Steven Taylor, Ph.D. heads Auburn’s Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts, which is part of the Natural Resources Management & Development Institute. He is a professional engineer, a professor and head of the Department of Biosystems Engineering at Auburn University. His post on sunflowers and biodiesel originally appeared in The Birmingham News blog. You can read his full post at The News or read an excerpt below.
Like countless other farmers, Annie and Mike Dee had seen their farm profits steadily eroded by rising energy costs. And like most other farmers, they were fed up.
For this brother-and-sister farming duo, the energy spike following Hurricane Katrina turned out to be the last straw. They were determined to do something about it. And with equipment and technical assistance provided by Auburn University’s Natural Resources Management & Development Institute, they did just that.
In a manner of speaking, they learned how to turn their combine into an oil rig by developing a way to grow and consume their own fuel. Sunflowers and soybeans grown on their sprawling west Alabama farm first are pressed into oil and then converted into biodiesel to power their farm equipment. But the Dees didn’t stop there. In conservation language, they have developed a way to close the loop by converting the waste co-products generated by this oil refinement process into a feed for their cattle.
The Dees are onto something, and so are other Alabama farmers who are adopting their own distinctive approaches to energy self-sufficiency. And there is a lesson here for all of us — farmer and nonfarmer alike — namely, that the path to energy efficiency will be winding and broad rather than straight and narrow. And just as the path will be wide, so will the array of technologies required to complete the journey.
In fact, no approach constitutes the final word on alternative energy production. Quenching our state’s and nation’s growing thirst for renewable energy calls for a multifaceted approach that not only encompasses biodiesel but also a host of other cost-effective technologies for converting biomass from plants, trees, crop residue and other byproducts into viable energy resources.
Corn-derived ethanol has and will continue to play a vital, albeit limited, role in powering our nation down the road to energy self-sufficiency. However, relying only on ethanol from corn will not enable us to achieve our energy security goals. That is why the Natural Resources Management & Development Institute’s bioenergy and bioproducts initiative is looking farther down the road toward the biomass-derived energy sources — wood, switchgrass and agricultural residues, to name only a few — that offer even greater potential as renewable fuels. It is also why the initiative is working with farmers and entrepreneurs to develop cost-effective strategies and technologies to capitalize on these sources.
Alabama constitutes a potential treasure trove of biomass-derived fuels — the reason why it and other Southern states often are described as this nation’s Middle East in terms of renewable energy. But the challenge remains of finding a way to break down this biomass into a form that can be readily and cost-effectively converted into renewable fuels. Much remains to be done, though much already has been done at Auburn and other major research universities.
In fact, Auburn researchers already are tantalizingly close to pay dirt. They have the ability to gasify biomass and to use it to power electrical generating plants. A big focus of Auburn’s bioenergy and bioproducts initiative’s efforts also is on refining thermochemical research already under way at Auburn and developing a cost-effective way to convert biomass into gas so it then can be turned into biofuels such as synthetic diesel fuel, gasoline or aviation fuel.
