North Dakota State University Economist Helps Sort Out Biofuel’s Future

February 24, 2010

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by Mikkel Pates (AgWeek) Need some help in deciding what to make into biofuels and what the government should be spending on it? If you’re a North Dakotan, you’ve hired Cole Gustafson to do some of this thinking for you. Gustafson is North Dakota’s biofuel economist — a position expressly created by the North Dakota Legislature in 2007. Gustafson, who has been at NDSU since 1986, took on this role in 2007.

...“As a public educator you want to be neutral,” Gustafson says. “Certainly there are downsides to these technologies. But we need to alert the general population of what these opportunities are, as well as the risks.”

Two of those opportunities are energy beets and biomass.

Energy beets: The energy beet project is simply making ethanol from a kind of beet that is designed not for its sugar content for human consumption, but for its potential for producing ethanol.

...Sourcing biomass: Another type of energy potential is from cellulose.

“The cellulosic source is creating a buzz in the industry — switchgrass, crop residues, timber,” Gustafson says. READ MORE