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Jon Prater, left, coordinator of the Integrative Energy Technology program at Colorado Mountain College's West Garfield Campus in Rifle, conducts a tour of the bioenergy facility on campus following the Biomass to Biofuels symposium on Thursday. He explains how this biomass processing equipment produces biofuel that can be used to replace gasoline.
A new kind of economic development is being pursued in the West.
Area ranchers and farmers are being urged to grow grass that can be converted to a liquid “biofuel,” rather than relying solely on growing hay to be turned into beef.
The two-year-old Western Colorado Carbon Neutral Bioenergy Consortium hosted a symposium Thursday at Colorado Mountain College in Rifle to get the word out about the economic potential for biofuel production.
“Phenomenal presentation,” said Peach Valley rancher Don Chaplin, one of only a few bonafide agriculturalists among the 100 or so people in attendance.
Chaplin said the concept outlined in the symposium is “a whole new venture that the community needs to know about.”
He said he planning to look into growing “biomass” crops on his ranch instead of simply growing fruit and leasing land out for cattle pasture.
Another rancher, Terry Porter of Porter Ranch, said he currently raises elk on his 3,500 acres south of New Castle, as well as leasing mineral rights to Antero Resources, a gas drilling company.
“I don't think it's feasible right now” to turn to biomass as a cash crop, he said. “I think it's got a lot of kinks to work out. I think that these smaller ideas ... making fuel out of grass ... it's a very small solution. We need something bigger.”
The consortium, which includes CMC, FluxFarm Foundation of Carbondale, Colorado State University and the city of Rifle, is building a new processing plant at the CMC Rifle campus that will convert biomass — grasses and other plant types — into biofuel.
The biofuel, in this instance, will be butanol, otherwise known as biobutanol, which can be used to fuel traditional gasoline engines.
Proponents see this as an alternative to using corn to make ethanol, which many believe is a dead-end technology. Studies have shown that the corn-to-ethanol model drives up food prices and exhausts the ground the corn is grown in.
This biofuel would be made from grasses that do not exhaust the land, according to advocates.
The biomass, in the consortium's vision, is to be composed of any of several types of herbaceous grasses, and perhaps prickly pear cactus, all described as high-yield, low maintenance plants that can be converted into fuel by using special processing equipment.
One such processing plant is under construction at CMC's West Garfield Campus, and is expected to be operational soon.
Jon Prater, coordinator of the Integrative Energy Technology program at CMC, who is in charge of building the biomass converter, explained that the process breaks the biomass down into sugars, which are then converted to butanol.
A byproduct of the process, he said, is small pellets of plant fiber that can be use in pellet stoves or be fed to livestock.
The CMC plant will begin by processing biomass from fields in Fruita, Rifle and Carbondale.
Morgan Williams, director of Flux Farm in Carbondale, told the assembled audience that there are approximately 130 million acres of underutilized land in the intermountain West, which includes portions of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.
Much of that land is used to graze cattle or raise hay and other ranch-related feed for those cattle, but the average rancher's income from that industry is only about $15,800 a year, Williams said.
In Garfield County, Williams continued, the situation is even worse, because ranching provides a negative income for many practitioners, meaning they have to get jobs off the ranch to keep themselves solvent.
As for the potential for economic development, speakers lauded the biomass model, maintaining it can raise the productivity of “marginal” lands, producing as much as three “dry tons” of biomass per acre per year.
According to Williams, if only 1 million acres are put into biomass production, that can translate into 240 million gallons of biofuel per year. That would provide 12 percent of the state's average annual vehicular consumption of fuel.
It also can mean $1 billion per year in revenues, the experts at the symposium said.
And, Williams told the crowd, “It does not mean the end of ranching. It would, potentially, be the means to ensure ranching's continued vitality in the West.” Growing biomass crops would provide income to ranchers and allow them to continue the livelihood that has become an iconic part of Western culture.
Calvin Pearson, a researcher with CSU, said there are 138,000 acres in the Rifle area alone that could be used for biomass production. He said the consortium is working to develop mobile processing equipment that can travel from ranch to ranch.
The consortium has begun a five-year testing program to determine which biomass crops work the best, Pearson said. One of the test plots is on the site of the old uranium mill west of Rifle, where the city has a large array of solar panels.
The Fruita test fields are the farthest along, Pearson said, showing a slide of baled biomass cuttings next to a field of standing grass.
The real issue regarding the conversion of biomass to biofuel, said Catherine Keske, assistant professor of agriculture and resource economics at CSU, is that “what we really need is people willing to produce it, and people willing to use it.”
And if the prices continue rising for fuel, food and other basic necessities, she said, the interest in biofuel should mount.
Area ranchers and farmers are being urged to grow grass that can be converted to a liquid “biofuel,” rather than relying solely on growing hay to be turned into beef.
The two-year-old Western Colorado Carbon Neutral Bioenergy Consortium hosted a symposium Thursday at Colorado Mountain College in Rifle to get the word out about the economic potential for biofuel production.
“Phenomenal presentation,” said Peach Valley rancher Don Chaplin, one of only a few bonafide agriculturalists among the 100 or so people in attendance.
Chaplin said the concept outlined in the symposium is “a whole new venture that the community needs to know about.”
He said he planning to look into growing “biomass” crops on his ranch instead of simply growing fruit and leasing land out for cattle pasture.
Another rancher, Terry Porter of Porter Ranch, said he currently raises elk on his 3,500 acres south of New Castle, as well as leasing mineral rights to Antero Resources, a gas drilling company.
“I don't think it's feasible right now” to turn to biomass as a cash crop, he said. “I think it's got a lot of kinks to work out. I think that these smaller ideas ... making fuel out of grass ... it's a very small solution. We need something bigger.”
The consortium, which includes CMC, FluxFarm Foundation of Carbondale, Colorado State University and the city of Rifle, is building a new processing plant at the CMC Rifle campus that will convert biomass — grasses and other plant types — into biofuel.
The biofuel, in this instance, will be butanol, otherwise known as biobutanol, which can be used to fuel traditional gasoline engines.
Proponents see this as an alternative to using corn to make ethanol, which many believe is a dead-end technology. Studies have shown that the corn-to-ethanol model drives up food prices and exhausts the ground the corn is grown in.
This biofuel would be made from grasses that do not exhaust the land, according to advocates.
The biomass, in the consortium's vision, is to be composed of any of several types of herbaceous grasses, and perhaps prickly pear cactus, all described as high-yield, low maintenance plants that can be converted into fuel by using special processing equipment.
One such processing plant is under construction at CMC's West Garfield Campus, and is expected to be operational soon.
Jon Prater, coordinator of the Integrative Energy Technology program at CMC, who is in charge of building the biomass converter, explained that the process breaks the biomass down into sugars, which are then converted to butanol.
A byproduct of the process, he said, is small pellets of plant fiber that can be use in pellet stoves or be fed to livestock.
The CMC plant will begin by processing biomass from fields in Fruita, Rifle and Carbondale.
Morgan Williams, director of Flux Farm in Carbondale, told the assembled audience that there are approximately 130 million acres of underutilized land in the intermountain West, which includes portions of Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico.
Much of that land is used to graze cattle or raise hay and other ranch-related feed for those cattle, but the average rancher's income from that industry is only about $15,800 a year, Williams said.
In Garfield County, Williams continued, the situation is even worse, because ranching provides a negative income for many practitioners, meaning they have to get jobs off the ranch to keep themselves solvent.
As for the potential for economic development, speakers lauded the biomass model, maintaining it can raise the productivity of “marginal” lands, producing as much as three “dry tons” of biomass per acre per year.
According to Williams, if only 1 million acres are put into biomass production, that can translate into 240 million gallons of biofuel per year. That would provide 12 percent of the state's average annual vehicular consumption of fuel.
It also can mean $1 billion per year in revenues, the experts at the symposium said.
And, Williams told the crowd, “It does not mean the end of ranching. It would, potentially, be the means to ensure ranching's continued vitality in the West.” Growing biomass crops would provide income to ranchers and allow them to continue the livelihood that has become an iconic part of Western culture.
Calvin Pearson, a researcher with CSU, said there are 138,000 acres in the Rifle area alone that could be used for biomass production. He said the consortium is working to develop mobile processing equipment that can travel from ranch to ranch.
The consortium has begun a five-year testing program to determine which biomass crops work the best, Pearson said. One of the test plots is on the site of the old uranium mill west of Rifle, where the city has a large array of solar panels.
The Fruita test fields are the farthest along, Pearson said, showing a slide of baled biomass cuttings next to a field of standing grass.
The real issue regarding the conversion of biomass to biofuel, said Catherine Keske, assistant professor of agriculture and resource economics at CSU, is that “what we really need is people willing to produce it, and people willing to use it.”
And if the prices continue rising for fuel, food and other basic necessities, she said, the interest in biofuel should mount.
