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Wanted to make sure you saw this op-ed that ran in the Missoulian this week by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on helping secure our country's energy independence through home-grown bioenergy.
Biomass can provide our country energy independence
The concept of getting energy from plant materials – producing bioenergy – may hold only vague meaning for many Americans. But already, biofuels saved drivers almost 90 cents per gallon at the pump last year, and they are helping secure our country’s energy independence. Moving forward, developing of new sources of renewable energy could be a game-changer: controlling fuel prices for all Americans, and creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, particularly in our rural communities.
Americans know that reducing our dependence on foreign oil is important for our economic and national security. To harvest the available energy from plant waste like corn stover, and new biomass sources including switchgrass and algae, will require the efforts of our brightest scientists, our best companies, and strategic investments in research. The challenge is to identify feedstocks and processes to produce biofuels in every region of the country.
One area of great promise – especially in the Mountain West – is woody biomass.
Woody biomass takes advantage of fast-growing trees such as poplar, as well as scrap wood from forests and sawmills to help produce renewable energy. These materials can be used to heat homes and schools, to reduce the carbon emissions of furnaces, to generate electricity, and could one day produce ethanol for our gas tanks.
To help make woody biomass a serious player in our country’s energy portfolio, USDA is coordinating research into wood products including methods for efficient harvesting and development of conversion technologies. USDA is in a unique position to help establish and commercialize the profitable production of energy from woody biomass. We have research facilities and are partnered with universities located throughout the country. Their work to develop feedstocks and processes to produce energy from wood that is appropriate to the region where it grows is the key to successful, cost-effective bioenergy. The added benefit is that such projects create good, sustainable jobs in rural communities.
Today, part of our research is focused on the wood itself – testing short rotation woody cropping systems, and developing genetic varieties that grow quickly, use fewer resources and are resistant to pests. For example, USDA supports research to unlock the genetic makeup of certain pine trees to understand how to accelerate their growth and usefulness for biofuels. Increased planting of these trees will also contribute to carbon sequestration and help to mitigate the effects of climate change.
In addition to advancing methods for growing wood specifically for energy production, USDA researchers are looking at systems for using wood waste and residue from forest restoration as marketable energy products. This is a particularly exciting opportunity, because better markets for the products of forest restoration activities will reduce the risk of wild fires and create new jobs for rural residents.
At the same time, we are helping put this research and wood-to-energy conversion into practice on the ground. Just last week, USDA announced nearly 20 grants to help encourage these sorts of projects. In Missoula, we are supporting work to build a boiler for the University of Montana that will convert wood to heat and electricity to provide 60 percent of the University’s peak heating demands. Two other USDA-funded projects in Seeley Lake and Columbia Falls will help produce clean, renewable electric power while creating jobs producing energy out of the state’s forest resources.
And we have supported more than 100 other projects across the country in the last few years like these to help create jobs producing green energy from wood.
At USDA, we have placed a strong emphasis on renewable fuels development to generate and sustain rural jobs and prosperity. Wood-to-energy solutions and a forest restoration economy are critical components of this strategy.
Embracing innovation to produce home-grown bioenergy will help us meet our energy needs and create jobs throughout the nation without emptying our pocketbooks to buy foreign oil.
In the future, don’t be surprised if the energy we’ve been searching for all these years is growing right here in Montana, in a nearby forest or in your own backyard.
Tom Vilsack is secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
