Perennial Biomass Production: reshaping climate by reshaping bio-energy, a renewable resource
Earth’s climate is slowly, but surely, being degraded and changed by carbon emissions due to air pollution, burning fossils fuels and nonrenewable resources. There are many anthropogenic impacts on the environment that directly impact climate change in negative ways. Society often ignores these negative affects because energy is a necessity and the world depends on it. Energy emissions effect different parts of the world and environments in individualized ways, which can cause society to categorize the importance of air pollution incorrectly. Many research conclusions have shown that without reevaluating current energy emissions, climate change will increase exponentially. One way that can help decrease carbon emissions is changing the agricultural strategy in producing biomass energy but in a different way: replacing annual biomass agriculture with perennial biomass agriculture.
What is a renewable resource? What is biomass?
Biomass energy is energy produced from plants and just one of many forms of renewable resources that are used to produce clean energy. As more research develops and the climate changes, scientists are encouraging a higher use of renewable resources to decrease emissions being released into the earth’s atmosphere.
Perennial Biomass Production is an agricultural strategy that can help reduce emissions with creating bio-energy by using a different kind of plant material. A majority of biomass energy that is being produced comes from using annual plant material, such as corn , however researchers have found that there can be more negatives than positives and agricultural industries should start making the transition to perennial plant material such as switchgrass, silvergrass, willow, and eucalyptus. The fundamental basis behind this idea is finding a type of biomass that consumes less energy is that annual plants require a very amount of high energy to process and use. The solution: making the transition to perennial plants which require much less energy and sequester or store the carbon it collects in the soil. By making this transition to perennial biomass agriculture, emissions can be potentially reduced by 85 percent.
There are many benefits to growing and using perennial crops, agriculturally, financially, and environmentally. Perennial biomass production, if implement and cultivated currently, has the potential to reduce carbon emissions by 4–7 Gigatons of carbon dioxide by 2050 (Project Drawdown).
What will it take to see results?
On a small scale, implementing perennial biomass to produce cleaner bio-energy would not be a logical investment. But on a large, collective scale and perspective, there is room for areas of profit and improvements to the environment and climate. The implementation of perennial biomass production is introduced in two different scenarios. Scenario 1 shows the adoption of perennial biomass production on 106.9 million hectares of the allocated land area by the year 2050. Scenario 2 shoes the adoption of perennial biomass production on 189.9 million hectares of the allocated land area also by the year 2050. A research team at the University of Minnesota is conducting research with the purpose of creating and improving perennial crops to enhance their long-term resilience, reduce establishment costs, and improve harvest efficiency to increase overall profitability.
Financial concerns are real-but profits are foreseeable
In a management guideline document created with the National Wildlife Federation states that “the use of biomass for heat and fuel production is not new in the United States, there has been a renewed interest in bio-energy production in response to increasing energy costs”. In the study on perennial biomass production done by Project Drawdown determined an economic model in two different scenarios of implementation of this strategy to determine the financial costs and profits of replacing annual crops with perennial crops for production of bio-energy. Total adoption of implementing perennial crops in Scenario 1 has a Net First Cost of $230.32 Billion $US to replace land size of 106.9 million hectares and Scenario 2 has a Net First Cost of $399.92 Billion $US to replace a land size of 189.9 million hectares, both from the years 2020–2050. With both scenarios of different amount of suitable land for implementation, the lifetime operational costs are $1.5–$2.7 Trillion USD but with a Lifetime Net Profit of $0.96-$1.66 Trillion USD (Project Drawdown). Ultimately, the overall investment is less than the projected profit once the transition is completely made from annual plants to perennial plants. Based on the projected financial scenarios, there are many benefits to transitioning to a different agricultural biomass energy both economically and environmentally.
Environmental Co-benefits
Perennial crops and biomass production and the projected about of carbon emission reduction is reason enough to switch and make the transition; but when evaluating and taking into account the many co-benefits this strategy will have, there is an even stronger incentive to make a change. Sequester carbon in the soil, restore degraded land, used as feedstock - raw material that supplies energy - for production of paper, cardboard, insulation, and bio-plastics. Another valuable co-benefit of perennial crops is they can prevent erosion by holding soil and surface material in place while restoring the land, they are less vulnerable to pests and can continue to support pollinators and biodiversity. Because they are a perennial plant, they can be harvested and rotated on a 2–3 year timeline and do not need to be replanted every season (University of Minnesota).
References
“Woody Perennial Biomass.” Forever Green, University of Minnesota, 22 Feb. 2016
McGuire, Bill, and Susan Rupp. “Perennial Herbaceous Biomass Production and Harvest in the Prairie Pothole Region of the Northern Great Plains.” 2013. National Wildlife Federation
Lemus, R., and R. Lal. Bioenergy Crops and Carbon Sequestration. 18 Jan. 2007, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352680590910393?scroll=top&needAccess=true.
Lemus, R., and R. Lal. Bioenergy Crops and Carbon Sequestration. 18 Jan. 2007, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352680590910393?scroll=top&needAccess=true.
“What Are Co-Benefits?” Co-Benefits of Climate Policy, www.theclimatebonus.org/cobenefits.php.
