It's a very rough measure, admittedly, but based on the number of hits on Google, ethanol is the reigning king of the alternative transportation fuels, compared to biodiesel.
Google News, which is a compilation of news stories, has close to 11,000 hits for ethanol and 4,900 for biodiesel. The broader Google search engine has over 30 million hits for ethanol and 11.3 million for biodiesel.
But that hardly mattered to some 1,300 people attending the Northwest Biodiesel Forum in Seattle May 5. "Biodiesel is coming of age," the Seattle Post-Intellingencer reported. "It's all the rage."
"This is a biofuels revolution," a canola (rapeseed) processor told the newspaper.
The biodiesel industry produced 25 million gal in 2004, the same year Congress passed a biodiesel tax credit of $1/gal for agri-biodiesel and 50 cents/gal for other types. The tax credit is set to expire in 2008.
The credit "has stimulated this industry in every way we imagined," Joe Jobe, CEO of the National Biodiesel Board told a US House panel earlier this month. "The tax incentive gave the industry confidence to invest in building new plants from the ground up."
Plants capable of producing biodiesel have grown four-fold, to 105, and are capable of producing 864 million gal, Jobe said. "More than one billion additional gal of capacity is also reported to be under construction," he said.
Sources of biodiesel can include vegetable oils such as soy, canola and palm, waste material, such as turkey offal, animal fats, used cooking oil and recycled restaurant grease.
A New York City congressman, Vito Fossella, Republican, sponsored legislation in May to double the tax credit for making biodiesel from recycled restaurant grease.
Representative Tim Walberg, Republican-Michigan, introduced legislation May 3 requiring that within five years all diesel fuel sold in the US contain, on average, 2% biodiesel. Some 55 billion gal of diesel were consumed in 2005, and a 2% standard would create a 1.1 billion gal market for biodiesel.
The 1.1 billion gal standard may seem paltry, considering the existing 7.5 billion gal standard for ethanol use by 2012; and legislative proposals calling for the use of 36 billion gal of renewable fuel (a good portion of which is expected to be corn-based and cellulosic ethanol) in the country's gasoline supplies by 2022.
Of course, ethanol has a much larger market because ethanol blends can be used in virtually all passenger cars (depending upon the volume blended); diesel use is largely confined to heavy trucks and off-road equipment. The size of the diesel fuel market in the US would increase commensurately should diesel passenger cars -- which the public emphatically refused to buy in the 1980s -- win public acceptance, as they have in Europe.
"We have a vision of '5 by 15,' " Jobe told the House Small Business Committee. "That's to say that biodiesel will make up 5% of the diesel fuel market by 2015," displacing 1.85 billion gal of [conventional] diesel."
But the horizon is not unclouded. A ConocoPhillips-Tyson Foods plan to make "renewable" diesel from animal fat has drawn fire from producers who run small, dedicated biodiesel plants. Big integrated oil companies are taking advantage of a tax loophole recently opened by the Internal Revenue Service, providing a $1/gal incentive to run animal fats and vegetable oil at petroleum refineries. (Read more about this venture.)
The IRS ruling allows a "volumetric credit for the co-processing of renewable materials with petroleum as part of the traditional refining process under existing infrastructure," Jobe told the House panel. 'The policy will result in giving money to a few of the largest, most profitable companies in the world simply for buying up animal fats and vegetable oils and blending it in low percentages in their existing conventional refinery infrastructure."
Unlike the biofuel industry, the petroleum industry has not built a new refinery in the US in over 30 years, Jobe said. Giving the oil companies "the same dollar-per-gallon incentive that biodiesel receives could severely undermine our progress, and those great promises that biodiesel has delivered," he said.
Incidentally, the ConocoPhillips/Tyson plan drew fire from activist group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. "With so many people becoming vegetarian and vegan these days, it does seem unwise for Tyson and ConocoPhillips to produce fuel from animals," a PETA official said.
Another issue to be resolved is the refusal by Colonial Pipeline last fall to transport biodiesel blends after a test shipment left traces of a chemical that could contaminate jet fuel, also shopped in the line.
Colonial is considered an industry bellwether because of its size, and if it decides to start shipping biodiesel, other pipelines are expected to follow suit.
Created: May 16, 2007
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This article was originally published in Platts 
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