Great map of DOE projects
August 28, 2008
BY Rona Johnson
The U.S. DOE website has a great map of interest to biomass readers titled "Major DOE Biofuels Project Locations."
It summarizes in one place 41 projects, centers and partnerships the DOE is supporting across the United States, giving the names and locations of the cooperators. There's no date on the map, and I spot at least one project that has changed since the map was published. (The folks in Tennessee have dropped Mascoma Corp. which received a grant to develop a cellulosic ethanol plant in Tennessee, and signed a partnership with Dupont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC instead.)
One sees at a glance where the centers of developments are, and the vast areas where there are few - primarily in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, the Heartland of America. That's a pity. The plains states comprise a huge territory with a lot of the marginal land that everyone talks about these days. The potential for growing biomass crops on marginal land is often raised as a counterpoint to the concerns of displacing food production with biofuel feedstocks. Yes, west of the 100th meridian is where rainfall seriously limits yields. It is also a region that could greatly benefit from new biomass crops.
While many of the technologies supported in these DOE projects will end up being applied in many locations, the development of biomass energy requires an understanding of place. Biomass will be grown in agricultural systems that develop around a specific place, with its climate, rainfall, terrain, soils and infrastructure all determining what will be successfully adopted by farmers. One of the hopes is that distributed bio based energy will bring a new prosperity to those farmers in the nation's Heartland. Certainly, corn-based ethanol has given a shot in the arm to the Corn Belt.
As a writer who has covered agriculture in the Upper Midwest for years, I know from experience that familiarity with a place is a pre requisite to properly describing it - and I would argue, a pre requisite to understanding the biomass potential and issues to be faced in developing biomass from the ground up.
It summarizes in one place 41 projects, centers and partnerships the DOE is supporting across the United States, giving the names and locations of the cooperators. There's no date on the map, and I spot at least one project that has changed since the map was published. (The folks in Tennessee have dropped Mascoma Corp. which received a grant to develop a cellulosic ethanol plant in Tennessee, and signed a partnership with Dupont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol LLC instead.)
One sees at a glance where the centers of developments are, and the vast areas where there are few - primarily in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, the Heartland of America. That's a pity. The plains states comprise a huge territory with a lot of the marginal land that everyone talks about these days. The potential for growing biomass crops on marginal land is often raised as a counterpoint to the concerns of displacing food production with biofuel feedstocks. Yes, west of the 100th meridian is where rainfall seriously limits yields. It is also a region that could greatly benefit from new biomass crops.
While many of the technologies supported in these DOE projects will end up being applied in many locations, the development of biomass energy requires an understanding of place. Biomass will be grown in agricultural systems that develop around a specific place, with its climate, rainfall, terrain, soils and infrastructure all determining what will be successfully adopted by farmers. One of the hopes is that distributed bio based energy will bring a new prosperity to those farmers in the nation's Heartland. Certainly, corn-based ethanol has given a shot in the arm to the Corn Belt.
As a writer who has covered agriculture in the Upper Midwest for years, I know from experience that familiarity with a place is a pre requisite to properly describing it - and I would argue, a pre requisite to understanding the biomass potential and issues to be faced in developing biomass from the ground up.
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