DNR Roundtable fueled by fuel talk

Professor: It’s vital to develop bioenergy sources

By John Cross

ST. CLOUD — Usually, items discussed at the annual Department of Natural Resources’ Roundtables center around fins, fur and feathers.

But it was another “F” word — fuel — that held center stage at the 2007 gathering of Minnesota environmental enthusiasts at St. Cloud Friday and Saturday.

The opening session along with much of the Ecological Roundtable sessions were dominated by discussion about bioenergy and the challenges it will pose on Minnesota’s natural resources ranging from wildlife to water quality.

Jim Bowyer, a professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota, told the crowd of nearly 200 that the need to develop sustainable bioenergy sources now is vital.

Pointing out that while estimates of just when peak global oil production will be reached range from 2007 to 2037, it’s inevitable that at some point, production will begin to decline.

“It’s a train coming down the track with increasing speed,” he said. “And when it gets here, there will be tremendous pressure to replace fossil fuels.”

The major source right now in Minnesota for bioenergy is corn. It is easy to grow, transport and refine within the existing agriculture infrastructure.

But it requires great amounts of fertilizer and energy inputs as well as large amounts of water to process it into ethanol. What’s more, the current demand for corn for ethanol production has driven up food prices and prompted some farmers to convert CRP and other conservation lands to row crops.

The message brought to stakeholders was that a better solution to biofuels, one that is more efficient and kinder to the environment, likely will be found in perennial prairie grasses and woodland products.

Unlike row crops, such sources of bioenergy would require no or little energy and fertilizer input and properly managed, could provide wildlife habitat and reduce erosion to improve water quality.

For the present, technology to create cellulosic ethanol from such sources on an industrial scale has not yet been developed. But progress in being made and biofuel production does become practical, the landscape of rural Minnesota could change dramatically.

Whether those changes are a bane or benefit to the state’s natural resources will depend on systematic planning and management to ensure that such bioenergy policy and production is beneficial both to producers and to conservation.

Jim Kleinschmit, with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, said the present ethanol boom has been good for farmers: “It’s great that they’re getting fair prices.”

But Kleinschmit also said the boom has meant that corporate interests also are cashing in. “Under 15 percent of the existing corn ethanol plants are farmer-owned ... most are absentee-owned,” he said.

Such plants almost always are much larger than the farmer-owned ethanol plants, he said. As an example, he cited a plant in Iowa owned by ADM. “It uses 6 percent of all the corn grown in Iowa,” he said, pointing out that natural resources can’t support foodstock based biofuels on that scale.

Kleinschmit said that farmers’ risks switching from growing foodstock-based sources for bioenergy will have to be mitigated by supporting locally owned systems and integrating water quality, climate and conservation issues into farm policy.

To ensure that both agricultural interests and the environment are going to benefit from the increasing demand for bioenergy will require establishing some standards and infrastructure to deal with what likely will be a dramatic change in the Minnesota landscape.

“We’ll have to think differently,” he said. “Will it be technology or the landscape that will be the driving force?