Research
Current
Biomass For Energy
Biomass power comes from plants -- crop and forest residues, corn kernels and stalks, energy crops, perennial grasses, and fast-growing trees like poplars, to name a few. It can be used to make liquid biofuels that serve as alternatives to oil, or to produce heat or electricity to power our homes. Biomass power accounts for roughly half of all the renewable energy produced in the United States, and we use more of it than any other country in the world. Today, biomass accounts for nearly 10% of the world’s energy source; by 2050 we believe this number will increase to 30%.Plants capture and store the sun's energy as they grow. Researchers are developing ways to produce energy from special, fast-growing, and higher-yielding "energy crops" such as willow, miscanthus, and switchgrass.All this plant material can be treated in different ways to produce energy and fuel. Biomass can be:• Burned in power plants to produce heat or electricity, with fewer harmful emissions than coal.• Fermented to produce fuels, like ethanol, for cars and trucks.• Digested by bacteria to create methane gas for powering turbines.• Heated under special conditions, or "gasified," to break down into a mix of gases that can be burned for electricity or used to make a range of products, from diesel to gasoline to chemicals.Unlike coal, biomass produces no harmful sulfur or mercury emissions and has significantly less nitrogen -- which means less acid rain, smog and other toxic air pollutants. Over time, if dedicated biomass is sustainably managed, converting it to energy can result in low or no net carbon emissions, provided that the carbon released is rapidly absorbed back from the atmosphere by biomass re-growth. Using biofuels in our cars and airplanes can potentially produce less global warming pollution than petroleum-based fuels, and allows us to invest our energy dollars at home rather than in foreign oil.
