New Energy Economics: Challenges To Biomass Processing

Cattlenetwork.com
04/08/2010 03:57PM

The demand continues to grow for cellulosic biofuel production, as well as blending biofuel with coal in electrical power and heating plants. New biomass harvesting projects being conducted by University of Wisconsin agricultural and biosystems engineers Kevin Shinners and Tom Hoffman and a Mississippi State University team lead by Jeremiah Davis highlight some of the challenges that farmers are going to face in processing and delivering biomass materials that will replace coal.

The goal of the Wisconsin project is to develop a one-pass biomass field machine that will both harvest a crop and produce a biomass cube. At the moment, most biomass is harvested by farmers and then transported to regional centers for further processing and densification. These centers may pellet or cube the material. The advantage of a one-pass, in-field machine is that biomass doesn't have to baled, which saves both energy and time. Also, a regional processing center won't have to de-twine the bales before processing.

The machine that both the Wisconsin and Mississippi research teams are using is a 1970s-era John Deere 425 hay cuber. These machines originally were produced for commercial alfalfa growers. John Deere only built 400 of these specialized machines and less than 100 are known to exist today.

Read more