Creating a magazine for an emerging industry is interesting. The last issue of Biomass Magazine is an example, covering several developments in depth and touching on topics that no doubt will become feature stories in the future.

Colleague Anna Austin, for example, answered my questions in her story "Sprucing up Wood Waste," about how some projects can use demolition and creosoted wood for feedstocks, when so many I've talked to make a big point that they are using clean wood. Of course, they're required to meet their permitting obligations, but there are projects utilizing recycled wood. Mueller Pallets in Sioux Falls, S.D., recycles wood pallets and accepts demolition wood. It's going to supply up to 350 tons of wood chips to power Poet's ethanol plant in Chancellor, S.D. Enerkem in Montreal is using creosote-treated wood, and has a commercial-scale plant going up in Quebec in partnership with GreenField Ethanol.

In "Cleansing and Reforming Syngas", Ron Kotrba covers the work of four research alliances that have received grants from the U.S. DOE to optimize thermochemical biofuels production. Cleansing and reforming syngas and maintaining catalyst function is the challenge to overcome.

Contributor Stephen Paley deals with a different kind of challenge in his article, "A Multi-Prong Approach to Carbon Neutrality." He outlines a number of feedstock developments in the search for carbon neutrality. Using forage sorghum, for example, would use less than 10 percent of U.S. farm acreage to produce enough biomass to replace all U.S. imported oil with cellulosic ethanol, he says. He discusses other new feedstocks such as elephant grass and microalgae. "Innovations needed for industry development may go unrecognized if they come from small companies," he adds. "This daunting obstacle must be overcome to achieve sustainable, carbon-neutral fuel production."

Finding promising projects to report on is sometimes a challenge. Feel free to tell us about projects, or issues, we should be writing about.