InSites is a quarterly newsletter that highlights the personalities and projects of the Waste Management Research and Education Institute (WMREI) of The University of Tennessee. WMREI is an affiliate of the EERC.
WMREI was created in 1985 as a state-funded Center of Excellence. Research areas include solid-, hazardous-, and nuclear-waste management; waste minimization; and pollution prevention.
Biotechnology is the focal point of the institute's technical research, while issues involving public attitudes and federal/state policies related to waste-management issues are the primary concerns of the institute's policy research.
For additional information about InSites, or to be added to our mailing list, please write InSites, WMREI, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, call 865-974-1156, or fax 865-974-1838. Or, if you prefer, e-mail Constance Griffith cbgriffith@utk.edu.
Table of Contents
Wasted
Energy, By Lisa Byerley Gary Managing
the Landscape
Lessons on Sustainable Living
Power Plants, By Kris Christen Benefits
of Bioenergy Crops
When
these UT researchers tour state buildings, they see green—in the form of
energy savings, environmental improvement, and bolstered bottom lines.
By Lisa Byerley Gary
One good thing about conducting an energy audit, say researchers from the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Energy, Environment and Resources Center (EERC), is that results can be as good for the environment as they are for the bottom line.
Although energy audits can evaluate energy use at any type of facility, UT’s work so far has focused on government and industrial buildings. In fact, EERC researchers Jonathan Overly and Greg Harrell are currently working on contracts with several Tennessee state agencies as well as large and small industrial operations.
As energy auditors, the researchers examine the efficiency of each facility’s major energy-consuming systems and determine how the facility can reduce its overall energy consumption and how long it might take to recoup the investment in these improvements.
Managers are turning to the audits, Overly says, to
identify areas where companies or agencies can save money while becoming good
environmental citizens. Harrell, a Tennessee native who joined EERC’s staff in
June after conducting similar audits for Virginia Tech, once conducted some 50
audits for a large petrochemical company in which the assessment team produced a
bottom-line savings of $100 million per year.
Tennessee Efficiency
Savings can be significant, though, even at lower levels. Overly, for example, is evaluating prison manufacturing sites across the state through funding provided by the State Building Energy Management Program. Though he hopes to expand the evaluation and conservation work to other types of state and nongovernment facilities, most of the work so far has taken place in state prisons for a group called TRICOR—Tennessee Rehabilitative Initiative in Corrections. TRICOR manages prison manufacturing facilities where inmates work at regular jobs ranging from dairy production to metal working to textile manufacturing.
While these operations aren’t huge, they do have special parameters to consider. For instance, Overly explains, a public manufacturing plant might operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but prisons are limited to one eight-hour shift each day, five days a week. Overly suggested installing setback thermostats on heating and cooling systems in prison facilities. These thermostats delay heating or cooling when the plant is not in use, which offers significant savings for TRICOR.
“Most of the savings we find are in lighting, heating,
and air-conditioning,” Overly says.
Rapid Results
Sometimes the payback is amazingly fast, Overly says. “One site I evaluated had the potential to save $108,000 a year with payback estimates ranging from zero to six months.” That’s faster than most. And overall implementation costs to effect such changes were only about $10,000.
Guidelines for implementing energy efficiency strategies usually cite a three- to five-year payback time; a company’s financial state typically drives the decision to invest in such energy-saving upgrades.
The primary tool of a one-day, on-site energy audit, such
as the one Overly did for TRICOR, is a simple walkthrough. Overly completes a
survey as he tours a plant and evaluates such measurements as temperature and
airflow. He then completes a report that includes potential energy savings,
costs, estimated payback times, and potential environmental savings that would
accompany a reduction in energy use. Current funding doesn’t permit him to
assist much with implementation, he says, but he encourages plant managers to
contact him if they have questions or concerns.
Measure It, Manage It
But the sites Overly visits benefit from more than just the report. “People learn just from talking as we walk through the plants. The first thing I tell them is an old adage in this field: you can’t manage what you can’t measure. You need to know how and where you use energy before you can find opportunities for saving.
“One private manufacturing plant I visited a few years ago—not a part of this project—was being charged 10 times what its actual energy usage was at one natural gas meter because it was calibrated incorrectly. They had the potential to save $300,000 a year by repairing the meter.”
Industry and Efficiency
Industrial site managers once looked at high energy costs as a necessity of doing business, EERC’s Harrell says. However, the global scale of a competitive marketplace has forced those managers to reconsider. They now realize what Harrell knows well: energy costs, to a large extent, are controllable. And EERC aims to provide industry the technical assistance it needs to increase energy efficiency, reduce waste, and boost productivity.
Harrell arrives at a manufacturing site with a variety of tools that help him assess the performance of energy systems. In fact, he has developed special software that can analyze the complex interactions among these systems. Because modifying one system component may affect the performance of the entire system, a system-wide analysis is necessary. A combination of direct measurement and system analysis software allows a complete investigation.
From Assessment to Assistance
Harrell typically provides three types of services for national and international industrial energy users: energy assessments, industrial training, and technical assistance.
Energy assessments compare the system’s current efficiency to the maximum practical system efficiency. Sometimes the primary focus is to achieve better economy through more efficient use of available resources. Switching a boiler to a different type of fuel, for example, can sometimes achieve significant cost savings.
When he completes an energy assessment, Harrell provides a list of recommended changes, which might focus on adjustments to equipment or a change or addition to system components.
Recommendations might also include an overall energy-management strategy or a long-term strategy if the industry is planning such changes as a major expansion. But Harrell provides more than written feedback.
“An assessment environment is a teaching arena. I learn a tremendous amount at each assessment and try to share what I’ve learned with staff at the site,” he says. I work closely with plant personnel during an assessment to provide feedback and training simultaneously.”
The on-site work can take anywhere from three days to two weeks, depending on the size and complexity of the operation. Harrell spends even more hours off-site doing research, performing calculations, developing cost estimates, and shaping recommendations. He sends a written report to the site manager, but even then he isn’t finished.
“I make sure the report is a living document,” Harrell says. “It needs to provide the training and knowledge that will take them to the implementation phase.”
Only after a plant incorporates his recommendations does he send a final report to the site. Harrell may occasionally be involved with the implementation phase, especially in developing nations, but plant engineers typically oversee that part of the work.
A second component of Harrell’s work is providing industrial training to clients from state and federal governments and universities. The courses, which integrate material on the systems he investigates with general energy-management principles, offer an interactive format that allows participants to provide insight from their areas of expertise.
The third component, technical assistance, comes into play when a plant needs advice on a specific energy-consuming component. For instance, a manufacturer might call for advice on buying a new air-compression system for a plant expansion.
Although Harrell works closely with the U. S. Department of Energy’s Office of Industrial Technologies to provide services to other types of industry, most of his clients come from “core industries,” such as petrochemical, pulp and paper, chemical processing, steel, and aluminum companies. Facilities such as these, by their very nature, require significant amounts of energy to produce finished products, Harrell says. His projects have drawn him to 15 countries on six continents and across the United States.
Harrell also has been active in graduate and undergraduate education, something he hopes to continue at UT as well.
Service to Your Door
Both Harrell and Overly hope their team will become a resource for manufacturers across Tennessee, as well as for public schools, universities, and other state buildings. “We would like to support the state of Tennessee,” Harrell says. “We want to be a major source of technical support for physical plants in Tennessee’s universities. We want to be the premiere independent information base for industries in Tennessee. And we want companies in any part of the state to look to us as a credible source of information.”
Energy-use analysis fits perfectly with UT’s three-fold mission of research, teaching, and public service, and EERC is the logical resource to provide those services to the state and industrial clients who need them most.•
For more information contact Jonathan Overly or Greg Harrell, EERC, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-4251.
Land
management plans preserve the beauty, specialness, of the Smokies.
By Dennis McCarthy
Editor’s
Note: Each issue of InSites
will feature an article from Sightline,
a semiannual publication that focuses on the environmental health of Great Smoky
Mountains National Park. Sightline
is a collaborative effort among the University of Tennessee’s Energy,
Environment and Resources Center; Great Smoky Mountains National Park; Friends
of Great Smoky Mountains National Park; and Great Smoky Mountains Natural
History Association. The following article appeared in the summer edition of the
publication. To receive a complimentary copy of Sightline,
contact Constance Griffith at cbgriffith@utk.edu or 865-974-1156.
When the National Park Service acquired land in the 1930s for the newly created Great Smoky Mountains National Park, Cades Cove—the largest valley in the Park—was a stunning landscape of open farmland, meandering brooks, scattered woodlands, and wetland meadows, all crowned with a ring of mountains. To the families that lived there before the Park bought them out, the Cove was the closest thing to heaven on Earth they would ever see.
The National Park Service, too, appreciated the beauty of the new parkland and wanted to preserve it for future generations. The challenge was to devise effective management plans that would withstand the vicissitudes of science. Since much of the Park’s vegetation does not mature for scores or even hundreds of years, the Park could not afford to make short-sighted management decisions based on fad.
No plan, of course, can be permanent; so over the years, the Park has had to contend with a variety of management challenges, whether meadows or wetlands or exotic infestations or endangered species or grassy balds or any of dozens of other problems that have presented themselves.
Splendor in the Grass
The original management plan for the new Park called for Cades Cove and other cultivated lands to return to a natural forested setting. As the Cove began to fill with shrubs and trees, however, something unexpected happened—it began to lose its specialness. So much of the beauty of the Cove, it turned out, depended on the open vistas the farmers had created. Without the vistas, the Cove appeared, well, almost ordinary.
To preserve the openness, the Park invited farmers back to the Cove to work the fields and to raise cattle and crops. Over the years, the Cove has changed, of course, but its open, rural character has remained. Today the farmers are gone. The last resident, Kermit Caughron, died in 1999 at the age of 96.
And that left the Park with a quandary. How should it continue to manage the Cove? The fields in the Cove were populated with tall fescue, a European native brought into the Cove 50 years ago. While fescue was popular at the time because it is a hardy winter grass, it turned out to have some major problems. An endophytic fungus found in most tall fescue is harmful to horses, cattle, and some game animals. Fescue also makes poor cover for wildlife, especially during the winter when snow and freezing rain knock the grass over, and the thick matting presents an impenetrable fence to small mammals that live at the grass-soil boundary.
Getting rid of the fescue, therefore, seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, the native grasses—big and little bluestem, purple top, Indian grass—that preceded the fescue had all but disappeared. One old field near the western end of the Cove, however, had not been mowed for 30 years and still had stands of native grass. The Park therefore began propagating grasses from these stands to replace the fescue.
Beginning in 1995, three sites were selected for conversion to native grasses. The sites were burned and sprayed with herbicides to remove fescue and other exotic plants. These sites, which now support native grasses, will be monitored for a few years before the Park decides whether to expand the conversion to other fields in the Cove.
Of Wetlands and Canebreaks.
The Park is also restoring some of the Cove’s wetlands that were ditched and drained in the 1950s and 1960s to create pasture. With grants from Target, the retail giant, and the Fish and Wildlife Fund, the Park selected three sites for restoration. Ditches were plugged with dirt and stabilized with bundles of willow sticks. As the willows sprout and root, they help hold the soil in place. Today, water no longer is confined to the ditches. It meanders across the meadows to create a true wetland again.
Cades Cove is not the only area where the Park is restoring native vegetation. Near the Park’s Oconaluftee Visitors Center, adjacent to the Cherokee Reservation, a native canebrake is being reestablished.
Today, only small, isolated stands of cane remain in the region. Two hundred years ago, however, canebrakes were common along streams in the region. Early travelers wrote of stands that ran for dozens of miles along river bottoms, where a man on foot could easily elude his pursuers. These stands were home for deer, bear, and other game that the Cherokee depended on for food. The cane was—and still is—used in making beautiful baskets, which the Cherokee are justly famous for.
Vanishing Act
A hundred years ago, the American chestnuts made up a quarter of the trees in the hardwood forests of the eastern United States and nearly half of some stands in the Great Smoky Mountains. That, of course, was before the chestnut blight. Shortly after the turn of the century, the chestnut blight, a bark fungus, showed up in New York City, probably from imported Japanese chestnuts. The blight attacked trees by girdling them. Within 50 years, the once majestic American chestnut had all but vanished.
Today, although research on producing a blight-resistant chestnut tree is beginning to bear fruit, there are no plans to reintroduce the chestnut to Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The loss of the American chestnut was probably the worst ecological disaster to beset the Smokies, at least within the past 350 years, but the Park has successfully adapted, and there’s no need to disrupt it again by trying to reconfigure the current forest.
Recovering Balds
The Park is having notable success with some of its other high-elevation plant communities. The Appalachian avens, for instance—a small, showy, yellow-flowered member of the rose family, found only at high elevations in less than a dozen sites in the southern mountains, and nowhere else on Earth—is holding its own in a preserve in the Great Smokies, with a little help from Park Service friends. The population, which grows in precipitous rocky outcrops at Cliff Top on Mt. LeConte, was down to a hundred plants when the Park came to its rescue.
Rock climbers and other adventurers scrambling over the cliffs where the plants struggled to survive trampled the avens and destroyed its home on narrow rock ledges. The Park’s first strategy, therefore, was to block off casual trails to keep rock hoppers out of the avens’ fragile habitat. Seeds were then collected from the Cliff Top population, sprouted in a greenhouse, and returned to the Cliff Top site. Drought the first couple of years knocked out three-quarters of the seedlings, but those that survived are now thriving.
The Appalachian avens’ home on Cliff Top is a heath bald—a shrub community largely made up of rhododendron, highbush blueberry, and other members of the heath family. Heath balds grow on sharp rocky peaks and knife-shaped ridges in the Park.
Another kind of bald in the Park, the grassy bald, is found at high elevations on rounded knobs and gently sloping ridgelines. Grassy balds are fields of mountain oat grass, with scattered shrubs, such as rhododendrons, azaleas, and blackberries.
No one knows for sure how grassy balds originated, but they were kept open by the Cherokee, who burned them for generations, and by herdsmen, who grazed cattle on them during the 19th and early 20th centuries. After the National Park Service acquired the land for Great Smoky Mountains National Park, burning and grazing stopped, and shrubs and trees began to take over.
In 1986, the Park began restoring two of its most popular grassy balds, Gregory and Andrews, which had shrunk considerably since the Park acquired the land. The two balds were selected because they’d been around a long time—in fact, they were described by the earliest European explorers who passed this way—unlike Spence Field, for example, which was primarily formed by pioneers’ grazing livestock. And both Gregory and Andrews balds represent unique plant communities. Gregory has a variety of native grasses and wildflowers as well as its famous azaleas, which are hybrids of four species. Andrews has a spectacular display of catawba rhododendron and a high-elevation bog with carnivorous sundew plants.
The Park’s initial task was to cut back invading shrubs, doubling the size of Andrews to about three and a half hectares and Gregory to about six hectares. Today, invaders are kept in check with mowers and weed trimmers. Azaleas have responded especially well, as has the dwarf gray willow, a rare shrub of the Southern Appalachians.
Wilderness is Preservation
Some areas of the Park, like Cades Cove, are considered cultural areas and can tolerate a great deal of human construction. Most of the Park, however, is classed as wilderness. Trails are the only signs of human habitation allowed in such wilderness areas.
Just because an area is classed as wilderness, however, doesn’t justify a totally hands-off approach to land management. While Park managers are much more circumscribed in wilderness zones than in cultural areas, they can still remove exotic species and conduct controlled burns; and if they want to restore a wilderness ecosystem, such as Gregory or Andrews Bald, they can cut, mow, or burn to maintain the ecosystem in its restored state.
Their ultimate goal is to preserve the wilderness in a relatively unspoiled condition—something like it looked when Europeans first arrived on the scene. They want to be sure the beauty we see and enjoy today will still be around for the benefit of our children and for unborn generations.•
For more information contact Bob Miller, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 107 Park Head Headquarters, Gatlinburg, TN 37738, or call 865-436-1207.
Education
for sustainable development, a concept whose time has come, flourishes on the
World Wide Web.
By Lisa Byerley Gary
Education
is an essential tool for achieving sustainability. People around the world
|recognize that the current economic development trends are not sustainable and
that public awareness, education, and training are key to moving society toward
sustainability—from the introduction, Education
for Sustainable Development Toolkit.
Imagine, if you will, that you’ve been responsible for a creation that meets a vital need of people around the world. That your creation will be translated into multiple languages and adapted for many cultures. That your creation will educate global publics and empower them in ways that will benefit their children and their children’s children for generations to come.
That’s what Rosalyn McKeown, director of the University of Tennessee’s (UT) Center for Geography and Environmental Education (CGEE), and a few collaborators have achieved with the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) Toolkit—a simple, adaptable, accessible, yet inexpensive education package that has been on the World Wide Web for a little more than a year. Since the Toolkit was posted, it’s been translated into eight languages and accessed by thousands of browsers worldwide.
Right Place, Right Time
The Toolkit began with the idea that “someone should do something” for people who wanted to create more sustainable communities at a grassroots level but had no idea how. McKeown’s work with CGEE, a sub-unit of UT’s Energy Environment and Resources Center, revolves around the “elusive and large concept” of sustainability.
As she began work on the online HTML and PDF formats of the Toolkit, the project took on a life of its own. “I was at the right place at the right time,” she says. “Too many good things happened all at once to be a coincidence.”
People who work in the field felt that the lack of good models and processes to help teachers include sustainability in their classrooms prevented the concept from taking root. Though she knew many models were possible and that many models are necessary, the process had to start somewhere. So McKeown took on the task of developing something that might, at least, begin a cycle of development.
She enlisted the help of colleagues, among them, Chuck Hopkins.
“When Rosalyn started to build the project, she asked me for some advice. I was someone to talk things through with,” says Hopkins, of York University in Toronto, who chair’s the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) efforts to reorient teacher education to address sustainability. “The magic of the Toolkit is that it is readable. It makes sense. It addresses the issues.”
Cultural Relevance
Many truly great concepts of the human world, such as democracy and justice, are hard to define and have multiple expressions in cultures around the world—from the Toolkit introduction.
“What was overwhelming for me,” Hopkins says, “is the notion that there are 59 million teachers in the world. How do you retrain that many people and with no budget? Our approach was to do the reverse. Instead of assuming all those teachers were in need of retraining, we took the approach that all had something to contribute. Rosalyn would identify what sustainability is and get them thinking of what it meant in their local contexts.”
Teachers could then build on their strengths. If they, for instance, teach language arts and their ability is literacy, they could change their reading lists for students to include pieces that discuss sustainability.
“No one group, no one association, no one discipline owns the concept of sustainability. We all contribute the best we can,” Hopkins says. “The Toolkit says ‘here are specific things you can do,’ in plain language. It offers hope.”
And the evidence bears him out.
Between February and September of 2000, the first seven months of the Toolkit’s online life, its resources were accessed nearly 19,000 times. Visitors came to the site from more than 3,000 distinct Internet addresses. And that was all with no publicity and without the site having been registered with any search engine. It got 4,000 hits in the first eight weeks alone, McKeown says.
Last fall in Toronto, a gathering of officials from 24 nations used the Toolkit to “get everyone on the same page” concerning teacher education. It is now required reading for some 360,000 pre-service teachers in India. McKeown has fielded requests for permission to translate the documents into eight languages so far, and that’s just fine with her.
“The material is not copyrighted in any way,” McKeown says. “All we ask is that you please cite us as the source. Many translations are modifications as well, which is also appropriate. Education for sustainable development, if it is to be effective, must be locally relevant and culturally appropriate. So the modifications go on, and that’s really important. We can tuck our egos aside. Someone said this may be the most used and least cited educational document out there.”
The reason it is so highly used, she explains, is partly that the content is badly needed, but also because it is accessible. The documents are available in HTML and PDF formats and are designed to download quickly even on older and slower computers.
Information for All
“The Web is a great equalizer,” McKeown says. “Before the Web, someone in a remote village would write for a publication from another part of the world and hope the letter got there. Then the provider would mail it back, if it was still in print. Then weeks or months later, it might arrive. That was an expensive and time-consuming process.
“Now anyone who is online can get on his or her computer and download the publication or read it off the screen. There is no ink or paper required. There is no time lag. Really, it is amazing that people now have access to international libraries when before the Web they had no access to anything. It is the great educational equalizer.”
McKeown, who serves as secretariat for the UNESCO chair that Hopkins heads, just returned to EERC from a one-year appointment as a visiting associate professor on the faculty of education at York University. There, she taught undergraduate science-methods courses and a graduate level sustainability course. She also worked with the York Seneca Institute for Science, Technology, and Education.
Her goal now, she says, is to update the Toolkit to incorporate things she has learned in the past year.
Sustainability education has “got to be a part of radical change and social transformation to re-educate us on how we live our lives,” she says. “It is a bucket that needs to be filled. Buckets get filled one drop at a time—with drops of blood, sweat, and tears often times—but I felt something had to be done. I hope my work will spark an interest in someone else who can take this in a new direction, and maybe their work will spark someone else in turn.”•
For more information contact Rosalyn McKeown, CGEE, The University of Tennessee, 311 Conference Center Building, Knoxville, TN 37996-4134, or call 865-974-1880. Visit the ESD Toolkit at <http://www.esdtoolkit.org>.
As
U.S. farmers watch commodity prices fall, alternative crops—among them, plants
that can be turned into energy—are taking root among researchers in East
Tennessee.
By Kris Christen
Alternative crops like switchgrass and hybrid poplar and willow trees could breathe new life into depressed farm commodity prices and at the same time help reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil, according to researchers at the University of Tennessee (UT) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).
These products would be mixed with coal and burned in conventional power plants or processed into ethanol, a cleaner-burning alternative to gasoline. This potential has caught the eye of the federal government and could put UT in line to receive additional funding for research into these and other new uses for farm commodities.
Over the past several years, the market for traditional crops such as corn, cotton, wheat, soybeans, sorghum, oats, and rice has almost disappeared, with prices barely above the cost of producing the crops, says Marie Walsh, task leader for integrated systems analysis in ORNL’s Biomass Feedstock Development Program.
“U.S. agriculture desperately needs a new product, and energy is a possibility,” Walsh says. Moreover, while solving problems with energy supply and agricultural income, these crops could be put in place in a way that reduces erosion and chemical runoff.
Savings Abound
Converting U.S. crop fields to these bio-energy products wouldn’t cost much more than is already being paid out to farmers in the form of direct subsidies, according to numbers researchers are running at UT’s Agricultural Policy Analysis Center (APAC).
In 2000, federal farm subsidies were at an all-time high, says Daniel De La Torre Ugarte, an APAC assistant research professor. In fact, at $22.9 billion, subsidies made up almost half of farm income last year, De La Torre Ugarte says.
“Introducing bioenergy crops could allow prices for traditional crops to rise as high as 10–25 percent above the current prices,” De La Torre Ugarte says. The prices would increase as supply of these crops declined while demand remained constant. And with more than 100 million crop acres now lying fallow in the United States and real crop prices at all-time low levels, “we’d still be able to take care of food and feedstock production,” without a significant impact on consumers’ food bills.
In reaching these conclusions, De La Torre Ugarte and Daryll Ray, APAC’s director, looked at the performance of the U.S. agricultural sector from 1996, the year most current farm legislation was enacted, to 2001, figuring in historical price levels, planting levels, and various price scenarios for bioenergy crops.
The researchers say, if bioenergy crops had been available to farmers in 1996 and if switchgrass had yielded prices of $35–$40 per dry ton, the average price of corn would have risen 20 cents a bushel, soybeans 90 cents, wheat 48 cents, and cotton—one of Tennessee’s most important crops—5 cents a pound. In each case, prices would have remained above the loan rate, the price that triggers federal farm subsidies, resulting in annual net farm income increases of roughly $5 billion from 1996 to 2001 and annual average savings of about $1.8 billion, De La Torre Ugarte says.
In other words, “what we’ve found is that, yes, the agricultural sector has the capacity to produce [bioenergy crops], farmers will be better off, and the government will save a significant amount of money,” he says. And shifting some of these savings toward the adoption of bioenergy crops would lower their cost, making them more competitive with fossil fuels, which currently help generate more than half of the electricity produced in the United States, Walsh says.
UT’s Expertise Tapped
APAC’s expertise in modeling various agricultural policy scenarios, combined with UT’s research on bioproducts and connections to ORNL’s biomass feedstocks program, have helped to single out the university for new federal funding, according to Tom Klindt, associate dean of UT’s Agricultural Experiment Station. The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved $700,000, with more money potentially in the pipeline, for UT, South Dakota State University, Oklahoma State University, and Oregon State University, states where the agricultural sector is struggling, Klindt says.
Moreover, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Energy (DOE) have long looked toward UT’s agricultural policy analyses. This is particularly true since 1998 when DOE approached the USDA about working together to determine the potential for widespread adoption of energy crops, as well as their likely impact on the rest of the agricultural sector, De La Torre Ugarte says. The goal, he notes, is a close synergism between USDA’s objectives to increase farmers’ incomes and DOE’s objectives to provide additional domestic sources of clean, inexpensive energy.
From Theory to Reality
Now that researchers have demonstrated that farmers could produce a significant and reliable supply of bioenergy crops, the next phase is to address the logistics and challenges of converting switchgrass into energy as well as determining the capacity of power plants to burn biomass products along with coal, De La Torre Ugarte says.
For instance, transporting harvested switchgrass to processing plants could engender significant costs because it is bundled into heavy bales. New research efforts are looking at pelletizing or changing the density of switchgrass so that transportation costs can be reduced, De La Torre Ugarte says.
Furthermore, farmers will have to undergo a significant education process. While farmers have traditionally produced crops for either the food or feed markets, the new crops will have a different market–namely energy production. “We have to convince farmers that there will be a market for energy crops and that utilities or ethanol producers will be willing to buy such products,” De La Torre Ugarte says.
In addition to selling farmers on the idea of raising energy crops, the fact that switchgrass is a perennial rather than an annual crop means the decision to plant it represents a long-term commitment. “Usually, if I’m planting cotton, corn, or soybeans, my planting decision is based on prices I can expect this year,” De La Torre Ugarte says. With switchgrass, “I’m planting for 10 years,” he notes.
Staying the Course
New contracts or long-term arrangements also may have to be set up between farmers and utilities to ensure a steady supply of feedstocks, as well as reasonable prices for farmers, De La Torre Ugarte says.
“This way, if prices for corn or wheat skyrocket for a couple of years, farmers aren’t tempted to wipe out all their switchgrass production and go back to corn, because by doing that they’d jeopardize the reliability of feedstock supplies and the survivability of the bioenergy industry,” he adds.
Some regulatory elements need to be addressed as well, De La Torre Ugarte notes. For instance, if coal plant operators do decide to co-fire coal and switchgrass, the facility may not be licensed for switchgrass and consequently would have to go through a whole new certification process with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“They may or may not be willing to do that, because there may be some processes in the coal plant that aren’t up to current standards,” De La Torre Ugarte says. “They may not want to jeopardize their certification status just to burn switchgrass.”
The biggest challenge of all, though, is cost, according to Walsh, because, compared with the market cost of fossil fuels, biomass products are more expensive.
There’s a caveat, however: “What you pay at the pump doesn’t necessarily represent the environmental cost of fuel,” Walsh says. Start comparing the two based on a lifecycle assessment of environmental impacts, and biomass and fossil fuels start evening out, according to Walsh. “You pay the full environmental cost eventually [in poorer health], just not when you buy a gallon of gas or flip on your light switch.”
She also points out that the development of fossil fuels was heavily subsidized in the beginning. “So it’s not like this is a new concept. We think this can be a win-win situation and that the opportunities are out there,” Walsh says. “We need to be willing to put forth a bit of an investment into it, but the payoff is there if we do.”•
For more information contact Daniel De La Torre Ugarte, Agricultural Policy Analysis Center, The University of Tennessee, 310 Morgan Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996, or call 865-974-7407.
Crops such as switchgrass, hybrid poplars, and hybrid willows may one day develop into a major market, with researchers foreseeing their use in a wide range of products–from liquid transportation fuels to paper to plastic precursors to electricity.
All of these fast-growing crops are native to the United States, with the range of switchgrass, a perennial grass, extending from the Rockies to the East Coast and from Canada to Mexico, according to Marie Walsh, task leader for integrated systems analysis in the Biomass Feedstock Development Program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Poplars grow pretty much everywhere, whereas willows are limited to the eastern United States.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s main interest in these crops lies in their potential to replace fossil fuels, says Janet Cushman, manager of ORNL’s Biomass Feedstock Development Program. Most of ORNL’s focus to date has been on switchgrass, which can be co-fired, or burned jointly, with coal to produce cleaner electricity than coal-fired power plants currently produce.
"Co-firing biomass requires only a minimum investment strategy, and it’s one of the cheapest ways for utilities to reduce their carbon emissions," one of the biggest contributors to climate change, Cushman says.
Another use of switchgrass is ethanol production. Because it’s a fibrous crop, switchgrass can be broken down into sugars and fermented into ethanol, a cleaner-burning fuel than gasoline. And with the phase-out of the MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether) gas additive, ethanol use as a fuel oxygenate is bound to increase, because it cuts down air pollution, Walsh says.
The researchers are looking not only at energy crops, but a full range of other resources like agricultural residues, wood material that’s thrown away in municipal solid waste, and mill residues for use in coal-fired power plants and ethanol production.
For instance, in no-till parts of the Midwest where yields are heavy, harvested fields are often covered with more residues, such as cornstalks, than are necessary for erosion control and even for soil carbon cycling, Cushman says. "It appears that some of that could be available for energy and still maintain a sustainable crop production system."
Other residues tend to be those left over from processing, such as bark at the paper mill and cotton gin waste. All the costs of collecting these wastes into one spot have already been paid, and they tend to be a waste-disposal problem, Cushman says.
Researchers are even looking at residues out West where
forests often burn out of control. Some of these fires could be avoided, Cushman
says, if thinning of non-commercial wood were carried out on a regular basis.
Not only could an energy use be derived for these resources, but the money
gleaned from this use could at least partially subsidize the fireproofing of
forests, she says.
