| Not just a snack, peanuts a possible biofuel source |
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| By JANE HOUIN
Ohio Correspondent
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Move on over corn and soybeans. Peanuts may elbow their way into the biodiesel fuel market. The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are searching for economically feasible peanut varieties for that purpose.
Agronomist Wilson Faircloth at the ARS National Peanut Research Laboratory in Dawson, Ga., and Daniel Geller, an engineer with the University of Georgia, are testing a peanut called Georganic. It’s not suited to current commercial edible standards for peanuts, but it is high in oil and has low production input costs.
Georganic - or similar varieties - could be the future of peanut biodiesel because it can be planted and grown with just one herbicide application for weed control, compared to the 3-4 applications typically sprayed during a growing season for edible peanuts. Additionally, these fuel peanuts are grown without fungicides, which are the greatest input cost in traditional peanut production.
To further reduce production costs and increase yield, the research team is also studying technology such as conservation tillage and selection of varieties with high tolerance to multiple diseases. Currently, there are 24 peanut varieties being scrutinized in this biodiesel screening project, including Georganic, which was developed by ARS breeders in Tifton, Ga.
Many old and new peanut varieties are being tested for field performance, and their oils are being analyzed for diesel performance characteristics.
Soybean oil is the main oil used in the United States for biodiesel fuel production. However, ARS scientists are also researching switchgrass and hybrid poplar as biofuel sources. Researchers believe these two crops may steal the show in the future when it comes to curbing greenhouse gases.
The good news, according to an ARS study published in Ecological Applications, is that while production of fuels from bioenergy crops does create carbon dioxide and two other greenhouse gases (because it takes energy to make energy), bioenergy crops as a whole offset their greenhouse gas emissions in three key ways.
First, they remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it in crop roots as organic carbon. Secondly, they produce coproducts like protein for animal feed, which in turn saves on energy to make feed by other means. And finally, displacement where a fossil fuel is replaced with a biobased fuel, “recycles” rather than adds more carbon to the atmosphere.
Researchers predicted a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emission if ethanol and biodiesel from corn-soybean rotations were used instead of gasoline and diesel, which is about two times the reduction of using ethanol produced from corn grain alone. And while those numbers may sound good, the researchers predicted that using switchgrass and hybrid poplar would produce nearly a three-fold reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when compared to corn-soybean rotations.
But the possibilities don’t stop there. ARS’s Renewable Energy and Manure Management Research Unit in Bushland, Texas believe locally available materials, such as palm leaf in Hawaii, are the most economical biofuel sources.
For example, one Arctic village uses fish oil biodiesel to fuel generators that provide the town’s electricity, while the Texas scientists are also working on burning a manure-coal mix to heat buildings and provide the heat needed to produce ethanol.
ARS is the USDA’s chief scientific research agency.
This farm news was published in the Sept. 5, 2007 issue of Farm World, serving Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan and Tennessee. |
| 9/5/2007 |
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