Biomass efforts gaining ground

There's nothing new about the concept of biomass, using plant matter for energy. Gasification plants operated in Germany and the United States during World War II.

 

But those plants were primitive compared to biomass efforts being researched today, said Bruce Dien, a research engineer at the National Center for Agricultural Utilization Research in Peoria.

Dien recently returned from a national conference on fuels and biotechnology in Nashville where he said almost 500 people gathered to discuss the latest in biomass research.

"A lot of different people are studying the process," said Dien, who's been working on ways to derive ethanol from plants like wheatstraw and grasses for 10 years.

"It's a pretty active field," he said, noting that companies like DuPont and the Spanish firm, Abengoa Bionergy, are heavily involved in biomass research. Iogen, a Canadian firm that already operates a demonstration plant, may soon build a plant in the United States, he said.

These are exciting times for biomass advocates, he said --ever since President Bush mentioned switchgrass in his energy speech earlier this year.

Establishing a goal of replacing 30 percent of the foreign oil used in this country with ethanol by 2030 will require finding ethanol sources beyond corn, said Stephen Long, a professor of plant biology and crop science at the University of Illinois.

Long is an advocate of miscanthus, a grass that grows over 12 feet tall in one season.

"Miscanthus is now a commercial crop in Europe. I saw that it had considerable potential when I worked in Great Britain. When I came to the U.S., one of my graduate students asked, 'Why don't we grow it here?' We've been doing trials ever since and having some remarkable success," he said.

Miscanthus not only produces a big crop readily converted to energy, but it doesn't require all the herbicide and nitrogen needed to raise corn, said Long.

"U.S. companies are now expressing interest in 'grass energy,'" he said.

Also interested in the possibility of growing grass to help meet the nation's energy needs is John Clarke, a former performance analyst who worked for more than 20 years at Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria.

Now retired in Maryland, Clarke focuses on tracts of land more than tractors these days. Growing miscanthus on 10 percent of the state's cropland could provide as much as 50 percent of the power generated by Illinois power plants, he said.

The plant could displace much of the coal burned in the state, Clarke said. "There isn't any mercury or sulfur in miscanthus," he said.

The immediate problem facing biomass advocates is the high cost of conversion. Building a cellulosic-energy plant costs five to 10 times more than an ethanol plant that burns corn, said Dien.

"It will take a lot of little advances in different areas to make it more competitive," he said. "We need better enzymes while getting the capital cost of equipment down," said Dien.