FAYETTEVILLE — A local professor spoke Feb. 11 in the community room of the Fayetteville Free Library about the sustainable and renewable qualities of bioenergy.
The Feb. 11 presentation by Dr. Timothy Volk, a professor in the sustainable resources management department at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF), was given to members of the local 350.org education and activism group Climate Change Awareness & Action.
Volk started by providing a snapshot of the United States’ energy use patterns and the role of biomass in our country’s energy supply.
The United States’ primary energy consumption, as he showed in a pie chart, can be split into petroleum and natural gas as the two biggest slices followed by nuclear electric power, coal, and renewable energy as skinnier slices, with each of those latter three counting as 9% pieces on the graph.
Making up most of the renewable energy portion of the U.S.’s economy, he said, is biomass in the form of biofuels, wood and biomass waste with corn grain ethanol comprising a good chunk of the biofuels.
Volk then laid out how the different types of energy sources flow into different sectors of our society, whether it’s for residential, commercial, industrial or transportation uses or electricity generation.
His emphasis there was to show that only 32% of the total amount of energy harnessed in the U.S. results in useful energy service, with the rest getting rejected.
“We waste two-thirds of the energy that we put into our economy,” Volk said. “If we’re gonna address the energy issues in the country, this needs to change—we shouldn’t put in so much energy on the front end to make what we want.”
Volk said it comes up in his discussions with people about climate change that there’s a hesitancy about having to give up their lifestyles in order for the country to meet its overarching climate goals. He said that changing our day-to-day personal routines isn’t as necessary as changing how efficiently we as a country use the energy that
goes into our system.
He went on to say that New York State has a robust renewable electric grid and that Upstate New York specifically has the lowest greenhouse gas emissions per kilowatt hour produced of any region in the entire country.
Though biomass is the biggest source of renewable energy in the United States, the public doesn’t know quite as much about it, Volk said.
He said the U.S. currently uses 342 million tons of biomass for fuel and power, with much of that coming from forestry and agriculture resources.
Volk also talked about renewable diesel being a one-for-one chemical replacement for fossil diesel and how renewable diesel can be made out of biomass, namely plant compounds like vegetable oils, animal fats, greases and crop residues.
He said oils are the easiest thing to convert into renewable diesel but that there’s a limited supply of it, so the next step would be to rely on extracting the desired chemicals out of wood or grass to give us renewable diesel even though doing so can be more expensive and there are extra steps in the beginning stages.
Volk added that as the demand for ethanol drops off for passenger vehicles on land, it’s beginning to be picked up and turned into sustainable aviation fuel.
Volk finished his presentation by talking about the Willow Biomass Program at SUNY ESF that involves drawing homegrown renewable energy from shrub willow for heat, electricity and even liquid fuels after being put into a combustion system.
The work to conduct research and analysis related to shrub willow while developing that “low-maintenance” energy crop is done by the college with numerous private and public partners, and most of the research trials over the years for the project have taken place at a station in Tully where there are field plots of willow.
Volk went into the rapid growing process, evidence of just how high the crop can grow, and how shrub willow is propagated from stem cuttings with new stems sprouting after each harvest.
“It’s a shrub willow—we want it to be a shrub,” he said. “We want it to be bushy because more stems means more leaves, more solar capture and more conversion of the carbon dioxide.”
Volk also delved a bit into the history behind that project, pointing to Onondaga County as the heart of the willow basketry industry through the late 1800s and early 1900s, when more willow baskets were made in the county than any other place in the country.
He additionally mentioned how mentors of his at the college Ed White and Larry Abraham followed the lead of Sweden when they put in the SUNY ESF’s project’s first academic research plots back in the 1980s.
Volk said shrub willow, which grows well in wet environments, can be found in places like roadside ditches and is common across the Upstate New York landscape.
On Tuesday, March 11, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. there will be another presentation with Climate Change Awareness & Action (CCAA) at the library, which is located at 300 Orchard St. in Fayetteville. That talk about heat pumps, their cost-effectiveness and their health benefits will be given by Ian Shapiro, the associate director of building science and community programs at Syracuse University.
The stated mission of CCAA is to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through individual and community education and action while supporting “fair and just” public policies and legislation.
