Maybe we will be seeing lots more of this stuff in the future.
Des Moines Register article
ISU ag researchers see tall biomass potential
By DAN PILLER •
dpiller@dmreg.com • September 3, 2008
Ames, Ia. — Switchgrass has been the buzzword for at least a couple of years as the logical successor to corn as the next-generation source for ethanol feed.
But keep watching miscanthus, described by Iowa State University agronomist Emily Heaton as a "cold-weather sugar cane." Miscanthus is believed to have double the potential fuel yield of switchgrass and — best of all — it doesn't seem to mind cold weather or frost.
"Miscanthus has been used to breed greater cold tolerances into sugar cane," said Heaton, a native Illinoisan who joined the ISU agronomy faculty this year after working for a California firm that develops grasses for fuel feedstock.
While switchgrass has proved itself in Iowa's climate during the centuries, miscanthus is a rookie to the state. It has been grown in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Quebec. But it doesn't have a test history in Iowa.
Several healthy stands of miscanthus, which can grow up to 12 feet tall, dot the Iowa State University Research and Demonstration Farm west of Ames. ISU researchers need to find out some basic things about miscanthus, such as the best time to plant and harvest it or how best to fertilize and grow the crop.
Heaton said switchgrass or miscanthus can't be grown as a winter crop after corn and soybeans are harvested. The two-year period needed to create good stands of either grass suggests that farmers would need to dedicate fields specifically for the grass crops rather than using them as fill-in crops between seasons.
A major issue is the bulkiness of the grasses. While corn is easy to load and move, grasses are bulky, take up a lot of space and have the potential to create large transport costs.
"That's a big problem with either switchgrass or miscanthus," said graduate student Andy Heggenstaller, who will receive a doctorate degree from ISU later this year and now tends the farm's switchgrass crop.
"The stuff is so bulky that we need to figure out how to compact it for transportation."
So far, pelleting is considered the most likely destiny of switchgrass once it becomes a fuel feedstock, but the industry hasn't yet settled on a consensus.
Switchgrass is attractive because it can be grown easily in all kinds of weather and unlike corn, isn't food for either humans or animals. But Heggenstaller said that while switchgrass will make a decent fuel, it won't make as much ethanol as corn.
Miscanthus, on the other hand, holds the potential to make up to 2times as much ethanol per ton as corn. A University of Illinois study in 2005 showed that using corn or switchgrass to produce enough ethanol to offset 20 percent of gasoline use — a current federal government goal — would take 25 percent of current U.S. cropland out of food production.
Nobody knows for sure what kind of financial market switchgrass or miscanthus would generate, but early indications are that at full potential it could produce fuel at the equivalent price of $25 per barrel for oil, a price not seen on world markets for more than five years.
Miscanthus would require only 9.3 percent of current agricultural acreage to achieve the same gasoline equivalent production. While miscanthus is a cousin of sugar cane, it isn't edible.
ISU and Illinois aren't the only universities in the biomass research derby. The University of Northern Iowa's Tallgrass Prairie Center has received $612,222 in state money from the new Iowa Power Fund to research different types of grasses for biofuels. The decade-old center has already done work on roadside grasses and prairie restoration.
Prairieland Enterprises of Centerville is developing plans for a switchgrass pellet facility.
Monsanto, Deere & Co. and Archer Daniels Midland last week announced a joint project to study the use of corn stover — the stalks, husks, ears and other byproducts of the corn plant — that can be made into cellulosic ethanol.
That study follows a similar collaboration between Pioneer Hi-Bred of Johnston and Poet, the ethanol maker from Brookings, S.D. Poet plans to build a cellulosic ethanol plant at its current corn-fed facility at Emmetsburg. That plant, scheduled to go on line sometime in 2010, would be Iowa's first cellulosic ethanol plant.
How far into the future switchgrass or miscanthus may take over from corn as the prime ethanol fuel feedstock is open to question. Theodore Crosbie, vice president of global plant breeding for Monsanto, plans to tell the ISU Bioeconomy Conference next week that corn will be the prime feedstock for ethanol for at least the next 10 years.
Comments like that are fighting words to the growing legion of corn-based biofuel opponents, who blame ethanol for driving up food prices, taking increasing amounts of cropland and rely on subsidies given ethanol blenders and mandates for ethanol use.
John Reilly, a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of ethanol, "You're creating a very big industry that's more costly than it needs to be and will want to keep its subsidies."
