Media Briefing Touts Bioenergy

By: Jamie Creamer

Outside the tent, a small plot of eight-foot-tall switchgrass swayed in a chilly late-February wind.

Inside the tent, Auburn University Interim President Ed Richardson was underscoring the significance of the event that had brought state and federal lawmakers and state and national news media to the middle of a rain-soaked field at the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station's E.V. Smith Research Center in Shorter.

"Today marks a change in direction for agriculture in many parts of the state and a change, in my view, in the mission of agriculture at Auburn University," Richardson said.

The event was a bioenergy briefing and demonstration orchestrated by Auburn University energy crops professor David Bransby.

During the briefing, U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions called the nation's dependence on foreign oil a threat to America's national security. Bransby assured the crowd of 300-plus that it is technologically possible to produce 30 percent of U.S. transportation fuels from agriculture and forestry; and both maintained that Alabama resources, and research at Auburn, will play a big part in that.

The information-packed briefing came on the heels of President George W. Bush's 2006 State of the Union address, in which he said the nation is "addicted to oil" and called for funds to be made available for research on producing ethanol "not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks or switchgrass."

That was music to the ears of Bransby, the nation's foremost authority on switchgrass. Bransby has been studying the native prairie grass as an energy crop for 20 years and has been advocating its potential for nearly that long.

His and other scientists' research at Auburn indicates that biofuels can be produced from switchgrass and other agricultural and forestry crops and byproducts, including poultry litter, and that the development of such an industry would both reduce the nation's dependence on foreign oil and, by giving farmers new sources of income, strengthen America's farm economy.

In Alabama alone, Bransby said, the economic impact of ethanol production would be tremendous in providing markets for the 1.5 million tons of poultry litter produced each year, as well as the state's abundant supply of wood chips and cotton and corn stalks. All that has been needed, Bransby long has said, has been for the government to finance construction of a commercial refinery that would demonstrate to private industry the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of biofuels.

That should happen now, Douglas Faulkner, assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, said at the briefing, as he announced the federal government's intent to make $160 million available for the construction of, not one, but three biorefineries to show that such facilities are financially viable. He said the goal will be to get ethanol to a price of $1.07 a gallon by 2012.

Faulkner noted that the Bush administration has mandated that 30 percent of the nation's transportation fuel be produced from biomass by the year 2030. According to Bransby, a recent joint study by the DOE and the U.S. Department of Agriculture determined that agriculture and forestry together could produce 1.3 billion tons of biomass annually, enough to reach the 30-percent target.

Bransby told the crowd that he often gets questioned as to whether farmers could be counted on to deliver biomass consistently, year after year.

"That question irritates me," Bransby said. "Have you ever sat down to dinner at night and had no food on the table? American farmers are among the most innovative people in the world. If you give them a fair market, they will deliver."

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