Bond makes biomass push
Columbia Daily Tribune
T. J. Greaney
August 23, 2010
Missouri is a locomotive that is acting too much like a horse-drawn carriage.
That was the upshot of a discussion today headlined by Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., who is looking for ways to unleash the potential of the state’s renewable energy sector before he leaves office at the end of the year.
Bond painted a picture of Missouri that included vast forests of untapped “scrub timber” in the south and fields rich with corn and native grasses in the north. Missouri, he said, is a veritable powder keg of biomass.
But too often, Bond said, lawmakers are focused on unreliable energy sources such as wind, and they pour money into “green jobs” initiatives that require huge subsidies for the production and installation of a relatively meager amount of solar panels. Lawmakers, he said, tend to shy away from things that must actually be “burned.”
“Well, what the hell do you think happens to that wood if you don’t burn it?” Bond asked in feigned outrage. “It lies on the forest floor, it decomposes and releases carbon dioxide. … Duh!”
Bond pointed to one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries, computer data centers, as a new market for the state’s agriculture and timber industries. Many of these companies have self-imposed mandates to include renewable energy as a part of their energy portfolio.
“Folks, data centers are not going to be powered by hamster wheels,” Bond said.
As if to back that up, Jim Grice, a Kansas City-based attorney who is leading a development team working to attract tenants to Columbia’s Ewing Industrial Park, said he plans to fly to New York tomorrow to meet with an unnamed “Fortune 50 company” interested in building a multibillion-dollar data center in Columbia.
That company, Grice said, wants to build a 100-megawatt renewable energy power production source on site. The company is keenly interested in the possibilities offered by biomass — woodchips, grass and corn stover, among others.
“The biomass opportunity is our opportunity,” Grice told the crowd.
Bolstering Bond’s argument was Gene Garrett of the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry.
In a presentation, Garrett attempted to quantify the untapped potential by showing that less than 10 percent of the state’s 13 million acres of forest is “under a management plan,” meaning it is available for selective, sustainable harvesting.
Garrett said a typical 70-year-old acre of contiguous forest has about 20 tons of material that is typically considered waste products by logging companies. That woody biomass could be used as biomass fuel.
Additionally, Garrett said, the state has more than 1.35 million acres of designated Conservation Reserve Program land, mainly in the north part of the state, which could be used to plant and cultivate millions of tons of native grasses and other biomass materials.
Finally, Garrett pointed out that Missouri has nearly 3 million acres of corn fields that can produce an estimated 7.3 million tons of dry matter known as corn stover each year. The stover provides an ideal product to burn in biomass plants.
Much of this potential, Garrett said, is sitting dormant.
“I’ve made a living off of recognizing opportunities,” Garrett said. “And we collectively in the state of Missouri have an unbelievable opportunity to create a new industry. … I can’t imagine a state that is better positioned than we are.”
