Pretreated Biomass for Food and Fuel
by Susanne REtka Schill (Ethanol Producer Magazine) Bruce Dale urges careful thought about energy and agriculture.
A 1-ton-per-day pilot facility on the campus of Michigan State University geared up this spring to produce pretreated biomass for feed trials. It’s part of a demonstration that professor Bruce Dale hopes will show others how pretreating biomass for feeding animals can be successfully integrated with biofuels production, ultimately producing both more food and fuel.
While ethanol skeptics claim it’s obvious that food needs trump the use of agricultural resources for fuel, Dale will tell you biofuels are not optional. As a scientist, he’s ready to back that up with data-based reasoning.
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Dale recently co-authored a peer-reviewed paper for the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology called “Food, Fuel, and Plant Nutrient Use in the Future,” along with an economist, a plant nutritionist and a soil scientist. The authors conclude the world will be capable of meeting its needs for food, fuel and fiber in 40 years, and biofuels can play a key role in fostering more efficient use of land resources.
Looking ahead to 2050, the paper finds that adequate world food production cannot depend upon expansion of harvested area. “Instead, scientists and food producers need to look at the way land is currently used and the best practices for how to move forward,” the CAST committee writes. The paper examines population dynamics, food demand, land use and productivity and the impact of energy and biomass production. The authors include Dale, David Zilberman, department of agricultural and resource economics, University of California-Berkeley, Paul Fixen, International Plant Nutrition Institute, Brookings, S.D., and John Havlin, department of soil science, North Carolina State University.
There is a clear relationship between a country’s wealth and its access to cheap energy, the paper says, pointing out that the “the age of stable, cheap oil is over.” As fossil fuel supplies shrink relative to demand, price volatility is likely to increase. “The world has had cheap food in no small part because it has had cheap energy, led by cheap oil. The production, processing and distribution of all agricultural and food commodities are intimately linked with the price of energy.”
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Many of the cellulosic feedstocks being considered have multiple benefits, he adds. “If we take reasonable care with how we grow them, how we develop them, then over time you get better water quality because perennial grasses improve water quality. You get more fertile soils because grasses improve soils. You get a lot of greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction because they are essentially carbon neutral and, if they are building up soil organic matter, they are probably carbon negative.”
The concerns raised in opposition to biofuels, including food versus fuel and land conversion impacts, are also not being thought through carefully, he says. “Agriculture today is nothing like it was 50 years ago, or 100 years ago,” he says, and it will change again. It isn’t hard to imagine a configuration for agriculture that would provide more food, more fuel and more environmental benefits. “It’s actually quite easy to image win-win-win scenarios once you start thinking that way.”
Dale lays out a vision for the agriculture of the future that will use land resources more efficiently. He points out that currently 85 to 95 percent of U.S. agricultural land is used to feed animals, and not to feed humans directly. There are a number of ways in which biofuel production can utilize biomass resources without competing with feed use, and actually enhancing supplies. Biofuel production would allow the early harvest of feedstocks such as alfalfa and grasses when the protein content is high, utilizing the cellulosic fraction for biofuel production and concentrating the protein for animal feed. Additional feed protein can be coproduced with biofuels via the spent yeast. In addition, a ready market for biomass would stimulate double cropping, turning cover crops utilized for their environmental benefits into cash crops.
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“We underrate people’s ability to produce from the land if they have the right incentives and the right tools,” Dale says. Well-intentioned hunger programs of the past that distributed cheap surplus U.S. grains in developing countries had the unfortunate side effect of undermining local agricultural systems. “Here’s the bottom line. Those are places that are essentially without fossil fuels. They’re too late. They’re not going to get into the fossil-fuel bonanza. We will have burned it all up before Malawi or Mali or Kenya or other places in Africa and elsewhere ever get the chance,” he adds. “The only way they are going to develop and have the living standards we take for granted is to figure out how to produce sustainably—and that means in an environmentally sound way—lots of liquid fuels. That’s only going to come from plant matter. As we get this industry going, we’re going to see some very interesting side benefits for countries that don’t have much in the way of liquid fuels. It will help jump-start a lot of economic development there, in the same way that having the cheap petroleum for so many years did here. It’s not cheap anymore, so we’re suffering from that now. But a lot of places that aren’t blessed with the petroleum we’ve had will be able to grow their own fuel. And, because they’ll be incentivized to do it in a land-efficient way, there will be more food as well.” READ MORE
