our hearing will come to order i want to welcome everyone to our hearing on biomass for thermal energy and electricity a research and development portfolio for the future before we begin to discuss the topic of today's hearing i want to  particularly recognize some special guests in our subcommittee today members of both the liberian and haitian parliaments are here as guests of representative david price from north carolina as part of a week long seminar on committee operations i understand there are fellow committee chairs here among our guests so we're very honored that you're here it's particularly appropriate we have international governments community with us today as bio power of course is a very much linked to the global issues of climate change and energy security of the members of parliament include the speaker of the house of the haitian chamber of deputies the president of the haitian senate the chair of the haitian committee on justice and the chair of the haitian committee on the budget the chair of the liberian committee on natural resources energy and the environment is also here with us along with other members of parliament and dignitaries excellencies thank you all for joining us we welcome you here we also know that our committee hearings can go somewhat timely if you have other engagements we won't take it personally if you have to if you have to go to another meeting but we're very grateful to have your presence here and we're honored and did you wish to offer any comments before we start also at our welcome on this side we're very grateful that you're here and hope that it's a good visit a productive visit thank you very much with that we will proceed with our discussion of today's hearing we will today examine a number of different technologies utilized to convert biomass feedstocks into bio power and discuss the federal role and development of these technologies while more widely known as feedstock for liquid transportation fuels biomass can also be used to generate heat and electricity a field otherwise known as bio power biomass includes of course any organic matter that is available on a renewable basis including agricultural crops waste and residues wood and wood waste and residues animal waste municipal waste and aquatic organism but of course if these things are used for energy they're not waste after all are they they are raw materials for which we can generate power b are vital as the country moves toward a more diverse portfolio of energy sources especially in the southeast and northwest of the country where there are significant quantities of these renewable resources for example the two thousand and five report published by the washington state department of ecology and washington state university found that our state my own has the potential for annual production of over one thousand seven hundred sixty nine megawatts of electrical power from biomass this is a roughly fifty percent of washington state's annual residential electrical consumption furthermore in my home district we have abundant forest biomass when this resource is harvested in conjunction with a sustainable forest management plan important restoration goals can be achieved such as wildlife mitigation watershed protection wildlife habitat restoration and reduced insect infestation and we can generate valuable power as a result as well and reduce our c o two output to realize these benefits new research needs to be funded enhanced basic and applied research and commercialisation of a diversity of conversion technologies needs to be advanced in two thousand to the bush administration consolidated liquid transportation fuels bio products and bio power research efforts across the only into the biomass program and since then the large majority of the research is focused on liquid transportation fuels primarily ethanol however given the decreasing available to fossil fossil fuel resources and simultaneous increase in the man along with concerns of lethal overheating of the earth and ocean acidification are responsible twenty first century energy policy will include a renewed commitment to bio powered technologies while the development of local transportation fuels from biomass is a critical research area i am interested in hearing from eyewitnesses about increasing bio power research efforts in the federal research part for oil and the steps we need to overcome barriers to new bio about power technologies my apologies to the translator with our guests i speak awfully fast good luck and with that i'd like to thank this excellent panel of witnesses for appearing before the subcommittee this afternoon i y distinguished ranking member of mr inglis for his opening statement thank you mr chairman thank you for holding this hearing today for the last ten years or so we primarily been looking toward biomass as a replacement for petroleum based transportation fuels the result has been a substantial interest in converting food crops to fuel with small emphasis being placed on developing cellulosic ethanol environmentally cost concerns or cultivating interest in other types of biomass is a fuel for baseload large scale power plants more research and technological innovation can expand the reach of renewable fuels in our energy sector the subject today's hearing represents a step in that direction developments in renewable natural gas bio refineries bio mass transportation and other technologies will help increase the efficiency of biomass energy and the diversity of organic materials can be used for the for energy generation i'm looking forward to hearing about the state of the industry today and where we should federal research and development resources to overcome remaining technological hurdles i also went to mit to promote the interest in bio power to south carolina universities including from in the upstate energy is already creating jobs back home thank you mr chairman for holding this hearing i look forward to hearing from the witnesses and you go back to balance my time and if there are other members who wish to submit additional opening statements your statements will be added to the record at this point at this point it's  my pleasure to introduce our witnesses at this time dr don j stevens is a senior program manager at pacific northwest national laboratory p n n l mr scott m clara is the director of the strategic center for coal the daleys national energy technology laboratory introduce our last witness a mr chairman for the opportunity to introduce mr joseph james who is a terrific example of alternative energy industry that's creating new jobs in south carolina as james says there were thirty five years of experience in economic development devoted to achieving equity for disadvantaged people in communities since two thousand and four his career is taking taking on new focus aiming to create jobs in redivide lies rural african american communities in south carolina through opportunities in the emerging  in recognition of his parenting work he was awarded the two thousand and eight purposed prize he's also a bio in inner g e entrepreneur he's a founding member and vice president of the board of south carolina biomass council and member of the southeast cultural forest hearing from him about this innovative to perfection technology that agra tech producers bring to the market and we thank him for being here thank you mr english as obviously not only have professional interests as members and chair and ranking member of this committee we have personal interests as we represent districts with great potential our colleague dr bartlett as you may discover when he offers his questions as one of the real leaders in walking the talk of renewable energy is a probably the lowest carbon footprint of any member of congress and his residence and i admire that greatly so he brings great expertise with that we'll begin as witnesses now we have five minutes for testimony followed by questions from the panel and we invite you to begin we'll begin now with dr stephens thanks again to all of you for your presence thank you very much mr chairman and members of the committee i very much appreciate this opportunity to be here today at a time when our nation's moving forward with a sense of purpose and urgency toward a more sustainable energy future and bio mass is certainly part of that future as a nation we have approximately one point three billion tons potentially available on an annual basis for a variety of energy purposes as you indicated those resources from agricultural residues from dedicated energy crops and others all of which are very significantly on a regional basis we can use that for a variety of purposes  what's pyrolysis and why is it important well bio pyrolysis is simply the process of heating biomass in the absence of air to produce a combination of liquids solids and gaseous products and we can control the relative amounts of those by selecting the process conditions accordingly today all focus on so called fast pyrolysis which produces a liquid product referred to  oil has several important characteristics that are beneficial for power generation most importantly the bio or oil can be used in high efficiency electric generation systems systems that can directly use solid bio mass with stabilisation and upgrading the bio oil can be used in industrial turbans combined cycle systems or potentially solid oxide fuel cells these have electric generation efficiencies of thirty to forty or more percent compared to a simple wood fired boiler system with efficiencies of fifteen to twenty five percent and since we have a finite amount of bio mass in our nation it's important to use that efficiently to meet our national energy needs both nationally and internationally at present there's significant interest in using pyrolysis technologies to produce bio or oil are in the near commercial stage of development and there are several large scale development units with capacities primary technical barrier at this time is a need for stabilization and upgrading stabilization is necessary so the bio can be stored and used for periods of several months and additional upgrading is needed to meet equipment specifications for high technology conversion systems the upgrading among other things chemically neutralizes the bio oil and removes mineral solves there are quite a few national and international research programs currently focused on removing these technical barriers for the utilization of biomass specific northwest national labs for example is working with many partners including industry department of energy a other national labs and universities to improve bio will stabilisation and upgrading and we're also looking at the use of catalysts to improve the initial quality of the bio oil as it's formed to reduce the need for downstream stabilisation and upgrading in addition we're working in collaboration with a range of international groups to understand just how much bio just how much stabilization and upgrading is needed for various applications for b l leads the international energy agency's task we're also working with groups in canada finland and asia on other pyrolysis issues as a result of this work we're making significant progress in overcoming the technical barriers for using to buy a lawyer in some way i would like to conclude by noting that pyrolysis offers flexible options to meet our nest national and regional energy needs the buyout oil gives us the opportunity to more efficiently produce electricity and that national and international programs are assisting industry by resolving the existing technical barriers thank you mr chairman and distinguished members of the subcommittee thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today and discuss some things that agra tech producers l l c is doing i want to give a special thanks to congressman inglis for his interest in our work it turns out that our manufacturing partner is located in his district even though our company is not within his district but we greatly appreciate his interest and his support i'd like to state a problem cellulosic material wood and agricultural material is not an easy substance work with it's generally about fifty percent moisture and in particular the case of wood it's bulky it's a relatively low energy value and the economics of getting it from the place of harvest to the place where it's actually going to be used as a fuel or energy sometimes means that we leave a lot of that material of that one billion that was referred to earlier remains in place where it might have been growing so a solution is required to that problem a solution that removes as much of the water as possible that dense applies the energy content of the material that also may change its physical characteristics in such a way that utilities can cope fire it and grind it very easily and mix it with coal as well as other users and other logistical approaches such as densification crushing the material into  facilitate its usability and of course there is a there's a challenge in developing the appropriate supply chains to get material from the point where it's been grown and harvested to the point where it could be used and i do want to emphasize there is a real need for a focus on solid fuels and addition to liquid fuels so i appreciate your comments earlier mr chairman about three years ago we got focused on something called tor faction or faction is essentially a process again it's a mild form of pyrolysis actually which drives off the water and in the case of the innovations that north carolina state university has developed we're able to capture some of the off gases and use those as process heat so the process that we are the rate is about eighty percent uses eighty percent green fuel if you will and very little fossil fuel and outside energy i won't go into any more details in that my written testimony is quite a bit about about the  process but the key thing is that it creates fuels from either wood or from agriculture material that can be used cost effectively and when i say cost effectively we're talking about producing material that may range in the eighty to one hundred dollar a tonne range and may have be two you can't or energy content in the eleven thousand b t u range which is very comparable to coal and the pricing of that is also comparable to coal in pricing our company has been very fortunate to have received a variety of federal and state support in our efforts to commercialize this very exciting technology one of our affiliates years back was fortunate to get a grant from and also to improve forest health we quickly learned what i've just described that if you're close to the customer it's easy to take that material and ship it to the customer for their use if you're more than thirty forty fifty miles away it is almost impossible to make the economics work that's when we went looking for a solution to that problem and discovered the tor faction process and n c state we've also been fortunate to have received funding from the u s force services would education resource center and we're using that those resources to help us investigate the differences between torah flying hardwoods and torah flying softwoods as you might guess different materials have different characteristics so need for research to fine tune or possibly make different kinds of equipment to handle different kinds of material mr chairman we're very fortunate as well recently to have gotten a grant from the department of energy under their s b i r s t t r program which is allowing us to look at the feasibility of developing mobile tor faction units which will allow us to go from farm to farm or forest  logging back be able to collect more material from dispersed places and put that into the the channel of material that can be used i do have some suggestions about some additional federal support that would be would be helpful to us one is increasing availability of financing for small companies we're very fortunate at the moment that we don't need financing to advance our manufacturing of torque faction equipment however as we get into and spend a little bit of our time on the processing side the credit crunch that our country is suffering particularly for small companies is a creating some challenges that we're going to need some help with in addition we have some very exciting i intellectual property is much in demand around the world and we're getting inquiries from china india russia and other places places which may or may not properly respect ip we'd like to be part of the global solution for renewable energy but as a small company we're very nervous about sharing our ip in certain places abroad any help that the federal government either legislatively or in  bilateral or otherwise would be extremely helpful to us as well and then lastly we believe that in addition to industrial scale activity where hundreds and thousands of tons of material are process by large fixed it's a large facilities we think there's tremendous opportunity for forest reliant communities and rural communities to use our technology on a community scale if you will  to work in their forests to work with their farmers improve forest health but also generate new revenues and new jobs in those communities deal we and u s d a have funded large scale research  research into large scale biomass supply and biomass value chain operations we would suggest that in addition to that in order for us to have and others to have an impact on low on rural communities that we should also be looking at the community scale or micro scale as well and we would be glad to participate that in your own state mr chairman we've had a number of forest communities contact us looking for ways to add value to the materials that they have available to them we would love to be able to provide demonstration units to them so they might accomplish that particular mission in summary we're very excited to be with you today we think there's some great opportunities to move forward and we look forward to working with committee thank you exxon testimony thank you thank you mr chairman and members of the subcommittee appreciate this opportunity to provide testimony on behalf of the united states department of energy's clean coal research program particularly those activities related to cope eating biomass materials with co that reduce the life cycle carbon intensity of electric power generation and large industrial processes the clean coal research program which is administered by the department's office of fossil energy and implemented by the national energy technology laboratory is designed to remove environmental concerns over the future use of coal by developing a portfolio of innovative clean coal technologies in partnership with a private sector efforts are focused on maximizing efficiency in environmental performance minimizing the cost of these new technologies in recent years the clean coal research program has been structured to focus on advanced coal technologies with integrated carbon capture and storage coping biomass with coal to current and future power plants is a logical part of the strategy the coal and biomass co feeding option when integrated in advance energy system with carbon capture and storage can provide electric power on a lifecycle basis with near zero greenhouse gas emissions biomass can be cofounded to nearly all coal based processes including pulverized coal combustion advanced oxygen based combustion plants and advanced gasification based plants when combined with pre or post combustion carbon capture technologies cofee ting biomass offers a very sound strategy to reduce the carbon intensity of these energy systems called biomass systems could become part of an early compliant strategy particularly in existing power plants systems can benefit from the economies of scale offered by large coal based energy systems large biomass only plants are often constrained by low biomass energy density feedstock water content feedstock collection preparation and local regional feedstock availability biomass can be used more effectively as a co feed in large central coal plants to realize the benefits of the economies of scale coal can also serve the offset the seasonal and variable nature of the supply biomass feedstocks considerable experience exists with a number of biomass the power generation facilities the may construct an operating particularly in europe the international energy agency's bio bio engineered energy task thirty two has compiled a very extensive database to provide a nice overview of this experience it reports that over the past five to ten years there has been remarkable rapid progress in the development of co firing several science of been retrofitted for demonstration purposes while another number of new plants are already being designed for involving biomass utilization with fossil fuels the majority are equipped of these plants are equipped with pulverized coal boilers which is the standard state of the art technology what you feel types generated as residue and energy crops over forty plants in the us have tofile coal and biomass over a period of several years operations have range from several hours of operation to several years with five plants operating  continuously for testing purposes either on water switchgrass and one plant operating commercially over the past two years on a mixture of coal and wood research efforts are currently focused on biomass preparation and pretreatment requirements feeding cold biomass mixtures in the high pressure gasifier said commercial conditions and characterizing the composition of the resulting strain to determine impacts on downstream components biological capture c o through two through algae called another c o two reduction strategy that is gaining attention as a possible means for greenhouse gas reductions from these fossil fuel plants algae the fastest growing plants on earth can double their size as frequently as every two hours while consuming c o two algae can be grown in regions such as desert conditions as not to compete with farmland the forests and they do not require fresh water to grow wild is recognize that the greenhouse gas is stored by algae well to merely be reduced to the atmosphere there is a net carbon offset by effectively using more the carbon contained in the fuel pick a trade it can to produce energy in conclusion to establish a new and widely deployed industry based on growing harvesting and processed large quantities of biomass fuel on a regular basis there are some key issues that are needed to address many of what you're hearing with the other speakers the single most important issue we believe is how much biomass can sustainably be made available to be economically and reliable  a power industrial facility this factor alone biomass availability will in turn dictate the scale of plant or plants in a particular region also experience dictates that the energy crop must not be competitive with a few food chain so land use and crop choices need to be carefully designed and manage their number of technical challenges as well to using biomass in future and current plants relative to things like the feeding biomass feeding slagging falling and corrosion of downstream processes and components this completes my statement and i look forward to the discussion period thank you thank you distinguished distinguished subcommittee members i appreciate this opportunity to share catalyst renewables operational lessons learned and insights on this important topic i ask that my detailed written testimony be included in the record as i intend to share only a few key points catalyst was both successful green renewable and sustainable energy company before being green was so popular our biomass experience originates with the wind sail plant in lyons falls new york we purchased this one thousand megawatt combined heating power facility in two thousand and three at that time the plant was in distress but after significant capital investment and reestablishment of trust and confidence with the local forest community we've been able to help lines to overturn the viability catalyst developed and deployed and approved the santa before stream management plan in conjunction with its renewable energy credit from the new york state renewable portfolio standard today the land sale would bet would basket is considered the healthiest forest in new york state wood from the forest and mass energy crops offer a significant renewable and environmentally acceptable alternative to fossil based energy supplies the united states bio power for it is being led by renewable energy energy generation innovators like catalysts and our strategies can be applied to all our security advantage from using clean renewable homegrown fuel for baseload thermal energy and electricity what he biomass has a proven reliable national logistics handling system and system biomass is not just wood today we have no integrated biomass handling system for the efficient and effective inclusion of crop residues and livestock nutrients so our first research and development suggestion is the design development and operational test and evaluation of regional logistic systems including integration of rail transport and  staging areas for what he biomass crop residues in nutrient feed stocks integrated handling systems must be designed and tested to be commercially and operational effective and suitable for with a minimum of handling touches as industry develops new facilities a concerted effort to advance commingled biomass supplies would hance resource use reduce costs expand biomass availability for renewable thermal energy and electricity we suggest multiple regional demonstration suited to regional food feed stocks are reasonable and prudent second catalyst is constantly seeking cleaner more reliable production of renewable baseload heat and power our foremost concerns are fish n c environmental suitability and elimination of greenhouse gas emissions presently are already permitted thirty seven m recognized as the most efficient combustion conversion device for biomass residues however if the boilers come with a significant associated energy palely pressurized air flow large quantities of air required to counterbalance the mass of the bo propel into the mass into a fluid i state this results in a six percent penalty on efficiency in case of onondaga that's twenty one thousand megawatt hours a year next environmentally c o two is also virtually sulfur free and our systems can already effectively eliminate particulate matter leaving emissions of oxides of nitrogen knocks the most important remaining consideration today we use catalytic reduction systems including selective catalytic reduction in regenerative selective catalytic reduction fresh catalytic units are capable of continuously reducing knocks by more than ninety eight percent at onondaga the catalyst will operate at high conversion efficiency for about ten thousand hours but then it must be replaced and disposed of presently nox reduction catalyst cannot be regenerated finally maintaining optimum chemical reaction temperatures and catalytic reduction units operated for the eliminated and the elimination of knocks and the elimination of use of fossil fuels as reheat or energy sources it's essential presently oil or natural gas is burned to maintain to maintain flue gas temperatures to effect rapid and high knocks conversion from i don't modern biomass conversion plant the heat and put approaches ten percent of the total b value that's three point seven megawatts of capacity at onondaga to summarize we must strongly suggest specific congressional direction to us to you we in funded research and development authorizations for appropriations to design test and deploy integrated biomass logistics thems to research develop and test equipment to eliminate parasitic power loss in bubbling fluid as biomass boilers to research develop test and deploy catalytic units that have extended operational lives and that can be regenerated in place i'd like to thank the committee for the opportunity right information today it's a privilege to be invited i was specifically asked to speak about research and development needs regarding aerobic digestion of animal manure to produce energy via bio gas and r digestion is a conversion of manure into bio gas which contains primarily methane through a process that without air it's a process has been around for years we use a long time and have a relatively good handle on the years can be used as renewable energy source in various ways it can be directly utilize on farm for heat or other uses can be directly combusted in boulder through spot water can be cleaned in condition what we call upgraded and can be injected into the natural gas pipeline can be used to some environmental options it reduces odors which in a farm setting is a very important situation it reduces organic material potentially reduces pathogens and generates marketable carbon credits for sale through duction of the base greenhouse gas about one half percent of the total us electricity generation in two thousand and eight or about seventeen percent of the non non hydroelectric renewable energy provision in this country but we have to recognize that we can't necessarily digest all of that manure and we can't get one hundred percent market penetration in the us e p a x r programs done some very good reports that looked at what systems are feasible specifically in the dairy and swine industry they believe that some of the larger systems are more feasible and if we take that market share that they believe would be good candidates for digestion is still represents about six point three billion kilowatt hours per year generated the implementation of digestion us has been very limited however currently we have one hundred thirty five operational m digesters in this country if we contrast that to the two leading countries in the world china and germany china currently has sixteen thousand animal manure anaerobic digesters that are medium and large scale similar to our confined animal feeding operations systems concentrate the competitive market from a standpoint of going back on the grid typically you're going to see house sale right in the u s which is going to average around three percent varies by location the country germany is currently saving thirty three u s cents per kilowatt hour for that similar energy and in china nine to ten cents per kilowatt hour the research and development needs in that assay are those that could reduce the cost of energy derived from your anaerobic digestion system so we can compete in the current energy market gas is equal to or greater than the current cost to purchase natural gas so it makes it not economically feasible to pursue that option the development of lower cost systems especially that could be applied on farm and smaller systems would be very useful the development of options would also be handy as i mentioned because the cost for bog ass upgrading is so high if we could skip the upgrade costs and directly use unconditioned by gas especially on the farm it would give us a much more economical opportunity to do cost avoidance situation this is a very basic research but it is very practical in nature is something that that would provide a lot of forward traction if we could come up with those systems next the development of an early i just in systems that are compatible with swine deep it finish operations most of the pigs in this country the majority are finished in the midwestern united states and majority of those twenty systems utilize what's called a deep pit system in your store directly on animals those systems are not directly compatible with  systems and the development of a system that would allow the at that station without large cost again would bring that market sector into the gang the adaptations development of how solids digestion systems to mature systems there's been hoss olives or dry digestion systems in this world for some time to move those systems into manure would also provide benefits ideally the advanced development advance lower cost knocks controls for  in some parts of the u s specifically in california knox limits are lower than we can currently achieve that are being written into permits with a lot of the technologies out there from a cost effective standpoint and there's limited some implantation i'd like to finish up by saying conclude by saying the number of near digesters in the us is increasing i think this is primarily due to the fact that we see increasing branch support at the federal and state level to build digesters so we're going to continue to see these systems come online we're not cost competitive in the energy market right now and this this topic touches energy environment and agriculture and i think it presents an excellent opportunity for d o a and u s d a to work synergistically to help answer some of these gaps thank you very much thank you dr branson an outstanding series of information from all of you thank you very much and i will recognize myself for five minutes to ask questions and be followed by the other my colleagues here thanks again to our honored guests we appreciate your presence and wish you a good day and enjoyable visit thank you very much dr burns i have a question that i've got a lot of questions for all of you but let me just start with this one well since you just spoke  my it's my understanding that methane is a more potent greenhouse gas by quite a significant factor relative to c o two in the energy but i don't know the answer to this and maybe you don't either but i'm going to ask and in the energy bill that's been kicked around the house and what's working in the senate does reduction of methane through the kind of process you've described you get a greater credit for that that you than you would if you're reducing c o two and by volume i don't know that that's the case but it seems  you need to hit your mike again or move it up there you go there you go yes or methane is recognizably twenty one to twenty three times more potent c o two depending upon which protocol in time scale now if i can rephrase the question are you asking is the combustion methane obviously when we combust methane we also generate some c o two in that process and if i understand you correctly you're asking if we receive a net gain from the combustion of methane as compared to the c o two that's a meter from the process it's that's part of the question then the other question will be this if we're not in some way using the methane to generate energy presumably some of that's just being released into the atmosphere so do you get under under any of the energy bills that are moving or do you think you should get credit for reducing  the methane that's going into the atmosphere that was here through your kind of process is yes well and i think the answer is yes you should get credit but it has to be recognised that the credit increment is tied to what was the existing system e if there had not been a digester at this location how much methane would be generated right cause once generally digestion process is put in we're going to greatly increase the methane production so it's that that differential click between the two that that should be created it's got very very good point one of the things that strikes me as i listen to the testimony of all of you really is that we've got this remarkable resource that can be used in a number of ways and i really appreciate that i think our staff been an outstanding job of giving us diverse perspectives on ways things can be used but as i look at the biomass program and v o a and maybe i'm wrong and maybe someone can correct me or if not help us figure out what we ought to do but as i look at the biomass program and bio power really like we're talking about today's really been the glock that it's mostly been fueled has mostly been and mostly frankly ethanol i mean we've just put so much effort into that and it seems to me at the expense of much of what you're doing and solar so i'd like to ask your comments you all actually give an excellent suggestions for things we could conceivably do better it doesn't seem like it's being done well now it's almost solely focused on on ethanol what you have some comments on  this committee or this congress were to direct the dealy and say you know we want you to give more attention to bio power in any of the forms the olive talked about how would that best be accomplished in your interaction with and some of you work for us on the labs to get funding for the early i don't want to put you on a difficult spot there but from your professional expertise how would that how could we best make sure that we're broadening the portfolio of possible uses a biomass and i'll just open that up to whomever wants to take a stab bomber you look ready to go so fire away i think the first thing that generally exists today is there's a there's a real bias against things that burn and in whatever form whether it's  direct combustion ultimately there is combustion and if we can get past that bias and start to focus on the fact that you know according to u s d a from the forest there's three hundred eighty six million bone dry tons a year from the forest alone when you add all these other factors you start to get into one point two billion tons per year of biomass we're talking about eliminating so many it whether it's bio fuels or bio power that would be a huge portion of our national need for power and for fuel so first we've got to get the recognition that this is good for the forest it's the methane question is an excellent one if this stuff flies and rots in the forest floor whether it's  the ditch it's going to convert to fifty percent methane fifty percent c o two by combusting it we may be carbon neutral but we're significantly green got greenhouse gas positive the key thing is to use technology and advances in technology and support advances tech and technology to improve the efficiency of the conversion so we can compete economically and as a businessman would i don't want to put words in your mouth of what i'm hearing it sounds like would it be fair say that the work the bulk of the research has been coming out of the in terms of how to deal with biomass as an energy source has not been particularly beneficial to the kind of utilization that you do in your industry almost none ok so and here's an of the subcommittee to ask d o a to confirm or correct my understanding and this is from hearing other scientist that the combustion of biomass is a more efficient conversion of that material into than using it to make liquid fuels i'm not one to suggest we should not make liquid fuels with that material but we should also be striving for where we can maximum utilization a maximum benefit the other thing mr chairman i would  suggest that some investigation might be the worthy we're very fortunate to have a technology that's in demand internationally and i can tell you that the europeans and particularly the british here lately because they've developed some new incentives to use dedicated biomass if you will are scouring around the u s locking up our biomass in long term contracts now i don't want to hurt our business opportunities but as a citizen i am concerned that there could be a point in the future where we developed our technologies and we've committed ourselves with the appropriate climate legislation and we find out that our feed stocks are being exported  other places i would urge that the subcommittee might ask for some research in that particular area outstanding points and you know you said it more delicately than i might but one of the sad things about i think the ethanol emphasis in my of the research on that is our net energy output is negative on that after a lot of work and investment a minute with corn based ethanol at any rate not to mention all the food impacts in the fertilizer in the water and particularly in trade also mr james by this issue of of of on site processing of materials in particular you know i've got timber communities now that are twenty to twenty five or more percent unemployment they've just been devastated and the idea that when you go out there with your gaiters and  everything else all the log inclement that you could take out along as part of the contract as part of the bed take out equipment the process would fuels in some fashion makes an awful lot of sense to me especially with the economic implications and the energy implications so i applaud you for that anyone else want to talk about this issue of dealey and ways they could maybe diversify the portfolio in a different way just one thing i'd like to give the a we some credit for they supported our effort at developing a plantation fuel purpose farm biomass in new york we've done some interesting work with the state university of new york environmental science and forestry college on purpose ground dedicated biomass i think that that in addition to the existing portfolio that was described could really make a difference it takes fallow farmland and otherwise not useful this is not a competitor with food it's an opportunity for people to get a revenue stream and that is particularly good because it acts as a carbon sink in addition to being carbon neutral on the generating side thank you i recognise mr inglis for five minutes i apologize to my colleagues and over a little bit  but so anyway it is really and sometimes people on this committee i think they've been smoking something reduce transportation costs which you move it on to where it's going to be burned right yes the picture you're referring to is the prototype on campus at north carolina state university and we are developing with the help of coasters zima your constituent company in your district larger units that are fixed units that will be placed close to fourth the areas or agricultural areas but thanks to deal we support we're also looking at developing mobile units which will be on wheels we hope and be able to actually go from logging back to logging back maybe from community to community in order to process material as close to the point of harvest as possible that's very interesting  mr chairman the you and your committee members or some committee members are certainly welcome to come and take a look at the prototype at some point time if you choose to do so would be glad to make arrangements for   a half a mile pipeline to a bunch of industrial facilities are using a similar problem i guess for siting hug farms and things like that if they become a an energy producer then it's less hard to cite those supposed right there's certainly an economy of scale that's associated with with energy production through anaerobic digestion landfill by gas production systems are typically much larger in terms of the the generating capacity then your systems would be they also my understanding is landfill systems are currently electricity generation those systems is probably done so  third or so the cost of what we're currently seeing as generation costs from your digestion systems again there are larger systems typically three four megawatt generating capacity and they're very predictable systems with a with a landfill yield and there's other factors that that make your digestion will tougher i mean animals are not coming in and out of the landfill there's not there's not potential changes in your biomass generation capacity in that when field because of the gas field and landfills occur generally after they're closed and then you yield that gas toward energy so that i've been very successful that is a model that can be looked at but there are some differences and primarily scale i think would be the one that would be different from what we see in existence with the near thank you thank you you mention that you get more energy from burning this and if you burn wood but unless we're going to spend a lot dumber than amec you won't get more energy from it than you would have gotten if you burn that wood because you have some energy invested in creating this this product so really you're trading convenience for energy because your day at less energy out of the out n of course you're correct however the systems boilers and otherwise that burn material burn more efficiently with higher b to you and less moist material ask your question about forest health absent fires how does removing biomass from for us make them healthier if we look at a tropical rain forest if you remove the biomass you remove essentially all of the nutrients you guys they're all in this cycle of life that has to be somewhat true in our temperate forest although nowhere near to the extent of the tropical rain forest i'm having trouble understanding how removing biomass absent fires how removing biomass makes the forest healthier you know i can use the example of upstate new york and really the whole north eastern mixed northern hardwood for absent an active with typically what happens in new york for example absent a low grade bio mass market loggers there's active logging going on up there they're taking the maple cherry the best wood and with no market for anything else they take that out turn it into furniture tabletops and they leave the stuff that you really don't want diseased trees  material when pulp and paper was active there was a market for that low grade material pulp pulp industry is basically dried up in the north and absent a market for that you've got this changing nature of the native forest in new york and in maine and in other places more so in new york and those forces tend to be less healthy and that's healthy you mean that they don't have the kind of trees growing there that you would like to have growing so when you take the trash trees out  and you're not getting new growth you're not as efficient at consuming c o two a forest fire is nature's way of fixing that problem they're not a lot of there's not a big problem in the northeast where it's particularly damp it's worse in my home state of colorado where the whole forest and go up in a hurry but being able to thin the forests and allow new growth diverse growth is good the audubon society tells us it's good for habitat and the defense department of environmental conservation says it's critical for for self in new york that help me understand what you mean by forest help doesn't mean you're growing more for us it means you're growing the kind of forest you would like to grow i have a question for this second round and i just introduce it now and  concern for sustainability even with no till farming for every bushel of corn we grow in iowa three bushels of topsoil go down the mississippi river and topsoil is topsoil because it has organic material in it we can rape our soils for a few years and then we will have the quality of soils we have where we're fighting very hard today to maintain the fertility of our soils i'm having trouble understanding how we can take very much biomass off our soils and still maintain that that fertility the soil let's come back for a second round to and to a discussion of this because i think that experiments  congress congressman if i could respond to your earlier question about force health the natural course is for force to have fires every several years which thins out the underbrush that's  naturally occurring thing you're going from what state i'm from south carolina ok that's different than up here i cannot remember a forest fire up here it just doesn't happen are temperate for us at least not i'm familiar with was a while you have a little later on the you know a little dry litter a barn but a real forest fire we just don't have them and i do we in the even and so forth i never heard of a forest fire and it's really different in your pine forest down there and in the west we don't have them here my point is they go on to force health issues to do extent there's a lot of underbrush and small diameter trees that are crowded against each other the rep pity with which disease and infestation spreads in the far east is accelerated so being able to mechanically thin those and most forest we have we live in we run highways through and we do other things that don't allow prescribed burns to take place mechanical thinning is what is happening to the extent there is budget for it for example the forest service has limited budget and one of the one of the reasons that they've developed the woody biomass realization program was to try to generate a cash stream off of that biomass that would allow them to treat additional acreage in the forest the other thing i would say is that the process that we have the living parts of the tree which are the bark in the leaves tend to turn into a fine powder whereas the corpus of the tree turns you know you feature if then you get chips out that that's fine powder tends to have more minerals in it and we are looking to see whether that can be a those when your will still be land applied as part of lazarus digestion it's important understand as a nutrient neutral process that the amount of nutrients for move the anaerobic digestion process for the album get requirement the microbes is is very very small so that those macronutrients are going to udall crops the n p n is still going to be there and farmers that utilize it early digesters are still going to have to have the same land by their new trick management mandan that mature is still going to go to the field it it is true however that it will go to the field with less carbon content than it can find prior to digestion for beef and dairy systems we can expect to see thirty to forty percent of that organic carbon being converted over to methane and c o two in the process and first wind in layers we're more in the sixty to seventy percent range but those nutrients from a fertility standpoint will still be there and and the benefits of the fiber and a lot of that carbon is still going to be there from building that in a composting process if it's if it's cheap complex you spread the manure on the field so that there's no anaerobic activity going on it's very thin then you shouldn't get methane should you know sir if we keep the system a row beacon nature we will not generate methane it will go through over a robot respiration it will generate c o two there will still be carbon lost there and also importantly without a rollback process we're probably going to lose not trojan out of the system as as gaseous ammonia you have to incorporate it in the soil to avoid that incorporation solomon yours is recommended to avoid that gaseous ammonia loss yes sir important line of questioning and i think especially regarding what we've seen with that and all what you talked about with great eloquence in the past on this committee continuing on the theme i began earlier it seems apparent that a number of areas of additional research search and and government activity whether it's in a lot property or targeted research on catalysts and a host of areas where we could be doing things if he were to spend give more attention to bio power broadly what gentleman's perspective what office ideally it would be technically equipped to do that where where would we best go with india we to james and then mr chairman i'll try to take a stab at that i answered the question is i'm not exactly sure however the office of biomass certainly comes to mind if i could also go back to an earlier point that you made we participated with others in our region and one of the last solicitations for a biomass supply chain and the as i recall the language in the solicitation did not exclude making solid fuels but there may have been a bias towards liquid fuels i think your staff might wish to analyze the awards that came out of that solicitation it may make sense for whatever part of the always is going to take on this assignment to have a very specific solicitation for solid fuels or some other types of activity that supports some of the testimony that you've heard today so there's not an ambiguity and i guess some opportunity for i don't want to use the word bias but some opportunity for not fully exploring that opportunity and if that's james obviously you're in the industry that would deal more with the solid liquid it would would there be a counter argument that would say well the reason they are biased if there was bias or the reason they favored let's say let's not deal with predilection but maybe they just made an empirical scientific judgment that there's more bang for the buck so to speak are better return on investment in liquid fields is that the case or do you think it think it was more  again not trying to put you on the spot but the question for me is we should be looking at all our options but we have to look critically at those options i think we should look at all options and we say we support all all options however the u nderstanding that i have from the scientists that i'm talking to suggest that direct combustion whether treated or untreated of bio mass gets more you end up with more energy on a net basis than you would li wanted to be a focus that's not just in name only i'm going to go right back to the liquid and the other thing i would say mr chairman that the electric utilities and other coal users are great collaborators and we've  had good luck in working with a variety of utilities so there's an opportunity to leverage some of the users including coal suppliers if you will into this process because we all need to figure out how do we work together how do we use existing distribution and supply chains that are already in place in order to make a system work and so i think if it's a solicitation it could be a little more specific in our case on solid fuels and encourage collaboration between users and suppliers and other members of that value that value and supply chain that we could come up with a very robust solution it will be my intention following this hearing actually quire precisely these recommend where you put your money but i would simply comment that officer bio mass program has had active bio power programs several years ago and several of the people who worked on those then are still there the expertise is resident and the capability exists there today for applications oriented work and of course office of science is capable of doing very basic work as well as a recommendation it would be very useful  bring together the two to solve both the very fundamental problems and the applications problems in a meaningful way that's very very useful maybe we should move the first presidential caucus to a temper state and we would have different  human waste as well as animal waste and in mumbai a while ago and we were travelling through the city at two or three in the morning and i really thought if we struck a match we might have you know a country like that that has so many people and has to come up with some way of coping with that waste problem if you can turn waste into something good sure is a win win proposition and actually while there we visited a place where they're doing that they're taking food waste from a dormitory and turn it into methane that empowers the kitchens and i asked them about the actually not the scale ability it's the opposite scale they keep it small enough that you could actually do a neighborhood that way and they said that is the challenge if you don't want to in case of some such a system you don't want to build it so large if you lose some of the benefits if you can do it much more locally you have this great benefit of being able to have a relatively small system that takes a great deal of takes to waste and then turns it into something useful is it something that as we develop things on the farm is that a possibility of moving into the city with those kind of the lessons learned on the farm i think there's there's great examples around the world of where that's already been done and i think whether you're going to see that implemented or not going to depend on where you are in the world i e what's the relative cost of energy for example the the largest number of manure digesters by far in the class of what we call domestic digesters we're human excrement not government the people's republic of china has put a great amount of funding into supporting their their construction i've done work with the systems outside of change and in some some watershed projects where they're using them to try to reduce pathogen and so forth but what you see is it it's very very quickly adopted system and that the bio gases generate is used for heat for a lot in these systems india has four million of these systems the paul has  hundred forty thousand you see them in locations again with the relative cost of energy if you were to look at the cost of say purchasing propane or natural gas in those communities versus the cost of going out and picking up wood to build a fire in the corner of your home those costs are such that it makes a lot of sense to generate bio gas and you know if we look at the relative cost of energy in this country you know it would you don't see those systems adopted because energy from a relative cost from our income is so low that we're going to purchase it rather than pick up wood to cook there are though examples of a lot of bog gas being generated from this but wastewater treatment plants in this country it's very common it's been done for years it's very successful those facilities however are typically a robot treatment plants because recall that we mentioned anaerobic digesting is nutrient neutral so we'll go through the tertiary treatment process and use in a robe extatic where we'll biologically remove nutrients and it may methane is the coal miners black damp is that true the explosive gas in coal mines is methane is it not which is odorless and so the older you get from the swamp is not the methane it's something that goes along with the with the mass thing our irrational exuberance over bio energy has resulted in two bubbles which have burst the first was the hydrogen bubble and nobody talks about hydrogen anymore because i think they finally figured out that hydrogen is not an energy source you always get less energy out of the hydrogen that it took to make the hydrogen the second bubble that broke was the corn ethanol bubble and i and one of my staff people did some early back to the on the local calculations and rhesus actually the same conclusions that the national academy of sciences reached they said that we turned all of our corn into ethanol every bit of it and discounted for fossil fuel then put it would displace two point four percent of our gasoline they said you could say more gas than that by tuning up your car and putting air in the tires they further said that if we took all of our soybeans and convert them into soy diesel a more efficient process by the way than corn ethanol that this with this place two point nine percent of our diesel now most of our arable land is our farmland is planted to corn and soybeans and so just as an old farmer being very practical when i note that if we took all of our corn and converted it to ethanol discounting for fossil fuel input you displace two point four percent of our gasoline and if you did the same thing for all of our s easily just place two point nine percent of our diesel and noting that corn and soybeans are grown on almost all of our land that's good enough to grow grow crops on i'm wondering sustainably how much we should really expect to get from our lands that aren't good enough to grow either of these crops on i just think that the third bubble that's going to break is the ethanol bubble i think we'll get something there i think you will get nothing like the potential that many people feel that the am i wrong this is a topic i know something about and it's you've asked a number of questions in there first on the purpose grown portion of it let's use state in new york for example we're looking at getting five bone dry tons per acre on about up to bailable two million acres of fal farmland that's perfect for fast growing what you buy us well and that's a cop us crop we don't till the soil it will go through twenty one years of life before you have to replace it harvesting every three years that's five tonnes per acre let's assume we just get a million of it planted it's six hundred million potentially based on a process that we're working on is roughly six hundred million gallons a year of of petroleum products not not ethanol conversion as i used to say if it was easy to turn wood and alcohol some guy in tennessee would have figured out how to do it a long time ago the fact is though it's not a stretch to turn it into hydrocarbons and it's being done it can be done now what about sustainability all the sustainability side of it is your harvest plan are you taking biomass which by definition in a forest sense is the waste not the you never go down and cut a tree down just for biomass in the northeast they're going to go in and do their normal logging thinning process and if you leave that on the those trimmings on the in the forest it then contributes to the humans in the forest and therefore the nutrients which helps additional trees grow at least to some extent our forests have to be a bit like tropical rainforest when you remove the tropical rain forest you have laterite soils that make as hard as a break and you have essentially no good agricultural land ok but the well and the worst thing you can do to the forests is put a farm on it the best thing you can do for forest is keep it then because for example in new york it takes up to sixty years grow a harvest you've got sixty years of leaves shed from that tree that's really re neutral nutrient typing which is the word for that and putting nutrients back into the soil when when you take down a typical northern hardwood up to fifty percent of that tree is not going to be turned into furniture that remaining top and limb is going to rot in the form that you would see it in the forest and it's it's not going to necessarily turn into new trends it's going to be turning into methane and c o two that's the stuff we clean up those leaves that shed every year are going back to put nutrients back into the soil so from a sustainability perspective it's at least demonstrated in new york specifically that thinning the forest properly increases the total rate of growth of that for us and therefore the c o two intake of that forest you're giving it more room to move your lying younger trees to grow so from a sustainability perspective at least we're not the experts we rely on experts who have told us this  that that is truly sustainable and truly good for the health of the forest long term so if you just assume that and on a national basis assume that's true on a national basis and we're talking about half of the hydrocarbon fuel use in this country could come from sustainable forest biomass mr chairman i'm still skeptical when i look at what we could get from all of our arable land o'lakes back to get many times that in this land is not good enough to grow either soy on i still remain skeptical of what the real sustainability is going to be even though even though those limbs and tops rot and the c o two and methane goes up you've still got humans there that's what holds water that's what holds and this is really true in the rockies of disease trees which are tinder dry and ready to go up in smoke minutely not the entire tree burns unless it's a really bad fire and what's happening in the northwest is we're actually thinning some of those out for in two ways of course are overgrown that increases fire risk but also if you've got insect infested trees you need to get those out here's the sad part from a from a global overheating perspective we're actually taking that wood out stacking it out and burning it now if you care about c o two which i know you do and and and so what was the paradox for me is we're actually spending good money for the sake of forest health to get this stuff out but we actually are not using it for energy and sadly the initial draft of the energy bill passed the house prohibited expressly prohibited the use of forest products from federal lands that count as biomass and only the president that it so severely restricted private lands that that became impractical and then the down way stream so that's a process the byproduct in the pulp and paper and you get back black liquor out as a byproduct the only way you could count black liquor according to the initial bill as as a renewable fuel source was if every shred of fiber upstream came from renewable source as defined by this it was a ludicrous approach and actually i got that fixed in the energy but a coalition of others but it was it was maddening to see a bill that was supposedly designed to diversify our energy portfolio and reduce greenhouse gases basically giving no credit for using greenhouse gases for fuel and leaving it instead on the ground to rot or burn up so your point is absolutely well taken i think it absolutely does apply if we were to just say we're going to grow huge for us that we're going to cut them down and never replenish that soil  i think you do have some adverse impacts but when we're taking by products out from the normal harvest process or from dead and disease trees i think we can use that actually pretty productively not that it's a panacea looked at  energy office be the correct office to look at some of this they've been involved in fuel cell work in advance conversion electricity work and i believe not be the propre people to take a look at some of the r and d needs that were done about earlier in the hearing share with me your insights on  this category are closely with this category i don't know compared to the biomass all we've got a long time today and did you have another follow up question doc bartlett i'm not going to ask you to do this on the record but and actually on the record if you want to but not not going to ask a day but if any of you want to comment at some point about how dealy can be more responsive it's not just about what entity is there but you all have given us i mean very good suggestions for for everything ranging but you know actual property rights as i mentioned earlier catalyst etc two technologies to two to logistical flow of of materials i don't know i'm not experienced enough or knowledgeable enough to know you talk about the drop sound requests for proposals or grad opportunities etc to what extent is that is there a bottom up process in other words where you all could could talk abt i'm going to ask you to answer that where you or you folks are people in the industry not just you here but others who may be in the audience or doing other things can say to deal with a hey here's what we really need not you telling us what you think we need but this is what we need can you can you conduct some aware of any specific mechanism at the moment i do you know we do have relationships with u s d a and they have created conferences and other kinds of get togethers that allow us to have some dialogue with them i remember doing a weapon are with us the staff were several dozen of them were on on the line with us talking about two or faction thank you for having the hearing it turns out that the only folks that i've been trying to talk with for the last month or so are here and we're going to get together and do some chatting after this meeting so we'll bring donuts to the next but i you know i think there needs to be more mechanisms that allow us to get together and have some dialogue and i'm sure the agency will do that i do want to compliment the secretary and the energy and that he's brought to the agency i see a lot of difference in the agency now and we're looking forward to finding ways to collaborate with them thank you and the anyone else wish to comment on that if not i want to bring the hearing to a close want to thank our with this is for testifying before the subcommittee i want to thank particularly my colleagues for their insightful and informative questions and comments directed to remain open for two weeks for additional statements for the members and for answers to any follow up questions a subcommittee may ask of the witnesses witnesses or excuse with our gratitude and the hearing now stands adjourned thank you all very much and thanks to the g