Looking at the Future of Bio-energy

Looking at the Future of Bio-energy. I’m Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report.

Biomass. Webster defines it as plant materials and animal waste used especially as a source of fuel and the term has been around since 1934. Obviously man has been using biomass since the dawn of time to keep warm and to cook food. It really was the first fuel. Bill Carlson is the owner of Carlson Small Power Consultants who helps people develop biomass, combined heat and power facilities primarily in the forest products industry. He will be moderating the final panel at this year’s Harvesting Clean Energy Conference to discuss whether bio-energy can boost rural economies, power our planes, and benefit the environment?

CARLSON: I think it’s a fairly broad charge and where we’d like to take that is to leave the participants with the feeling that the sky is the limit so to speak on where all this can go. They will have been to various sessions that are more pin-pointed to things like farm energy or growing their energy crops or developing small-scale hydro on irrigation canals, all that sort of thing. But here I think it needs to take a little bit more futuristic look.

Boeing will be a part of that panel as well. Carlson believes there are multiple ways to use renewable energy.

CARLSON: I’ve had a great opportunity for the last couple of years to spend some quality time on that very issue because an organization I’m on the board of called 25x’25 which advocates 25% of the nations energy from renewable sources, from America’s farms, fields and forests by the year 2025, put together a working group to look specifically at woody biomass and the contributions it could make and basically the answer we came to was an overwhelming, yes.

The one thing that Carlson believes is missing in all of this is a national energy policy.

CARLSON: It probably will have to take the form of some sort of national goal and maybe it does revolve around renewable energy and it says that...well it almost says something like 25x’25.

For additional information on clean energy and the upcoming Harvesting Clean Energy Conference in Boise, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.???www.harvestcleanenergy.org