High corn prices have also led farmers to plant 12 million more acres of corn this year than last, marking the largest crop shift since World War II. This historic movement toward corn has sparked concerns that farmers are abandoning crop rotations or tilling lands that are poorly suited for intensive row crops. Environmentalists are warning that high corn prices might lead farmers to withdraw lands from the federal Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers not to plant on highly erodable lands. According to John Panuska PhD’06, a UW extension specialist who has studied Wisconsin’s CRP lands, returning those lands to corn will increase nitrogen runoff and exacerbate water-quality problems in the state’s lakes and rivers.

Citing such troubling side-effects as the clearing of rainforests in Asia to harvest palm oil for biodiesel, the United Nations has adopted a similarly cautionary tone on the promise of bioenergy. In May, the U.N. made one its first public reports on the subject, which concluded none too cheerily: “Unless new policies are enacted to protect threatened lands, secure socially acceptable land use, and steer bioenergy development in a sustainable direction overall, the environmental and social damage could in some cases outweigh the benefits.”

Scientists say these problems underscore the need for new technologies that enable fuel production from a wider array of feedstocks. They point to the potential of crops such as switchgrass, a perennial prairie grass native to the Midwest that can be burned to generate electrical power or fermented into fuels. Low in input and high in energy yield, switchgrass holds great promise as a feedstock in a sustainable bioenergy pipeline, especially since it can be grown on marginal lands such as those in the conservation reserve.

But many questions remain before we will know if it’s a viable option. “I can go out and make bails of switchgrass, and I can take those to the biorefinery right now,” says Kevin Shinners BS’81 MS’82 PhD’85, a professor of biological systems engineering. “But it’s going to cost me more to bring it to their gate than they’re going to be able to pay me. If we can’t figure out more effective ways to grow and harvest and store these materials, there will be no biorefinery.”

Typically in such cases, the research community needs money and time to sort out the big picture. With the influx of recent funding, no one these days is complaining about money. But what about time? The Department of Energy’s plans call for the United States to be making 250 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol by 2013, perhaps not an overwhelming quantity compared to the 139 billion gallons of gasoline Americans consume each year, but a steep climb from where we are today, which is more or less zero. Can science move fast enough––and carefully enough––to meet those expectations?

“It is a short amount of time, and we have a long way to go,” says Donohue. “But, you know, we’ve done this before. In the sixties, we had a president who said, ‘Let’s go to the moon.’ He issued a bold challenge, and with the support and technology that was there, we achieved that goal. This is our chance to say, ‘Let’s go to the moon.’” And lest we forget, such hopeful journeys involve not only giant leaps, but small steps.

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Tags: Bacteriology, Bioenergy, fungus, Insects, Microbiology
Posted in Energy, Fall 2007, Featured, Main feature, On The Cover | No Comments »