A Kiss for Renewable Fuels | Green Energy News

July 23, 2006 – Vol.11 No.18

A KISS FOR RENEWABLE FUELS.

Hydropower, wind energy, solar thermal energy, wood and corn stoves and furnaces, pellet stoves, waste wood fired power plants: all relatively low-tech successful renewable energy technologies.

Yet some renewable energies that are being sought are very high tech and may not be successful for decades, and even then only with considerable investment from both private and public sectors. Hydrogen fuel cells come into this category as does the current effort to develop various forms of cellulosic ethanol.

One of those forms of cellulosic ethanol that’s being researched is ethanol derived from switchgrass, essentially a hardy weed that can and does grow just about everywhere with no help from humans.

According to a story in the Baltimore Sun, at least one researcher from the University of Maryland thinks the best thing to do with switchgrass is just burn it for fuel in a big boiler, not necessarily bother turning it into liquid fuel.

Ken Staver working the University’s Wye Research and Education Center on Maryland’s Eastern Shore has been burning bushels of dried switchgrass cut from an unfertilized plot. He uses a straw burning boiler and saves the agricultural research station 700 - 800 gallons of oil each winter. At today’s prices that’s $1700 - 2000. He estimates only one acre is needed to grow the equivalent energy of 500 gallons of fuel oil each year.

Just burning the stuff for energy doesn’t require any processing and distilling. It’s just allowed to grow, then cut, dried, baled and burnt. Switchgrass, too, is a perennial. It doesn’t require replanting every year.

Stave admits that the straw-fired boiler - a FARM 2000 from Teisen Products in the UK - is a little crude and could use some efficiency improvements and says that switchgrass could also be pelletized and used in home pellet stoves.

Although he doesn’t suggest - at least in the article - that switchgrass could be used as fuel for power plants, it seems possible that it could be. Switchgrass used directly as fuel on a large scale would be renewable, greenhouse gas neutral, and could displace oil, coal and natural gas in some power plants.

Low tech, for sure, but with renewables there is one mantra that seems to work: Keep It Simple Stupid. And, this technology is here today at comparatively negligible research and investment cost.

The article Acres of Cheap Fuel for Farmers was published on July 28, 2006 and written by Frank Roylance. Visit the Sun at http://www.baltimoresun.com/ , the Wye Research and Education Center and http://agresearch.umd.edu/RECs/WREC/index.cfm Teisen products Ltd http://www.farm2000.co.uk/