Rural Energy for America Program

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If you are concerned about the soaring price of oil and the threat to national security resulting from dependency upon imported oil, then biofuels may seem to be a good idea.

Andy Olsen is a Senior Policy Advocate responsible for field organizing and constituency building for the Environmental Law & Policy Center’s Farm Bill - Clean Energy Development program. He believe that the 2007 Farm Bill is an excellent opportunity to advance clean energy production in the United States over the next, crucial five years.

Writing for Renewable Energy Access, Olsen describes1 the programs in the proposed Farm Bill that the Senate Agriculture Committee, chaired by Tom Harkin (D-IA) , is expected to consider.

The energy crop transition programs in the Harkin draft would overcome major logistical barriers and would directly aid growers. One program would provide cost-sharing to early farmers who convert fields to energy crops. These incentives would be targeted to supply regions for new or existing biopower or biofuel plants. Grants to aid infrastructure improvements from field to biorefineries through development and demonstration of harvesting and storage systems will help fuel needed innovations.

The Rural Repowering proposal calls for creating short-term markets for energy crops and other biomass by repowering fossil fuel boilers to biomass for heat and/or power, large and small. Community-scale initiatives can succeed where larger, more rushed energy crop scale-up efforts have faltered.

Rural Repowering, with sufficient funding, can spark regional efforts, employing region-specific biomass sources and expertise. This concept seems to have gotten a boost in negotiations with inclusion in the biorefinery loan guarantee programs.

Two knee-jerk responses:

Farm to Fuel

    1. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute argues that food prices everywhere would be affected by grabbing a large portion of the country’s food supply for fuel. Either other grains would make up for diversion of the corn crop into fuel, affecting other commodity prices, or U.S. exports would decrease, again affecting prices around the world.
Biomass as a Feedstock Requires Mass Quantities

  1. As currently proposed2 the Administration’s 2007 farm bill would include a plan to build modular micro-refineries. The rationale is such satellite bio-refineries can utilize fully those “scattered lignocellulose resources“, which make each bio-refinery more profitable / justifiable.

    The concern is that, being agricultural, would such Fischer-Tropsch facilties require the same monitoring and pollution control as other such plants? Ostensibly for the development of cellulosic ethanol, entrained flow gasification can make use of a variety of waste, to include agricultural wastes, grasses, cornstalks and wood waste, as well as hog manure, municipal garbage, sawdust and paper pulp.

    Yet since such production requires massive tonnage to be cost effective, and the process can accept coal or other highly polluting feedstock, the fear is that the Biomass Biofuel Initiative will be a greater source of GHG emissions.

HAWT on a farm


The Farm Bill boosting investment in renewable energy sources is seen as economic development in addition to a strategy for the United States to develop greater energy independence. Yet it will be self-defeating if it overlooks critical environmental issues.

Under the Harkin plan, as in the House Farm Bill, farmers can invest in “a wide variety of clean energy options.” It would seem like a good idea that REAP (Rural Energy for America Program) could include not just ethanol but also wind and solar, energy efficiency, biogas, biopower, and geothermal.

The Harkin proposals simplify incentives for smaller projects with block grant rebate programs and eligibility for grants and loans expanded to schools and hospitals. Including feasibility studies will help get more projects from under-served areas into the pipeline.

But the REAP funding levels in the compromise are very reduced from the initial Harkin-Lugar Bill that called for a ramp-up to $250 million per year in 2012, for a total five year investment of $710 million. Word from negotiations is that the five-year total will reach just $270 million, or $54 million per year. Given that applications area already running well over $60 million, more funding would result in more clean energy capacity.

Continue reading here: Co-generation from Municipal Solid Waste Incinerators

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