Study: Prairie Grass Can Produce Ethanol

New research shows that prairie grasses grown using only moderate amounts of fertilizer on marginal land can produce significant amounts of ethanol.

The five-year study of switch grass done by the University of Nebraska and the USDA's Agricultural Research Service was published this week by the National Academy of Sciences.

Researcher Ken Vogel said he estimates that an acre of switch grass would produce an average of 300 gallons of ethanol based on the study of grass grown on marginal land on farms in Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota.

An acre of corn grown in those same states produces about 350 gallons of ethanol on average.

Renewable Fuels Association spokesman Matt Hartwig said this latest study adds to the evidence supporting the development of cellulosic ethanol.

.....

But Vogel and the other researchers did develop an estimate of how much energy switch grass would produce based on current conversion rates. Switch grass produces more than five times as much energy than the energy that's consumed by growing the crop and converting it to ethanol, according to the report.



http://apnews.myway.com/article/20080108/D8U20Q6G0.html

insects, birds, mice, voles, prairie dogs, weasels, badgers, snakes, hawks, owls, antelope.......

Once it produced buffalo, but that's a long story, and we we haven't learned a thing from....

That's the question that needs to be answered here.

... but the agricultural lobby is trying to keep that message out of
the public eye ...
:hide:

Is this scalable?

Is it scalable without subsidies?

How much will shipping from the non-market that is the northern plains to real markets like the Front Range, the Mississippi River Corridor, the western Great Lakes, and points further, add to the cost at the pump?

What would be the return per acre for an average farmer taking corn and bean acreage out of production?

What would be the return per acre for an average rancher pulling his livestock off the pasture to let grass grow?

If the tradeoffs involved in those answers are unacceptable to the landowners, will they be allowed to harvest grass from CRP acres, and if so, during which season?

Entirely removing the aboveground biomass on some repeating cycle will eventually deplete certain growth-limiting substances in the soil, even with nitrogen replenishment, no?

On a related note, what's the feedstock for the fertilizer, and how much energy is involved in making it?

Did they work with any plots of mixed native prairie, or just monocultures of switchgrass?

Whether or not this is based on a monoculture, how much energy is required to restore this species to pastures dominated by such exotics as leafy spurge, spotted knapweed, and so forth, or by row crops?

Or could the same be done with exotic species that are currently uncontrollable and cover large acreages in the northern plains?

I'm interested in the choice of the word "marginal." I assume this is meant to imply that these acres are capable of producing modest yields of row crops with inordinate investments of time and materials. Quite a bit of that acreage in the Dakotas is in the Missouri Coteau, which is difficult to farm because it is a terminal moraine, or the Missouri River slope, again difficult to farm due to terrain. Quite a bit more is in the prairie pothole region, much of which is under wildlife easements of several types. The potholes themselves are marshes that do not grow switchgrass, but do serve as recharge or discharge points for many aquifers. Quite a few are also listed as critical habitat for piping plover, putting them off limits to such disturbances as mowing during the nesting season. Whooping cranes also migrate through this area on their migration between south Texas and the Northwest Territories, making extensive mowing in non-cultivated areas used by the cranes problematic. Further west, precipitation drops off, and the grass yield becomes wildly variable between years. In some rather large areas, buffalo grass and blue gramma dominate, with occasional cactus, yucca, and sagebrush poking above the grass. Good luck harvesting grass there. The Nebraska Sandhills aren't stable enough to grow harvestable grass on them. If you tried to harvest what was on those hills, you'd be able to pull out one small harvest before the dunes started whipping in the wind. Outside of these areas, most of the land that can be farmed, in any way, is being farmed, currently at profit. Everything else provides the last vestiges of Great Plains habitats for a bunch of species that would be at risk of extinction, and subject to ESA listing, if wholesale habitat destruction continues. I don't see much in the way of "marginal" acreage available for this, or anything like it.

And I'm not trying to shoot the messenger. Just some general frustrations I have with living here and hearing the locals give me the whole "Ethanol will save us," without even bothering to consider any reasons why it might not. I suspect I'll hear more of it now. Obviously car culture is not negotiable out here (if it were, passenger trains would be a nice fit, just like they were in decades past), so I guess they'll keep dumping money into this pit because it's one more way for these states to leech off of everybody else.

on a large scale.
It has not been tried on a large scale.

Growing grass is not very difficult.

and welcome to the E/E forum! :toast:

Meet "Razzleberry...."

along them, instead of using farm land?

Or rather, a native mix of switchgrass, little bluestem, needle and thread, needlegrass, western wheatgrass in the mixed grass biome; the same in the tallgrass biome, with indiangrass and big bluestem added to the mix; and a mix of such species as buffalograss, blue gramma, and several other of the more xeric-adapted species further west. States generally like to control surface erosion along roadways in this manner. A lot of it from the central plains (east-west, not north-south) on eastward is mowed every summer, but to save costs, states often give this up to local farmers who then bale it and use it as feed for livestock. The stuff further west in the steppe biome doesn't produce enough biomass to be harvested for this.

Theoretically, this is somewhat interesting, but it doesn't provide any solution to the underlying problems of per-capita energy consumption and overall population.

for years. I drive by a large ethanol plant for several years and haven't heard a good reason yet.

This is my father in law and mother in law with their 2007 corn crop. It was a pretty good crop. But look at the foliage to grain ratio. Now the foliage doesn't go to waste as he is a beef producer too and he feeds the stalks, why feed them? Because they have a pretty good sugar content and they add weight to the cattle. Why can't the corn stalks and all be used to produce ethanol?



This is the grass from the article in the OP. It appears to be better use of the ground area, more production weight per acre than corn only or even corn and stalks.



It seems to me that sorghum (or really any of the cane crops) would be a good alternative. High sugar content, easy production on much of the plains states in poorer soil than that required for corn. High weight production per acre.



My point is that there has to be a more reasonable crop or product to distill than corn...just look at the volume of production compared to the amount of ground required..just seems stupid to me.

I apologies in advance for the trolls on this board.

The new energy bill addresses many of your concerns and will help this country move away from corn only ethanol. It will do so by adding ethanol production from just about anything other than corn. There are provisions that insuring our food supply and quality of life by demanding the sustainability of our lands. In addition, it will make our fuels go further by increasing the performance of our ethanol cars and increasing the mileage of all our cars.

Yes, any crop with high sugar content can be used for ethanol. Brazil makes ethanol out of sugarcane. One of our country’s first major exports was sugar. Many of the gulf and southern states use to produce large quantities of sugar can and will again in the near future.