New machines, new crops | More attention to new fuel sources
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Agricultural engineers need to start thinking about new machinery for a new era of agriculture, they were told at a North American conference earlier this year.
Allen Rider, former head of Case New Holland’s farm equipment division in North America and now head of the U.S. renewable fuel initiative 25 x 25 Alliance, wants to see a quarter of American fuel supplied by renewable sources by 2025.
However, he said not enough research is taking place in a sector on which he believes the American economy’s recovery from recession hinges.
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“We’ve been working since 2004 with this goal, about eight percent per year growth in renewable fuels, and we are more or less on track, but some of the goal posts are moving,” he said during the American Society of Agricultural and Biotechnical Engineers meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, this winter.
“The next few years are ones that will benefit from significant innovation, the kind that comes from engineering.”
He told North America’s top agricultural engineers that they hold the keys to a successful future for renewable fuel.
“This is about more than the agriculture business in North America. This is about our security as a society. We need access to fuel, food and a sound economy. And we can grow it,” he said.
“This is a $700 billion industry.… Ethanol now employs 400,000 people. It didn’t exist a decade or so ago.”
He said American energy use is continuing to rise, up four fold from 2004, while renewable sources, despite increasing in volume at a steady rate, make up only eight percent of supplies.
“In 2004, renewables were six percent, with half coming from hydro. I don’t see us building any new dams in the future,” he said.
“Eleven percent comes from wind, and that will grow. It’s up 500 percent since 2004, but it is localized with half coming from Texas and all of it needs government support. It can’t grow in most regions.”
His organization says wind powered electricity is also crippled by a shortage of high capacity power lines in the West and the High Plains.
“Solar needs more public support than wind.… Geothermal has potential, but so far it’s only one percent of the solution,” he said. “So where are the new sources to come from? Fields, that’s where. It will be biomass.”
Rider said the future of farm mach-inery and farming will be found in biomass production and collection.
“Straw, cobs and stover, new crops and their production tools. And the technology to efficiently convert biomass into liquid fuels. This is the time to be looking to the future of technology,” he said.
Steven Mirshak of DuPont agrees with Rider’s assessment of future needs in biomass. He said at a meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, last month that cellulosic biofuel blending will grow from almost nothing in 2012 to 80 billion litres by 2022, which will require as much as 200 million tonnes of cellulosic feedstock.
The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the cellulosic fuel industry will require 117 million dry tonnes of perennial grasses by 2030 and a doubling of the currently available 76 million tonnes of agricultural residue. Meeting this requirement would potentially rely on more than half of North America’s farmland, he added.
Mirshak feels the starting point for early production will focus on existing grain ethanol facilities, where cellulose can be added to the production stream.
Pioneer is working with one such group, Lincolnway Energy, at Nevada, Iowa.
“There’s a lot of technology yet to be developed, but this is where the future of fuel will come from,” he said.
