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2007/12/13

Energy bill includes biofuel such as prairie grasses

Filed under: — Stormwind @ 11:55 am

The energy bill currently in the U.S. Senate would require 21 billion gallons of biofuel from sources including prairie grasses by 2022.  Perhaps this will spur usage of diverse tallgrass prairie plantings for biofuel and carbon sequestration!

From a CNN article

"It also would rapidly ramp up the required production of ethanol, eventually to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase. At least 21 billion gallons must be from feedstock other than corn such as prairie grasses and wood chips."

2 responses to “Energy bill includes biofuel such as prairie grasses”

  1. Stormwind says:

    Don Hennick said:

    Lets give it a name: I say Global Carbon March inter our exhaust

    I don’t see any mention on your web site of Pyrolysis or Agrichar . Do you have projects in the planning stage on the carbon sequestration front?

    The more you learn about this ancient technique of soil restoration the more you’ll see how elegant this solution can be for carbon sequestration, for us all.

    Imagine putting the carbon tax funds into the hands of millions of peasant farmers all around the world, building their soil and their net worth at the same time. Please search “AGRICHAR” “BIOCHAR” or “TERRA PRETA”

  2. Stormwind says:

    No carbon sequestration projects in planning currently but we have many concrete ideas.

    With carbon sequestration only trading at ~ $2 per ton on the Chicago Climate Exchange I don’t think it can provide enough funding for prairie restoration, but if it increases due to mandatory carbon restrictions and goes up to ~$30 per ton like on the European Climate Exchange then I think the economics could support it. And that is without considering the possibility of cellulosic biofuel harvesting of prairie plantings.

    At first reading the wikipedia pages on Pyrolysis and Biochar don’t sound compatible with prairie restoration (no forest to char and burn, just prairie plants). I wonder if the blackland prairie soil created by prairies (prairie vegetation growing, decomposing, and burning combined with prairie plant roots and soil biology) has any similarities to terra preta?

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