11-1 IAN Gov. Otter on Bio-Mass

 Saving Idaho’s forests could mean keeping corn out of our gas tanks. That’s Today’s Idaho Ag News, I’m David Sparks, right back. Governor Otter recently talked to me about using some of Idaho’s aging forests as bio-mass to create energy. “Dave bio-mass of all nature of all resources, I was explaining to the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, that two years ago I spent 22 million dollars fighting fires in Idaho. All of that stuff was because the forests were overcrowded, we haven’t got good healthy forests, the trees are too crowded and as a result they’re all weakening and the bugs get to them, other diseases get to ‘em. If we could go in, we could create a healthy forest and therefore less fire damage and we could take all of that stuff and produce bio-mass electricity. In fact, we’ve got a couple of companies that are already looking at Idaho to build bio-mass generators, about 50 megawatt size seems to be the economical size and that’s a $250 million investment. But 50 megawatts in several places across Idaho would be extremely helpful to the 40% energy that we import and it would fuel our need for more energy for manufacturing and more energy for other products that we produce in the State of Idaho.”

Recent technology has been created that turns biomass like dead wood into ethanol.