Switchgrass and Ethanol production?

There is no such thing as a "free ride". It has been a "cheap ride" in this country for a long time. Those days are over and the "ride" is going to get more and more expensive. Everyone in this country needs to be more conservative of fuel, whatever the source. It should this country's number one priority.

Today, it is an experiement, & does not produce more energy per gallon than you use to get there.

It has the _potential_ to produce more ethanol per acre than corn grain does, but that is only a theory today. It is not actual.

They need to come up with better enzymes to make it work more efficiently & more completely.

They feel 5-10 years it should be a _real_ thing with switch grass.

Note that corn stover (leaves, stalks, cobs) can also be used to produce ethanol, if we develop the right enzymes. Then we come back to a lot more ethanol per acre from corn, if we ferment both the grain & the stover.

Several farm magazines have had reports about the infant state of switch grass.

It appears it grows (well yields...) much better in southern USA, so little help to me here in MN.

It is very, very miserable to harvest - this has been a universal statement. No using the beat up old NH square baler to come up with the millions of tons of this stuff needed to fuel a plant. Seems a regular sized plant would need a semi load of switchgrass every 7 minutes 'round the clock. That is a _lot_ of volume....

It is like a summer grass - very hard to establish, miserable actually to get it to grow. Once established tho it is then very persistant.

I like all the media reports that talk about switch grass as if it were a real thing today. It's all theory today, but they hope to get there in a decade or so.

Likewise the sugar cane - Brazil has a lot of rainforest that doesn't treat regular crops very well - disease & fungus & such - but is _perfect_ for growing high-yield sugar cane, so naturally they are way ahead on that - it works there.

Corn is what works in the USA. In a few years, bio-mass from cornstalks, rice, wood waste, and switch grass might work even better.

--->Paul

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Turn your switchgrass into pellets for direct burning in an industrial stationary burner or sell it to your nearby landfill. There is a landfill near me, they have piped it with Big O below the landfill soil seal. Plans are to vacume off the methane for burning. In fact they have already done a pilot project. One of the problems I see, modern day landfills don't have enough organic material. Municipalities are sorting out the compostables, leaving a high percentage of plastic going into landfills. Landfills are buying expensive fluf as a compaction material, to pack down all this plastic.

Basically as I see it, just maybe we can fertilize switchgrass with sewage, recycle the plastic and put all the compostables, switchgrass included back in the landfill, then we'll have a real power source. Doesn't take a whole bunch of sophisticated equipment either. Basically the one I saw running was a 150 hp natural gas engine off 500' of Big O, and not a very organic landfill either.

The biggest problem I see with switchgrass over corn as grain is that I believe the volume of switchgrass will be signicantly greater per gallon of ethanol production and that storage space gets outrageous. Then the switchgrass has to baled and those bales tossed about, loaded, hauled, and unloaded, with far less ease than augering and dumping grain. Ethanol plants, even corn based, tend to not store more than about a 1 week supply of grain. So we farmers have to deliver weekly on their schedule from OUR storage. When switchgrass takes several times the storage volume, storing and hauling gets to a much greater task. Switchgrass grows only in summer (a warm season grass) and yields only one cutting and you have to careful to not cut too close to the ground or you kill it.

If my switchgrass patch wasn't usually too wet for a grain crop, I'd plant it in something else. Wet is supposed to be best for switchgrass.

Then there is the LITTLE problem that the enzymes needed to convert cellulose to sugar just barely work, without the effiency needed for production ethamol plants today. There are beliefs in the industry that adequately effective enzymes will be developed "real soon now". I don't have inside information.

Right now cellulosic ethanol is just beyond a "Pie in the Sky" dream. It may never work well, but if it works it may work equally well on corn stover, hay, switchgrass, wood scraps, kudzu, and scrap paper, if the inks don't kill the enzymes.

One plant has been announced in northern Iowa and in the last couple weeks on was announced to be built in Georgia to work with wood scraps.

Gerald J.

Either way, it certainly won't work in the U.S. We can't grow the sugar cane, and we also use a lot more fuel - for industry, and for jerking around - than Brazil does.

Yes, the U.S. certainly is behind in certain technologies - but many of them are bogus anyway.

Germany and the Netherlands have invested heavily into wind and solar-electric which DOES make sense, long-term. In regard to the often hyped-up "new" alternative fuels - I don't know of a single one that has been proven to provide a sustained yield over time. Many deplete soils, and use more petroleum to process and transport - than the petroleum fuel if it had been used directly.

The problem is that cellulosic ethanol production is in the very early research stages. Researchers are looking for the right process to make all of the efficiency theories reality. If it happens it will be a good thing. It is possible that in the future all of our organic garbage could be used to produce ethanol, now then, we would have found the mother load.

This whole deal is nothing new, it has just been brought to the front burner because of the fuel vs food debate.