A Billion Tons of Biomass: Toward a Sustainable Biomass Feedstock Infrastructure

The US is embarked on a trajectory to produce up to 30 percent of our transportation fuels from biomass by 2030. As one indicator of the scale of this challenge, it is useful to benchmark the USDA-DOE estimate of the biomass required, one billion tons, against our current agricultural sector. Current U.S. production of grains, fruits, vegetables, hay, and even pasture grasses combine to only 800 million tons. To achieve this scale we will need the equivalent of a second agricultural infrastructure, bigger than that the current one, arising from nowhere in the next twenty years. Imagine all the workers, equipment, and other infrastructure investments that will require. In the U.S. we have already seen railcar shortages in the last few years due to rapid increases in corn ethanol production. With even more rapid scale-up of cellulosic technologies predicted, we can expect substantial shortages of railcars and trucks, as well as greatly increased traffic on the rural roads and short-line rails that will carry this feedstock about. For new, high yielding bioenergy crops we will need new harvest equipment, and to contain transportation costs we will need new methods of densification before transport. To insure a large biorefinery has a secure a year-round feedstock supply, we will need massive storage facilities, perhaps satellite pre-processing centers, and a tightly choreographed strategy for moving all that material around. And beyond these technical considerations are the human factors ? enthusiastic producers, cooperative neighbors, and perhaps 200 new workers in the feedstock supply chain for every 50 keeping a biorefinery hum. To understand and prepare for these challenges, we need to do our homework now ? inventorying feedstock, talking to landowners, developing supply-price curves, and investing in the producer co-ops, equipment companies, transportation infrastructure and the people that this industry needs. If we desire a future where a substantial fraction of our energy comes from biomass, it is increasingly clear that we need immediate and substantial investments in feedstock infrastructure to enable that future growth.