UC Merced Scientist Honored for Biofuels Research
(Central Valley Business Times) The mass production of biofuels could be a major step toward eliminating dependence on fossil fuels, but a number of factors have stood in the way, including the argument against using productive agricultural land for fuel instead of food and the cutting of natural forests for the purpose of growing crops to turn into fuel.
Now, Elliott Campbell, a professor in the School of Engineering at the University of California, Merced, hopes to find ways around those problems.
Mr. Campbell has received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award, through which he’ll receive $407,588 over five years to study the capacity of abandoned agricultural lands to generate crops used to produce biofuels.
…Mr. Campbell’s project will begin with a study that will calculate the total area of abandoned agricultural lands in the United States and Brazil. He will then use field tests, historical crop figures and remote sensing data to estimate how much biofuel could be produced using these lands. Finally, he will determine the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted during the production and transportation of the biofuels to help determine the environment’s net gain.
…The study will analyze the potential production of several different biofuel applications — cellulosic ethanol, corn ethanol, sugar cane ethanol, dedicated biomass electricity facilities and biomass co-firing with coal — on the abandoned ag lands while also determining the most effective locations to limit the greenhouse gas emissions created in production. READ MORE
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