title: A new class of plants for a biofuel feedstock energy crop.
abstract: Directly burnable biomass to be used primarily in steam boilers for power production has been researched and demonstrated in a variety of projects in the United states. The biomass typically comes from wood wastes, such as tree trimmings or the byproducts of lumber production, or from a cash crop, grown by farmers. Of this latter group, the main emphasis has been utilizing corn stover, or a prairie grass called switchgrass, or using tree seedlings such as willow. In this article, I propose an alternative to these energy crops that consists of several different herbaceous plants with the one consistent property that they annually generate an appreciable bulk of dried-down burnable mass. The fact that they are a set of plants (nine are offered as candidates) gives this energy crop a great deal of flexibility as far as growing conditions and annual harvest time line. Their predicted yield is impressive and leads to speculation that they can be economically feasible.
authors.affiliation: University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, USA. jkamm@utnet.utoledo.edu
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kamm
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods*; D031164:Ambrosia; D018533:Biomass; D001709:Biotechnology / Q000379:methods*; D004736:Energy-Generating Resources; D035264:Flowers; D006368:Helianthus; D010944:Plants; D014197:Trees