PacificAg

PacificAg

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
PacificAg, the country's largest and most experienced biomass harvest company in the country, is helping growers see increased profits in the emerging biomass markets. Energy reporter Joanna Schroeder: “for a lot of utility companies who are finding the cost of solar or wind to be too expensive, biomass pellets are highly competitive in terms of cost and so they will use those pellets to burn instead of coal. How I like to describe the pellets is if you are a golfer, the spikes on your golf shoes create those pellets, that is literally what those pellets look like. What crops provide biomass? In the Midwest it is corn residue which is called ag waste. That is what they are converting into cellulosic fuel or pellets. If you are living in a region where wheat is a major crop, they can use wheat as well. If you are looking at regions in the Northwest where you have a lot of dairy or even in Wisconsin, you can create biomass from alfalfa fields. In California where they have a pretty strong rice market, you can also convert that rice into biomass. From the cellulosic ethanol side, there are only two biomass residues that are being converted, are corn and wheat. So on the alfalfa and the rice side, we are talking about the feed and pellet markets. It does not mean that any of these crops are not interchangeable.
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