While the US automotive industry continues to rebound after its near collapse from the financial crisis few years back, China is quietly expanding its presence in the Detroit-based market.
Encouraged by the low price of real estate and the high level of advanced engineering talent, dozens of Chinese auto companies and suppliers are opening plants and offices in and around the Motor City, where they hope to one day sell cars to US buyers.
Cellulosic gasoline and diesel company KiOR expects that, given current and anticipated operations through the remainder of the year, its Columbus, Mississippi facility will produce approximately 410,000 gallons of renewable fuel during the fourth quarter of 2013.
That brings full year production total from the facility to approximately 920,000 gallons. The ratio between gasoline, diesel and fuel oil expected to be produced during the year is approximately 35% gasoline, 40% diesel, and 25% fuel oil.
General Motors’ European unit Opel is cautiously optimistic that sales will grow enough in 2014 to avoid a further round of cost cutting, Chief Executive Karl-Thomas Neumann told newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Opel is on track to reach profitability by 2016, Neumann said, but the company expects a difficult year ahead, weighed down by restructuring costs for ending vehicle production at its factory in Bochum in Germany.
The day when planes, trucks and cars are commonly revved up on pond scum may be on the near horizon thanks to a technological advance that continuously turns a stream of concentrated algae into bio-crude oil. From green goo to crude takes less than an hour.
Construction at POET-DSM Advanced Biofuels’ Project LIBERTY is on schedule for an early 2014 startup, with a crew of approximately 300 workers on site daily, a POET-DSM executive said today in Chicago.
