Biofuels Research Project Aims To Study Sustainable Development

by Nino Marchetti (EarthTechling) One of the major issues facing those growing biofuel crops are finding suitable locations where they can be grown sustainably, avoiding competition with food crops for land resources. A new renewable energy research project being undertaken by Arizona State University researchers aims to address this problem.
The research project, funded through a nearly $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation through its Water Sustainability and Climate program, will work to identify locations across the United States where perennial biomass energy crops (e.g., miscanthus and switchgrass) could be grown. It is being approached from an interdisciplinary undertaking over five years, integrating what the university says are “physical, agricultural and economic elements embedded within a high-performance computing (HPC) framework” to achieve its tasks.
The project will look what’s termed sustainable “hot-spots,” or areas best-suited for expansion of perennial bioenergy crops. READ MORE and MORE (Biofuels Journal)