Tuesday, November 6, 2007
174-1
Biomass Production Systems – Exploring the Options.
For any biomass production system to be successful certain minimal criteria must be met. The system must be environmentally responsible, agronomically feasible and economically viable. Many of the proposals for biomass production systems fail to meet some of these criteria and others fail to meet any of these criteria. Often a system is proposed, with evangelical fervor and testimonial endorsements, based on deductive rather than inductive logic and biological and economic reality are frequently ignored. To further complicate the decision making process, government policy and subsidies can make environmentally irresponsible and agronomically poor systems economically viable. Although useful, short term yield comparisons of potential biomass crops do not reveal inherent deficiencies among system comparisons. Based on available production data from low input high diversity systems, low input low diversity and high input low diversity systems, a simple comparison of hypothetical biomass productivity over a ten year period was made. Based on this limited analysis it is apparent that meeting all of the original criteria will be difficult and require a multitude of site specific systems. In many cases, the economic return from the biomass harvest may be extremely low and the environmental benefit of not harvesting may be a far more acceptable option.
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