were similar to that of vegetable oils, and then made biodiesel and tested its properties using the Eurofins QTA. Zerina had no shortage of assistance from those in the biodiesel industry; Graydon Blair of Utah Biodiesel Supply, Brian Mattingly of Plymouth, Utah-based Washakie Renewable Energy and Eddie Hall with Eurofins QTA all lent helping hands, for which Zerina tells me she is forever grateful. Read “Utah’s Young Biodiesel Phenom” in the May/June issue of Biodiesel Magazine for all the great details.

In addition, we have other feedstock-oriented articles written by this issue’s contributing writers, to whom I would like to give special thanks. Nate Burk, risk management consultant with INTL FCStone, authored a feature-length back-of-the-book contribution titled, “The New World of Biodiesel Feedstocks;” Doug Smith, R&D director with Baker Commodities, wrote this issue’s Talking Point column, “One Company’s Waste is Another Company’s Feedstock;” Graham Noyes, attorney with Stoel Rives and author of the book The Carbon Rush: America’s Path to Fire and Gold, penned the Legal Perspective column, “The Importance of Feedstock in California’s LCFS;” Melanie Bernds with the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center conducted a Q&A with Danforth Center researcher Jim Umen, which resulted in “The Algae Farmer;” and Juergen Fischer, AGQM chairman of the board, wrote an article detailing the latest quality survey results for German biodiesel.