04/26/07 Backing Biofuels

Backing biofuels. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. We all are feeling the price of gasoline in the wallet. And we are all for anything that will help get that price down. Farmers feel the pinch even more. Recently Oregon Congressman Greg Walden spent some quality time talking to people all over the state about one answer. Biofuels. Walden talks about some of the new ideas. WALDEN: There's a lot of interest in the new biofuels initiative both in terms of ethanol and biodiesel and woody biomass as well by the way to look at ways to produce fuel from woody biomass so you have different systems that are being considered. One for example at the Port of Morrow along the Columbia River is an ethanol plant. Standard ethanol, import or buy local corn and produce 40 million gallons a year of ethanol for the region. It would be barged down to Portland and blended down there. And then the wet distiller's grain would be sold off for basic cattle feed in the region. But while there are many up sides to what Walden heard, there are other issues. WALDEN: You go to Pendleton Grain Growers and hear what they have to say about biodiesel fuel and the issues there and it becomes more complex. They're looking at both canola and camellia as potential plants that can be grown and in the process I begin to look at what do you get besides biodiesel  and what you get is a lot of leftover. For example if they used canola biodiesel, to make a hundred million gallons a year you'd need 900 thousand tons of feedstock which would take a million acres and you'd have leftover 540 thousand tons of meal and ten million gallons of glycerin. Well to use all that meal you'd need half a million cows to eat it. Yet another idea would net a human food product. WALDEN: Then you get on over to the Nyssa area on the Idaho border and they're looking at a whole different system where the byproduct would actually be a human food source. Think Power Bars if you will. And they would actually grow the crops there that would be used in the production of ethanol using a gasification process so they wouldn't have all the waste product that you'd need to feed to animals, they'd actually produce food out of the back end of their operation and ethanol out the other end. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.