Listen to the audio file of this story here .
Intro: Most people associate biofuel with the corn industry of the Midwest. But biofuel crops are now emerging in the dry interior climates of the inland Northwest. Next time you go to the pump, your gas may contain ethanol or biodiesel grown here.
Mary Hawkins spoke with WSU energy expert, Dave Sjoding, about ethanol and biodiesel fuels in this interview from “Our Northwest”:
Hawkins: Cellulose is contained in just about every natural, free-growing plant in the world. It also happens to be the key ingredient in something called “cellulosic ethanol”. It’s in the stalks left over from harvest; wood products are made of cellulose. It can even come from city dumps.
Here’s Dave Sjoding:
Sjoding: WSU did a study of how many tons of cellulosic feedstock can our state produce. Year in, year out there's about seventeen million tons of organic waste streams that would be potentially available for use to make ethanol. Well, this is where our state gets a chance to play, and our region gets a chance to play as well I might add, because the same is true in Oregon, and Idaho, and Montana -throughout the Northwest.
Hawkins: Cellulose as a byproduct of agriculture, industries and city waste is big. There are also emerging dryland crops that may soon grow in a field near you. Here’s Dave again:
Sjoding: Camelina's one of them I'm going to flag here for the drier parts of our state.
It's an oil seed crop, so you can use it to make bio-diesel, for example. Some of these crops have really strong roots, so they'll go down, they'll crack the pan if you've got one, and those root structures then open up the soil bed in a nice healthy way. A lot of farmers are seeing the follow on crop, whether it's wheat or whatever, to be improving yield what it was before, simply because of the benefits to the soil that they've had from the oil seed crop that was the year before.
Hawkins: For researchers like Dave, It’s all about less dependence on oil… for most car engines there is a limit to how much ethanol can be in the mix… Diesel is a different story…
Sjoding: As you pull up to the pump, you get a blend of both, for gasoline a blend of ethanol, as well as regular gasoline. And on the diesel side, you can have a much stronger range of blending. Generally ethanol is limited to 10% unless you have something done to your engine. Some research and development is looking to bump that to 20, 25% but on the diesel side you can blend up to 99, 100% straight bio-diesel.
Bio-diesel is a very slick type of substance, so it really does clean up your engine, and gives you a slipperiness that if you're using, for example, low sulfur diesel, you need that slipperiness as an additive anyway. So this is a nice combination that again is thinning down our demand for oil.
Outro: For more information about biodiesel, ethanol and how these fuels will help reshape our energy future, go to "Our Northwest" at N-W-P-R dot org.
