“The trick is going to be getting farmers to grow the stuff. Now that food crops are way up in price, crops are going to be competing for the avalable crop land. And lets not forget, more farming—more pesticides and fertilizers end up in the soil, groundwaters, and streams. Furthermore, don’t think for a minute that the environmentalists aren’t going to start sceaming the minute land where some obscure species hangs out is threatened, or worse, protected federal lands.”
The switch grass grows in areas you can’t till or are difficult to till. In 1999 there were about 90 million acreas in the CRP program, that is land that you and I are paying farmers not to farm.
Just getting that land out of CRP will save billions of dollars.
If you look at my posts, I am not a big believer in the ethanol economy. It is just too expensive and inefficient to convert food or biomass into ethanol.
Now if you compress the grass into pellets, you have a cheap heating fuel. One acre could provide the equivalent of about 4,000 gallons of heating oil. Pellets are easy to handle and would be about as convenient as heating with oil.
The problem with pellets is that they don’t burn in internal combustion engines. But this is a problem that should be solved in the next five years. Direct heat to electricity systems are being developed. They will make coal plants much more efficient but will also open the posibility of using pelletized fuel for transportation fuel. At this point, petroleum is in trouble and has to compete with the agricultural industry on price. This will keep the price of petroleum and biomass low. Assuming the government does not get involved.
Expensive when oil is $50 a barrel, or expensive when oil is $100 a barrel?
In my county, it is the riparian land that has gone into CRP. That is a very valuable program for salmon habitat conservation. It pays the farmers a long term federal lease payment and requires them not to crop or graze the land, fence it from livestock and encourage tree growth. It is not simply paying someone not to grow a crop, but to manage the land in a way beneficial to the restoration of habitat for salmonids. It is not the same amount of money as the farmer would get for cropping it, but our farmers are generally conservation minded and the lease offsets are enough to help justify such set aside.
I am interested in using wood waste to produce ethanol or alternative fuels. Because of extreme environmental nonsense here, timber projects on federal lands rarely take a tree over 20 inches in diameter. The value of larger trees helps to offset the cost of a project. The US Forest Service also believes it can pile sales with stewardship obligations to remove submerchantable trees and brush. Then the enviros insist upon prohibitively expensive helicopter harvest. Consequently, there have been many local sales that no one bid on simply because they were not economically viable.
A market for submerch. and brush with a small facility buyer close enough to overcome the cost of transport could help to offset the sost of thinning and reducing fuels needed for healthy forest management. Any carbon produced could be partially offset by the reduction in carbon from removing burnable fuel sources and crating healthy resiliient forest lands.