Abstract
Directly burnable biomass to be used primarily in steam boilers for power production has been researched and demonstrated in a variety of projects in the United states. The biomass typically comes from wood wastes, such as tree trimmings or the byproducts of lumber production, or from a cash crop, grown by farmers. Of this latter group, the main emphasis has been utilizing corn stover, or a prairie grass called switchgrass, or using tree seedlings such as willow. In this article, I propose an alternative to these energy crops that consists of several different herbaceous plants with the one consistent property that they annually generate an appreciable bulk of dried-down burnable mass. The fact that they are a set of plants (nine are offered as candidates) gives this energy crop a great deal of flexibility as far as growing conditions and annual harvest time line. Their predicted yield is impressive and leads to speculation that they can be economically feasible.
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Kamm, J. (2004). A New Class of Plants for a Biofuel Feedstock Energy Crop. In: Finkelstein, M., McMillan, J.D., Davison, B.H., Evans, B. (eds) Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Symposium on Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals Held May 4–7, 2003, in Breckenridge, CO. Biotechnology for Fuels and Chemicals. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-837-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-59259-837-3_6
Publisher Name: Humana Press, Totowa, NJ
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Online ISBN: 978-1-59259-837-3
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