# tons of biomass per acre



## mrglock27 (Dec 8, 2003)

I was reading that blackberries brambles can produce 12 tons of biomass plus another 11 tons of dead canes and leaf litter per acre per year. If they were harvested around august when they're covered with berries they would get alot more sugar for making ethanol. Is that alot of biomass compared to other ethanol producing crops?


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

You need the right enzymes to break down & convert the biomass into sugars. So you have several problems:

The sugar from the berries will only get in the way through the enzyme process.

Will anyone ever make the right enzyme/ etc to make blackberry stems/ leaves into sugar? It is certainly not one size fits all with the enzymes - at least to be efficient at it.

Who would ever wish to harvest & handle those things? 

You can harvest almost 6 tons of corn, followed by 4 tons of cornstalks off an acre of ground. This still leaves close to 4 tons of cobs, stalk, & leaves to preserve the soil. Very easy to collect the grain sepreately from the stalks, and the stalks are dry enough to bale & keep.

It will be _real_ hard to compete with that.

Some grasses can tho.

And in specialized areas, rice straw or wheat straw or grass from grass seed production is a waste product that needs to be destroyed. Going to be tough to compete against those options.

Wood waste - bark, chips, sawdust - is a real big product that lumber producing areas would love to find a use for.

But it all depends on which enzymes for which products get developed & super efficient first.

That is how I view ethanol production from non-sugar/starch crops. It's a great theory right now, but needs to be developed into a positive production real world thing.

The logistics of collecting, storing, & transporting the huge volume of biomass will also be quite a problem to work out.

For your brambles, if everyone cuts the green plants in August, what will fuel your ethanol plant next April for example? How do you store the juicy mess you have? And so on. Cornstalk bales or sawdust piles store pretty easily for a year, maybe longer.

We will need to come up with the whole process for it to work.

I like your thinking, see what works. There are some issues to work out with brambles tho! 

--->Paul


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## mrglock27 (Dec 8, 2003)

thanks Paul, you're very knowlegeable about this stuff. If they could just figure out a way to use this super fast growing stuff that's already growing on millions of acres that would be cool. Blackberries, Kudzu, Morning Glory, Scotch Broom, Etc.


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## hillsidedigger (Sep 19, 2006)

After a few seasons of removing the prodiguous biomass, I suspect the yeilds will tend to decrease.


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

hillsidedigger said:


> After a few seasons of removing the prodiguous biomass, I suspect the yeilds will tend to decrease.



I would think so. Those types of plants - no one wants, so they die & fertilize themselves. They recycle. Once on starts removing all the plant material, fertilizer will be needed to keep it productive.

Wouldn't it be odd to fertilize kudzu to make it grow better?  

Someone mentioned grass clippings in a past post. There are tons of that produced by folks who tend to overfertilize their lawn, then don't recycle the grass by mulching it. Would be nice to be able to use that 'crop'.

As well as all the others mentioned here.

--->Paul


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## afrikaner (Sep 5, 2005)

I agree with paul. Also look at sugar beets. They yield impressive amounts of sugars for ethanol.


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## Jim-mi (May 15, 2002)

I thought that the 'cane' from this year is where next years fruit develops. So if you went in and 'clear cut' the field then you would have disrupted the cycle. Yes the roots would still be there to pop up next year..........but.
I wanna stand back and watch as someone does a 'selective cut'..........lol


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## agmantoo (May 23, 2003)

An enzyme has been patented by a firm in Florida that can process pine trees for ethanal production. The amount of biomass that can be produced here in the South in the acid soils of virtually "waste" land is staggering.


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

Cool. I'm for the energy production.

Will be very, um, difficult for the corn ethanol plants up here in my backyard if/when the biomass plants become efficient & out pace the corn plants.

I don't own stock in any, but I do raise corn so I am directly effected by all this.

Will be an interesting ride, to see who wins, who loses in the bio-energy race.

--->Paul


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## Explorer (Dec 2, 2003)

rambler said:


> .
> 
> Wood waste - bark, chips, sawdust - is a real big product that lumber producing areas would love to find a use for.
> 
> --->Paul


Pellets for stoves?


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## Al. Countryboy (Oct 2, 2004)

We heat with wood (logs)and the power company some years bring me loads of these chips that are ran throught a shreder. I use it for mulching. Probably close to 20 loads this year. I have skimmed off the top of these piles and brought buckets full and put into my Ashley heater which has duck work circulating into my house from the sunroom. They seem to do ok if the draft is opened up. The problem is that after you go down 4 or 5 inches in these piles of chips that are mostly from green trees they go through a heat and start breaking down and is wet and want burn. I will be smoking sometimes when dumped off the truck. They are not allowed to leave it in the trucks because of fire hazards. You can see heat coming out of these piles on cold mornings and when you dig down some, it is nice and toasty. I believe for me to make use of these chips for heating, I would have to take my tractor and spread the chips out in a thin layer during the summer to really dry them out. You would also need a fairly large building to store them in to keep them dry or they would start breaking down again. This is still something I may try doing in the future.


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

Seems to me that we are so hung up on ethanol that we forget that biomass can be burned. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just burn burn biomass to create electricity?


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

tinknal said:


> Seems to me that we are so hung up on ethanol that we forget that biomass can be burned. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just burn burn biomass to create electricity?


Depends on what you wish to accomplish. In some cases, yes you are right.

Liquid fuel is pretty efficient in powering a vehicle that can go 400 miles between refueling.

Converting biomass into electric & transmitting it has a lot of losses too, and really is not too efficient. Then to use for transportation, it has to be stored in really inefficient batteries & those need to be lugged around..... I've never really understood the thought that an electric car is somehow 'green'. Batteries are way way too innefficient, and the generation & transmission of electricity is also not very efficent - lots of losses. The only 'green' part of electric cars is that the pollution & efficiency losses happen in another part of the country, all we see are an electric cord so we pat ourselves on the back....

Hauling the biomass to a central boiler costs a lot too. The residue - ashes - is a low-level fertilizer, but not real valuable as far as anyone wanting it. Costs to get rid of it.

Hauling only the grain to an ethanol plant is much more efficient. Hauling away the 'residue' is a feed product, worth hauling away to use as livestock feed.


It's a complex question, what is more efficient, & is tough to look at the big picture & weigh all the different points of it.

Here in southern MN a power company & the state & groups of farmers studied a plan to grow _lots_ of alfalfa, haul the bales to a power plant, seperate the leaves (high protien) from the stems (low protien, high fiber). Then sell the leaves for feed, and burn the stems for power production.

After the expected big govt $$$ were invested to study, it looked like this plan would work on paper & would produce more electricity & feed than it used, with some profit left for all.

At that point people got hurt, as there was some misunderstanding on who would or wouldn't try to make this plan a real thing, and it all kinda fell apart.

But it would prove that your ideas _should_ work, but you might have to add in some other bit to make it all worthwhile. In the alfalfa plan, the trucks could haul alfalfa in, and haul high $$$ protien & low $$$ ashes back out to the farms. Sure helped make it all work out.

At least on paper.

If what we need is electricity, biomass can work.

If what we need is liquid fuels for transportation use, ethanol & bio-diesel come out a little better - today anyhow.

Of course, lets use all where they make sense.  

--->Paul


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

Well rambler, my thought on that is thet we have plenty of power plants that run on natural gas or fuel oil. If that fuel oil were displaced by biomass it would then be available as a motor fuel. Any natural gas displacement would go to home heating. I'm in the central part of the state and we have acres and acres of canary grass. Obviously corn should be used for ethanol, but seems to me that the stalks could be used in local central heating plants, factorys, etc. I used to work for a wood products company that provides all its plant heat and runs the kilns on wood scrap and sawdust. The plant I work in now bales and sells for a pitance tons of cardboard a year. It would go a long way toward heating the place. 

The power plant in Elk River runs entirely on Hennipin countys garbage.


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## fantasymaker (Aug 28, 2005)

Al. Countryboy said:


> We heat with wood ( I believe for me to make use of these chips for heating, I would have to take my tractor and spread the chips out in a thin layer during the summer to really dry them out. You would also need a fairly large building to store them in to keep them dry or they would start breaking down again. .


You might wanna try digging a deep narrow pit to put them in then running a heat collecting pipe thru it ,should be able to pull some heat out of it. I dumped a couple of truckloads in a pit one fall aand my duckshung out there all winter.


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## rambler (Jan 20, 2004)

tinknal said:


> The power plant in Elk River runs entirely on Hennipin countys garbage.



Drove past that plant for the first time a couple weeks ago.

Natural gas just doesn't do much for me - closest pipe is over 5 miles away. A person doesn't think much about the products we can't use. 

I think most oil generators are peakers, not really the 24/7 power producers? Most of our electric in Minnesota comes from the coal plants over by the Dakotas, plus the nuke plants.

Biomass is an interesting thing. Can burn it, can ferment it. The trick is getting enough energy density to transport it, and not over-harvest it to hurt the soils.

I like your ideas - hope I'm not sounding negative. 

--->Paul


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

rambler said:


> Drove past that plant for the first time a couple weeks ago.
> 
> Natural gas just doesn't do much for me - closest pipe is over 5 miles away. A person doesn't think much about the products we can't use.
> 
> ...


Nope, you aint sounding negative at all. I've done some work in that plant. It was originally one of the first (if not THE first) atomic power plants in the world.

Natural gass might not affect you directly, but I think we have to look at our energy supplys as a whole. I assume you use electricity, and electricity can be generated by any type of fuel. Therefore, the more cheap fuel we have, the cheaper all electricity becomes regardless of how yours is generated.


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## ET1 SS (Oct 22, 2005)

tinknal said:


> Nope, you aint sounding negative at all. I've done some work in that plant. It was originally one of the first (if not THE first) atomic power plants in the world....


Which one?

The 'first' nuclear fission chain reaction was conducted in 1938 in Berlin by the German physicists Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner and Fritz Strassmann.

The first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was obtained at the University of Chicago by Enrico Fermi on December 2, 1942

Electricity was generated for the first time by a nuclear reactor on December 20, 1951 at Arco, Idaho, producing 100 kW.

On June 27, 1954, the world's first nuclear power plant to generate electricity for a power grid started operations at Obninsk, USSR

The world's first commercial nuclear power station, Calder Hall in Sellafield, England was opened in 1956, 

In Penn in 1957, The Shippingport Reactor was the first commercial nuclear generator to become operational in the United States.


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## Beef11 (Feb 2, 2006)

Thanks for mentioning mother Idaho, Atomic city, Idaho (near arco) is named after the event.


Are you guys talking about large scale power production or small scale home type power plants?


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

Beef11 said:


> Thanks for mentioning mother Idaho, Atomic city, Idaho (near arco) is named after the event.
> 
> 
> Are you guys talking about large scale power production or small scale home type power plants?


Well, the one in Elk River was a regular power plant. I still remember the reactor from when I was a kid. Looked like a short, squat silo.


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## tinknal (May 21, 2004)

OK, they call it a "demonstration reactor" 22 MW. Opened in 1964.
http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/nukelist1.htm#MN


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