I’ve had two people visit me here at Oak Point this summer wanting information relating to biofuel production in Northern NY. I’m not sure how much I was able to help them but there’s certainly a lot happening, much of it good, in the biofuels area.
I’ve never been in favor of using feed and food grains (i.e. corn) for biofuel production. This involves converting a product edible by humans to one–distillers grains–that can be consumed only by animals, and even that in limited amounts. We will need to increase global food production by huge amounts in the years ahead, and a high percentage of the arable land in the world is already in production. Maybe millions can be made in grain ethanol production, but to date millions have also been lost, much of it by farmer investors, when ethanol plants went belly-up in the middle of construction when the price of corn and gasoline made grain ethanol a losing proposition.
Cellulitic ethanol is the future of ethanol production, as well it should be. All of the feedstock used in this process is inedible by humans, and most by livestock as well, straw being a notable exception. With this in mind I was interested to read that grass seed producers in the Northwest soon won’t be able to burn grass fields after seed harvest because of air pollution concerns. But at the same time this ruling was coming down the pipe, cellulitic ethanol production was being cranked up in the same region that could use this grass as a feedstock. The burning of grass seed fields has long been a concern in that region, particularly in the Willamette Valley. I remember being there in 1971 and learning what engineers at Washington State University were trying to do to reduce the air pollution created by burning this grass. They had a prototype machine that supposedly burned the grass in such a way as to reduce particulate pollution. It was easy to find this machine in the field–just look for a huge plume of smoke rising on the horizon! Oh, well, back to the drawing board. I know a bit about burning these fields, having participated in an Iowa ”field burn” after grass seed harvest. “Participation” in this case involved lighting one match at the edge of the field, then running like hell. Boy, was that fire hot!
Never underestimate the ingenuity and ability of American technology to overcome seemingly impossible problems. A few years ago the “experts” were saying that cellulitic ethanol production was the ideal, but the technology to do this economically was many years away. From recent reports, “many years” turned into a few years. Transportation of feedstocks is still a problem, but one that will be overcome by the siting of these plants close to where the material is produced.