Oak Ridge research team says switchgrass can reduce Gulf of Mexico “death zone” effect

A research team at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory said that improvements in crop management and the planting of perennials such as switchgrass could ease hypoxia levels in the Gulf of Mexico, which has a 6,000 mile “death zone” west of the mouth of the Mississippi River. Nutrients from the Mississippi feed algae blooms that are consumed by oxygen-munching bacteria. The team said that construction and restoration of wetlands, reduced nitrogen and phosphorus limits, and improvements in riparian buffers are other methods that could reduce the size and impact of the death zone.

Detailed results from the five-year switchgrass study, that demonstrated average production costs of $60 per ton of biomass with a low of $39 per ton, are now available online. The complete USDA / U Nebraska-Lincoln study will be published in BioEnergy Research, but is available online here.

The report details a five-year, 10-farm study on switchgrass production. The research team determined that five farmers achieved average costs of $50 per ton for production, translating to a feedstock price of as little as 58 cents per gallon for switchgrass ethanol. The research team also found that greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by 94 percent in switchgrass production, compared to gasoline emissions. Two farmers in the study, with previous experience growing switchgrass, achieved costs of $39 per ton in the five-year study, or 25 percent below the average for the group, indicating a potential to produce fuel at as low as 44 cents per gallon.

In Illinois, researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign surveyed local farmers and report that the major challenge in developing cellulosic ethanol will be to persuade farmers to grow the crop. Farmers indicated in the survey that they would only grow cellulosic crops if they could be persuaded that the cellulosic crops such as switchgrass and miscanthus can compete with soybeans and corn in terms of profitability.

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