11/09/07 Dealing with Renewables

Dealing with Renewables. I'm Greg Martin as Line On Agriculture presents the Harvest Clean Energy Report. Getting from point "A" to point "B" is not always a straight line. I've tried many times when traveling around the U.S. to get to my destination the straightest route but sometimes it's just not that easy. The same goes for getting away from fossil fuels and into renewables. We are right now taking those first, tentative baby steps. Recently 2 conferences were held to look at how to further our progress in this new realm and according to Patrick Mazza, Research Director with Climate Solutions, there is a raod map being developed. MAZZA: There's really three areas of challenge. First developing the feedstock supply and that can be either dedicated energy crops or current crop residue or other sources of biomass residues. The second is collecting and transporting the cellulosic feedstock's because there really is a huge bulk involved and a 50 million gallon a year cellulosic plant is going to involve about 2 billion pounds of material a year so it's no small task and the third hurdle to overcome is the processing technology. Once you get this stuff to the plant, how do you break down the cellulose? Mazza has boiled the essence of the meetings down for us. MAZZA: What's looking likely for starting the cellulosic based biofuels industry is using current residues, particularly corn stover and wheat stubble. There was a general sense that for cellulose energy crops, the perennial grasses, we're unlikely to see them emerge on what's currently prime farmland, we're more likely to see them emerge on marginal farmland. As for collecting and transporting these mass amounts of biomass residues& MAZZA: The sense is that we are really going to have to invent a new system to transport this massive amount of material. One example that was given in these conferences was POET which is based in South Dakota which is creating side by side with an existing corn starch ethanol plant a cellulose operation that's going to use corn cobs and so they're creating a whole new collection system to bring the cobs to the plant and store them there. Of course there are lots of dollars being spent right now on the development of the actual processing technology. MAZZA: There's a general agreement in terms of economically being able to process cellulosic biomass, we're not quite there yet. The process requires enzymes to break down the biomass material and two separate companies announced they will have economical enzymes available in about 4 years. For additional information on clean energy, visit harvestcleanenergy.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network. www.harvestcleanenergy.org