College Station, Texas
April 30, 2007
Big Sorghum is moving up on Big
Oil in Texas. Ten-foot tall stalks of bioenergy sorghum, planted
on thousands of acres, could march across Texas just as oil
derricks once did, replacing black gold with green gold.
Texas A&M Agriculture will
host U.S. Department of Agriculture Under Secretary Gale
Buchanan and Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples on
Tuesday, May 1, for a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the most
promising biomass research efforts within The Texas A&M
University System.
Biofuels derived from plant cellulose - found in the tall
sorghum among other biomass alternatives - offers an energy
future that is at once sustainable, environmentally responsible,
and just around the corner.
"Corn is a viable way to produce ethanol from starch," said Dr.
Elsa Murano, who serves as Vice Chancellor of Agriculture and
Life Sciences for the A&M System and also directs the Texas
Agricultural Experiment Station, where scientists are digging
into a range of biofuels alternatives. "But that's not the only
option for Texas and the southern part of the country."
In addition to growing corn for biofuels, Texas can capitalize
on decades of sorghum research at the Experiment Station, Murano
said. The giant sorghum varieties being grown in experimental
plots today are drought-tolerant, can be grown across the state,
and offer high yields in ethanol.
"Based upon our analyses, we find it's efficient to take
something like our new sorghum varieties or sugar cane that
produces large volumes of biomass, rather than producing grain
and then converting grain-starch to ethanol," Murano said.
Texas is uniquely posed to take advantage of this developing
technology as a leading agricultural state with a large forest
industry, a major biomass producer with diverse growing
environments, and major universities and agencies with energy
expertise, said Bob Avant, program manager for the A&M System's
Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.
Texas is an energy-friendly state, Avant adds, producing 26
percent of the U.S. domestic oil and 29 percent of natural gas.
The state already has an "extensive energy infrastructure in
place," with 26 existing refineries, 135,000 miles of natural
gas pipeline and a large structure of pipelines for transporting
crude oil and liquefied petroleum gas.
Texas is also a huge energy user. Texans used about 12 billion
gallons of gasoline in 2004, or 533 gallons per capita. The
economics aside, there isn't enough grain production capacity in
Texas to supply that need, Avant said. |
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