Biomass Magazine

[MHC]

Energy grasses focus of Ceres Field Day
Posted August 26, 2010, at 3:31 p.m. CST

Energy industry executives joined investors and policymakers near
Houston Aug. 26 to take a firsthand look at energy grasses and
research developments that are expected to push bioenergy to the
forefront of renewable power and transportation fuels.

The bioenergy field day, hosted by Ceres Inc., provides a unique
opportunity for industry leaders who may not be familiar with
agricultural production to walk among towering energy grasses, share
updates and see how improvements to biomass production are made
through plant breeding and modern biology. This year's event included
side-by-side crop comparisons, field demonstrations and presentations
from Drax Power, Dupont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol, General Motors,
NRG Energy and The Nature Conservancy.

"We cannot de-carbonize the world's energy supply without biomass,"
Ceres president Richard Hamilton told more than 100 attendees from the
U.S., Europe and South America. "The central question we face, then,
is how to go about producing biopower and biofuels in the most
scalable, efficient and sustainable way."

Biomass is expected to be one of the largest sources for renewable
electricity in the U.S. and Europe, according to projections by the
U.S. Energy Information Agency and European Commission. Moreover, a
2009 Sandia National Labs study, using conservative yield and
conversion assumptions, concluded that advanced biofuels made from
plant fibers could produce 75 billion gallons of biofuel per year in
the U.S.

During the morning event at the company's 200-acre research center,
Ceres highlighted the performance of low-carbon energy grasses as well
as research that is expected to increase yields, make greater use of
marginal lands and lower input requirements. One Ceres trait, for
instance, could cut oil consumption in the U.S. by more than a billion
barrels over a decade, and substantially reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by making grasses even more efficient at utilizing nitrogen
fertilizers.

If managed in new ways, perennials such as switchgrass and miscanthus
could even sequester more carbon than is emitted in the life cycle of
processing and burning them. "We could actually start talking about
removing C02 from the atmosphere rather than simply decreasing overall
emissions—farming carbon at the same time as we produce energy,"
Hamilton noted.

Ceres vice president of plant breeding and genomics, Jeff Gwyn, who
led field tours at the event, said that low-input grasses will make
the greatest sense in many locations, since they will outperform other
sources of biomass on a per-acre/per-year basis, and can be readily
improved. He expects yields of energy grasses to follow the trajectory
of row crops. "There are dozens of paths to increase yield and lower
inputs, and we are pursuing them and stacking them together in
different ways," Gwyn said.

Amid a breeding nursery, he described the process of improving new
plants, "Whereas a farmer may grow one seed variety over a 1,000
acres, we may grow 1,000 varieties over one or two acres. And, when it
comes to finding that one winner among thousands, thanks to genomics
and other breeding technologies developed by Ceres, it's not a
guessing game, but a straight-forward scientific process," Gwyn said.

SOURCE: CERES INC.