9UNP0192SD_Randy_Jackson_WordPress

- Welcome everybody to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW-Madison Biotechnology Center and also for UW-Extension, Cooperative Extension. And on behalf of the Wisconsin Alumni Association, I'd like to welcome you to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight I'm delighted to have Randy Jackson as the presenter. He's going to talk about, can grass farming help us drive in a sustainable manner? Randy was born and raised in southern California. He earned a Bachelor’s of Science in Environmental Sciences from UC-Riverside, a Masters in Natural Resources from Humbolt State University and a PhD from UC-Berkeley in Ecosystem Sciences. 

He joined UW's Agronomy Department in 2003 as part of what's called a cluster hire where the University hired three new faculty simultaneously around the theme of agro-ecology. People in his lab explore links between plant community dynamics and ecosystem processes and herbaceous systems: grasslands, wetlands and croplands. I think it's going to be a very interesting talk tonight given that gas has plummeted down to $3.79, but it hasn't gone down much lower than that. We'll see where cellulosic ethanol may drive us someday soon. Please join me in welcoming Randy Jackson to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. 
- Thank you very much Tom for that introduction, and thank you for the warm welcome, and it's just a pleasure to be here at this forum. All this talk about Nobel Laureates is enough to give one heart palpitations, but it's a nice varied and eclectic mix of talks that you have in the lineup, and so I'm very honored to be included as part of it. As Tom mentioned, I joined the Agronomy Department here at UW-Madison five years ago and as part of this agro-ecology cluster hire, and one of the reasons that I've listed these several UW-Madison groups on the title page here is that I find part of my mission being -- making links across traditional disciplinary boundaries and so I just wanted to take a minute to point out some of the different affiliations that I have, some more formal than others, so obviously the Agronomy Department which I have listed here at the top is my tenure home, but I'm also part of the new -- it's now in its second year or maybe in its third year now, we're getting ready to take our third crop of students -- Agro-ecology Master’s Program. And also am involved in what's known as the Madison Ecology Group although I believe we're going to be changing our name soon to try and get a little more of the UW branding, and I think it will be called the Wisconsin Ecology Group. This is an umbrella association of ecologists here on campus. 

We don't have an ecology department. There are ecologists embedded throughout campus in different various departments and so we do try to come together as often as possible under this heading of the Madison Ecology Group or the Wisconsin Ecology Group. I think we're going to change our name to that. And then the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies is where most of my graduate students are studying, and it's a fantastic group as many of you probably know. They have several graduate programs and it's a terrific association of scientists and researchers. And then finally what I'll spend I think most of the evening tonight talking about is a new group here on campus, the GLBRC, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. You may have heard some about this in the press or in talking to colleagues. This is a recently funded DOE center here on campus. It's based here on campus and also is a collaboration with Michigan State University and several other partners. So I just wanted to give a little feel for the different affiliations that I have here on campus before I launch into my topic which is, "Can grass farming help us drive in a sustainable manner?" 

And it may be a little lofty given that I don't have a lot of data to show you tonight, but I think it sort of frames what the questions around cellulosic ethanol production are. So first I thought I better spend a little bit of time defining what I mean by grassland. It always is a topic that brings up a lot of discussion, but in the most general sense, grassland is land that's colonized by or sewn to grasses which are in the grass family poaceae, and also herbaceous non-woody plants which we often just refer to as forbs. And so those of you who are prairie enthusiasts probably know this already, but a lot of people are surprised often to find that grassland also includes non-grasses or these broad leafed forbs. Here is a fairly fuzzy satellite depiction of grasslands of the world and as you can see they occupy a lot of the world's surface, a lot of the terrestrial surface of the world and what's interesting about this is this is just what we can see from space and classify as grasslands. It's a very broad classification because it also includes things like savannah and tundra, so it's a very broad grouping of grasslands, but it excludes where places that we know also have grasslands and that's because from outer space they don't look like grasslands because trees dominate those areas. And so if you also fill in the blanks here on this map with what we know to be grasslands, it's a very, very significant part of the earth's surface. And then I've used the word ecology several times but I thought I better ground it with a definition. And the simplest definition of ecology is the study of organisms interacting with each other and interacting with and in their environment, so it's a very general definition, but this is how ecologists define what they do. One of the things that ecologists are faced with, and not just ecologists, but ecologists have sort of taken the time to classify it is the world around us and how do we categorize where we're at, and so this is one of the ways that we classify the world around us, the world that we see. 

And this is moving from the top to the bottom, very broad systems. So we talk about biomes and so before I was talking about grasslands of the world and so that would be the grassland biome. Grasslands writ large. Everywhere in the world there are types of grasslands. And then we break biomes up into landscapes and landscapes are areas that are characterized by interacting combinations of land cover and land use and that's just to say that they're units of land that aren't homogeneous, and that's a fairly vague description, but it's homogeneous units interacting with other homogeneous units. That's what we talk about when we talk about landscapes and landscape ecology. Moving down that, landscapes can be thought of as ecosystems, and this is a fairly rigid definition of ecosystems. And here we're generally talking about the cycling of energy and matter within the natural environment. Often we just refer to carbon and nutrient cycling as shorthand for ecosystem ecology and then community ecology is really looking at species -- I'm sorry groups of species and how they interact in a defined space in time. So I'm not going to continue down this list, but it's just sort of the way that we ecologist think about the world around us, and my work focuses at these three levels the landscape, the ecosystem and the community level in particular and so much of my look at biofuels and cellulosic biofuels will focus at these levels. 

Okay, so with that little prelude, let me just give a little roadmap for what I want to talk about specifically tonight. The first is to try and motivate the talk of "what and why cellulosic biofuels" and so I'll spend a little bit of time separating cellulosic biofuels out from other types of biofuels. And then address this question that a lot of people have which is how much land is actually available for biomass production given that a cellulosic biofuel economy were at hand, how much land would be available to feed into that -- into that economy? And then finally how does a grassland ecologist such as myself study biofuels? Okay so the what are cellulosic biofuels part of this -- this is a fairly simple diagram, but I like it because it shows that cellulosic biofuels are really just built on top of a basic sugarcane platform, and so if the endpoint, the desired endpoint is ethanol production and the reason we would want ethanol is because we can mix it in with gasoline, and if we can mix it in with gasoline and burn it as a fuel for transportation then the hope is we could displace some of our oil dependency. And so with ethanol as the endpoint, the sugarcane process basically takes sugar from sugarcane plants and ferments it, distills it, dries it, and you end up with ethanol and some byproduct. Currently we have a corn based ethanol process dominating the US ethanol market or milieu if you will and it simply takes the starch -- maybe not that simply. It takes the starch from the corn grain, breaks it down into sugars and then moves on with that sugarcane based platform. The cellulosic ethanol platform would simply take the plant biomass, the vegetative part of the plant and break it down into sugars and make ethanol out of that. And this is something that people have known how to do for a long time in laboratory conditions and at fairly small scales. 

What we still can't do is ramp that up to big production scales. People are having a go at it now in the last couple of years, and this is really the focus of the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Trying to overcome the bottleneck, or the bottlenecks on turning plant material and the cellulose in plant material into ethanol for transportation fuel. It's indicated down here at the bottom what types of feed stocks if you will would funnel into this pipeline of cellulose. And the things that are commonly talked about are crop residues, the stover is the stocks and the stems that are left over after you harvest the grain from corn. Rice straw, wheat straw, forestry residue and then something that we're interested in GLBRC is crops that would be grown explicitly for feeding into this pipeline. Some of those are switchgrass, hybrid poplar trees, Miscanthus which is a large ornamental grass and many others. Okay, so that's the what of cellulosic ethanol. The question next is why, and the simplest response is to reduce our dependency on oil for geopolitical and environmental reasons. I don't need to go into much detail about the geopolitical reasons for us wanting to displace some of our oil dependency, and I'm sure we could have an interesting discussion about that, but in general, it drives much of what happens globally in a geopolitical context is dependence that we have on oil and so I don't want to get too political there. 

But the environmental side of things is it's pretty clear that this consumption of oil which is a fossil fuel is driving the elevation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and this is an indisputable fact that greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere at rates that are -- have not been seen in human history. There is now fairly strong evidence that that accumulation of greenhouse gases is also leading to some degree of warming of the atmosphere and so what we're seeing now as climates start to change locally is that that influences those people who are especially dependant on the environment around them for subsistence farming and that sort of thing, and so the point I'm trying to make here is simply that the environmental reasons feed into the geopolitical reasons, and the geopolitical reasons feedback on the environmental reasons. So there is just a lot of good reasons that we'd like to break our dependency. And President Bush said so in his 2007 State of the Union Address where he mentioned that we were addicted to oil and needed to do something to alleviate that addiction, reduce that addiction, or reduce our dependency. He called for displacing 30% of our oil use with ethanol by the year 2030, and those numbers can be disputed -- not disputed, but those numbers aren't exactly what he may have said in his speech, but this is what has come out of the policy that's followed from his speech. Yes, you have a question. 
- Will George W. Bush still be the President in 2030. 
- No, he absolutely will not be the President in 2030. 
- I'm sorry, the question was will George W. 

Bush be the President in 2030. 
- Will George W. Bush be alive in 2030? 
- I believe he will be, but it's possible that he won't be. 
- So he can't be held to this. 
- No, he set this policy. That's an interesting take on that. He may not be held to it, but he did set the policy and this is the policy that we're currently working under. 
- Okay, so he set this mandate basically that we would displace 30% of our oil dependency with ethanol by the year 2030. In the meantime, DOE estimates that using corn grain, that corn grain based ethanol production process, we could -- the most we could possibly make is 12 billion gallons of ethanol and so you can see that that's not even close to the 60 billion gallons of ethanol that would be needed to displace 30% of our oil dependency. 

And so the implicit part of this is it has to come from somewhere else, it can't just come from corn grain. There are problems, other problems with corn grain ethanol, and here's to me the simplest one which is that in 2007 a quarter of US corn grain was converted to ethanol and that displaced 2% of our oil use, so if we take the rest of the corn in the United States, we can displace less than 10% of our oil dependency, so we're not going to come close to the goal or the mandate set by President Bush. The same sort of problem here is noted by Field et al in a piece where they talk about the fossil energy required to produce this amount of ethanol meaning about 30% would represent 80-90% of the energy stored in the ethanol, so it's a fairly inefficient process. There's a great deal of argument about how efficient it is and how efficient it might be in the future, but the interesting part of this is that from a climate perspective, Field says ethanol from corn is basically a way to make cars run on coal and natural gas because so much coal and natural gas would be needed to convert the starch and the corn to ethanol. So there are big problems with corn grain ethanol, and as I mentioned -- as I pointed out, this also leads to some of the promise of cellulosic ethanol. And so I put up here a 48 billion gallon goal, and I'm just doing these calculations, and they're very coarse, so don't hold me to too many significant digits here, but they are -- this are big broad brush types of estimates. I mentioned the 60 billion gallons to displace 30% and only 12 billion could come from corn, and that's really maximizing corn grain, so that leaves 48 billion gallons. Some people estimate as much as 70 gallons of ethanol per ton of dry matter. If this big production process were in place, could be extracted from biomass. And so I mentioned here, this has still not been done and this in fact is the focus of GLBRC, trying to get to this point. 

But let's use that as a working estimate for now. This translates to 685 million tons of biomass per year that would need to go into again displacing a little bit less than 30% of our oil dependency. There's been some work done by the DOE in particular in USDA looking at the biomass resources that are currently available in the United States, and just to cut to the chase, they estimate that there are about 423 million tons of excess dry biomass available each year in the US. Now excess dry biomass, this is supposed to be hands on so let's hear from the audience what you think excess dry biomass might be. Yes sir. 
(inaudible)
 
- That might be part of it. I think a broader definition of excess biomass would be biomass that wasn't -- that might be not native vegetation, so they don't want to talk about cutting down native forests. We don't want to talk about harvesting remnant intact prairies, not yet at least. 

So excess biomass is biomass that is grown on CRP land, Conservation Reserve Program land. In other words, we planted it and so we can harvest it. And then also the biomass like I mentioned before, the corn stover that's left over after we harvest grain. And so this is their estimate of how much is currently available excess biomass, and so what I'm implicating here is that we're going to have to come up with more than what is currently available. Yes sir. 
- In terms of the concept of excess, are you from an ecological standpoint, are you going to talk at all about okay can we in fact harvest all of that that you've described as excess and still maintain the ecology of the native systems that sustain it. 
- I'm certainly going to get towards that, but because that idea -- that notion of excess biomass is one that when I first read it I was thinking well what does that mean? This is the most important part is the biomass that goes back into the ecosystem. Okay and so this is just to point out that they're also looking at Conservation Reserve Program makers, so let me just briefly say that the Conservation Reserve Program is a set aside program that the federal government has where farmers can take lands that are marginally productive, not very productive out of corn production or soybean production or whatever crop production they might have had it in and set it aside and manage it basically as grassland. And there are some complex rules about whether you can harvest it or not and when you can harvest it and this sort of thing. 

But what is interesting is that the New York Times read in an article today indicating that the government has ruled that the Secretary of Agriculture ruled that farmers this year were not going to be allowed to go and plant crops in their CRP land which is something that was up for debate. So anyway, Conservation Reserve Program acres are the acreage that we think a lot of this excess biomass is going to come from. I also wanted to point out that much of the CRP acreage is west of the 99th Meridian and so much of it is in fairly unproductive landscapes. In fact that's sort of the motivation for the CRP is that we would set aside unproductive land and let it build soil carbon and that sort of thing. But in the east, or in the upper Midwest if you will, east of the Mississippi this is what CRP looks like in a lot of cases, planted to native prairie grasses, not always native grasses. Sometimes exotic cool season grasses, but it's the point I want to make is that it can be very, very productive and so it could be a source of a lot of biomass that could be funneled into this biofuels pipeline. This is another picture of CRP land -- sorry, I'm having some issues here -- some CRP land that's been planted to switchgrass which I mentioned earlier and President Bush mentioned in his State of the Union address. And so this is just a monoculture of switchgrass with the exception of a couple of stragglers in there that is being grown explicitly for biofuels. And then this next picture is a picture from two days ago at the Arlington Field Station and this is also -- this plot right in the middle --this is also an area that's being grown to switchgrass for biofuel production. But I just wanted to give you a sense of when we grow this as a crop, it's very bleak for the first year or maybe even two years. 

The switchgrass takes a long time to establish and so there is going -- we're currently doing some research to look at how things like soil erosion and gas losses and that sort of thing happen during this establishment phase of the switchgrass. Okay, so there's a tremendous amount of variability in production. Whether you're in the west, you're in the Midwest, in the east and this table is meant to depict that. And I'm not meaning for you to look at all these numbers other than just to look at this column which is showing a range of biomass yield, and if you can't read it, let me just tell you that they're very big ranges. And what I wanted to do was pull the mean out of all of all these and so what was useful was I went down here to CRP land across 34 sites in 7 northeastern US states and used this number -- 6.6 megagrams per hectare of biomass and that translates to 2.7 tons of biomass per acre. The reason I'm pulling that number out is I'm trying to get back to this 685 million tons of dry biomass goal. So if we assume that average level of productivity, 2.7 tons of biomatter per acre, then that translates to 253 million acres. We need 253 million acres at an average level of production to hit that 685 million dry tons of excess biomass goal. And so just to give a little context, the state of Wisconsin is 42 million acres, so it would be several states. There are currently 34 million acres of CRP in the US and so what I'm trying to point out here is that it's not just going to be CRP land, there is going to have to be other land that is producing biomass to feed into this goal. 

And that can be coming from the crop residue, but it also could be cropland that's converted from current cropping systems into some biomass production. And then just for some more context, there is 448 million acres of cropland in the US. So about half of what we currently grow for crops, that sort of acreage in biomass production. And then this is just a potential switchgrass production on a Conservation Reserve Program map. And the main point is just that as you can see, here in the State of Wisconsin we're scheduled to produce a lot of this biomass and particularly in the driftless region in the southwest part of the state, the red is the area that's potentially going to produce over 100,000 dry tons of biomass per year. But much of it will come from the upper Midwest. And now let me just point out that the global analysis is quite different and if you go to the literature and look at people and look at what they're writing about biomass for biofuels, they're saying but wait a minute. Marginal lands like the ones I've been talking about here, CRP acreage, fairly unproductive lands, those are the lands we depend on. And so you may be setting aside land in Conservation Reserve in the US, but that's where we get most of our milk and meat from is on these marginal lands, so we can't be diverting those lands into biofuel production. And I just wanted to point out that that's sort of the take away message in the global literature when it comes to cellulosic biofuel production. 

In most of that literature they conclude that it makes most sense to use what's left over on the current crop fields, the residue if you will of the crop. And so here's an example of why the residue might be an attractive thing. This is a picture two days ago at Arlington of corn, and there is going to be a tremendous amount of residual biomass there even after the harvest of the grain. Okay, let me just take a moment and ask if there are any questions about those calculations, coarse as they were before I launch into the next part of this talk. Yes ma'am. 
- In all of these calculations, is the assumption that -- is it the assumption that you can continue to just harvest these dry mass, biomass things at infinitum? What about depletion I mean because normally those things would degrade back into the soil. 
- So, excellent question. Same question basically that we had earlier, and I'll rephrase it and that is can we continue to harvest biomass at infinitum and not replenish the carbon, the organic matter in the soil? And the answer is no we can't, especially if we're harvesting most of the above ground biomass. 

And the reason for that gets fairly complicated, but I'll just suffice it to say that most of the carbon or organic matter that builds in soil and grasslands comes from the roots. But if we continue to mind the above ground part of the biomass over time root production declines. And so over time we will definitely mine the system of organic matter. That said, one of the reasons that crops like switchgrass and native grasses are so attractive is that they put on a tremendous amount of below ground biomass of root biomass each year. And so the hope is that you might harvest it, harvest it, harvest it and then rest it for awhile and allow all that biomass and carbon to accumulate and then go back to harvesting it. And so that's really where we're at now is trying to develop how best to manage those types of systems. I have a bunch of questions, Tom? 
- You mentioned an amount, can you give us a ratio? What's the ratio of below ground carbon fixation as opposed to mid September corn field for example. 
- Yeah, it's highly variable from species to species but lets just say that in a warm season, native grass typical of the tall grass prairie, you might have as much as four times as much biomass standing biomass below ground as you do above ground. 

And there is a tremendous amount above ground. Now if we look at productivity which is a little bit more of a dynamic measurement, we use numbers like 2:1 below ground to above ground. Some years 1:1 and it depends a lot on the weather. On the other hand corn, most of the biomass is above ground. Much less of it is below ground and so if you're talking about building soil organic matter, certainly the native grasses, and they don't have to be native, the warm season grasses are going to put on much more biomass below ground. Yes. 
- Can you give me like a reference like either a Web site or a peer review like a reference paper that would have the numbers down to the one? 
- Sure. I'd be happy to provide you a reference. The question was can I provide a reference on the above ground below ground biomass numbers and I certainly can. 

Yes. 
- What are the benefits of burning ethanol as opposed to oil? The ecological benefits? Does it burn cleaner and have lest effect on greenhouse gases and global warming? 
- So the question is what are the benefits of burning ethanol in our gas tanks over burning oil in our gas tanks and the simplest answer is that we're not burning fossil carbon, we're burning carbon that was recently fixed by the plants. And so the greatest benefit is in terms of the greenhouse gases. Right now the fossil carbon is carbon that has been up to this point stored and sequestered and not in the atmosphere, and we're taking that and then sending it into the atmosphere when we burn oil. When we burn ethanol that we've made out of plant production, that carbon that we're burning in the tank was recently in the atmosphere, taken up by the plants and sent right back into the atmosphere. So in that respect, we're not burning carbon that is already sequestered, that's the simplest way. In terms of the dirtiness of burning, I'm not an expert on that, so I don't really want to touch it, but I will guess that burning ethanol would be cleaner in terms of other pollutants, but I'm seeing people shake their heads, so I said I won't touch it, I shouldn't have. 

Yes, sir. 
- What's switchgrass? Is it a member of a different species? 
- The question is what is switchgrass, is it a member of a different species? It's a single species, it's panicum virgatum is the species. It was a native grass from up in Canada all the way down through Texas. That's one of the reasons that people are fond of it for biofuel production because it's native to a lot of areas and people realize that native carries a cache in a lot of circles. It also has a tremendous amount of genetic variability and has adapted to a lot of different climatic regions and so one of the questions that Mike Hasler in our department and now with the Dairy Forage Research Center here on campus is looking at is how problematic is it to just call it switchgrass? Should we really be calling it northern ecotype switchgrass, mid latitude ecotype switchgrass, southern latitude, that sort of thing. 
- How deep do the roots go? 

- How deep do the roots go? Higher variable depends on the environment, but some would say well over a meter, so three feet, four feet, but most of the roots are in the upper 50 cm and maybe even upper 30 cm. I would-- when I say most of the roots to get to Tom wants me to quantify these things, I would say 75% of the roots are in the upper 30 cm or so. 
- (inaudible)
 The Bermuda Grass roots were like ten feet down. So I used to like have a little prairie in my backyard. 
- Yeah, there's no question that the roots can go quite deep, but as I mentioned, most of the roots are in the upper soil profile. 
- So what happens when -- when I was living in Arizona, we had this (inaudible)... 
- Yes, I'm familiar with it. 
- So back in the 1880s before regulation, they overgrazed it, so I'd explain it like the cows/cattle would eat the top part and then use the energy from the roots to grow more top and they kept eating it down, so eventually -- and the Arizona strip used to be really tall grass prairies. 
(inaudible)
 
- We're trying to figure out how to manage the grass biomass too, for biofuel production. Another part of my research is looking at grazing and how those things might be related. Okay so let me press on here with how does a grassland ecologist study cellulosic biofuels. A lot of it has to do with what Bruce was referring to which is how much of the biomass to remove. But let me just point out that so far all I've talked about really is biomass production which is what we call a provisioning service, a provisioning ecosystem service. 

It's the good if you will that we extract from the agroecosystem or from the farm. But what about other ecosystem services? And so here is a very complicated diagram that I think is genius. It's the result, or the product of a group called the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Group, and this is a group that came about around the time of the millennium. And their charge was to take stock and status of ecosystems of the world. One of the things they did that I think was very forward thinking was to build this framework and take things like corn, grain, and wool and all the things that we take from ecosystems, agroecosystems and used to call ecosystem goods, things that have explicit markets and bring them into this framework and call them provisioning services. They are an ecosystem service. We happen to have markets established to deal with those services, but there are also other kinds of ecosystem services that aren't provisioning services that don't have markets explicitly developed that historically haven't been thought of as goods. Nonetheless, we humans value them because we derive benefits from some of these ecosystem services. And then the reason this diagram is complicated is because they were intrepid enough to try and connect each of the different types of ecosystem services to constituents of human well-being, and I won't run through this, but they've done a very interesting job of sort of bringing together what are the things that humans are trying to do in their pursuit of happiness and basically it is that, it's freedom of choice, pursuit of happiness and that sort of thing. 

And what they've done is try and link various ecosystem services to the foundations of freedom of choice. The opportunity to be able to achieve what an individual values doing and being. Okay so they tried to link these ecosystem services and let me just talk a little bit about what these ecosystem services are. I mentioned provisioning services: food, water, wool and fiber, wood and fiber, fuel, etc. But there are other kinds of ecosystem services that are called regulating services. These are things like climate regulation. We've been talking about taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it below ground. Flood regulation, we've heard a lot about this around Katrina and New Orleans. That had the extensive network of wetlands that had been in place prior to development. It may have dampened the effects of Katrina. 

This is something that is hotly debated, but this is the sort of thing we're talking about here under regulating ecosystem services. Another type of service is a cultural ecosystem service, and this is a very vague, nebulous, hard thing to quantify. It's things like aesthetics, spiritually, education, recreation. Things humans value. Benefits that they derive from ecosystem services, but they don't necessarily have a market. And finally all of these three need supporting ecosystem services. We need soil to accumulate in order to have farms. We need nutrient cycling in order to grow crops and so these are services that ecosystems provide but we don't pay for. Yes ma'am. 
- Is there someplace in there that there is recognition of the animals and all of the species from insects on up existing in relation to these ecosystems? 

- Yes, you've hit on something that -- it's down here at the bottom -- life on earth, biodiversity. The question was is there something in this framework that takes into account animals and wildlife and that sort of thing. And so it's biodiversity and that's sort of a box around the whole thing. And this is something that's actually hotly debated right now is which one of these boxes should biodiversity or the diversity of life go into? And so an easy thing is to put it into the cultural box because we humans value diversity, a lot of us do at least. We think diversity is good. We like to see a lot of different flowers, we like a lot of different birds, and so it's a cultural service. But really what most ecologists have been doing for the last 100 years is trying to get diversity into a different box. A lot of ecologists have been trying to get diversity into the regulating box and that is we've been trying to find relationships between diversity and productivity because we think -- at least we hypothesize that more diverse ecosystems are likely to be more productive. If not immediately and today, over the long term. 

And so that's why it's not specifically in there right now is that it's something that we're debating and talking about quite a bit. 
- (inaudible)

- Right, so actual pollination is an ecosystem service that's easy to categorize, but what I was referring to was more of just having diversity, having a bunch of different taxa is important to a lot of people, myself included, and how do you classify that? Was there another comment or question? 
- (inaudible)
 
- Absolutely, and it's one of the reasons that -- thank you for that point -- it's one of the reasons that the GLBRC, the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center has an entire thrust dedicated to sustainability and what we've done just to cut to the chase here is use this ecosystem services framework as sort of the grounding framework for sustainability. 

I mentioned earlier we have to talk about -- or maybe that was an earlier discussion today -- when we talk about sustainability, or can we do things in a sustainable manner, we have to define what we mean by sustainability. And so what GLBRC is doing is saying the ecosystem services framework is a good foundation, a good grounding rod if you will for us to address how sustainable is planting a monoculture of switchgrass versus a diverse prairie. What that allows us to do is take stock not only of how much biomass is being provided but what the tradeoff is in terms of pollination services for other agroecosystems say or the cultural service of being able to look out on the landscape and see a lot of different taxa instead of just one, or if there is actually a link between diversity and productivity that might be a really important thing. And so that's part of what we're studying in GLBRC. I meant to show you all the different thrusts here of the GLBRC. This effort here at UW and Michigan State. And I mentioned up here earlier that the first three thrusts have really been, are really aimed at that idea of trying to get biomass converted into ethanol at big production scales. And these are things like improving plant biomass so that there is more of it. This is largely plant breeding and biotechnology efforts to improve the biomass processing. These are engineering efforts. 

And then to improve the conversion of biomass into energy products. And this has to do with okay we have this enormous vat, there's biomass in it, there are microbes in it. How are we going to make that an efficient thing so that we can actually realize some energy gain. Thrust four is to improve the sustainability of the biofuels pipeline and that is come up with different cropping systems and look at tradeoffs and ecosystem services if you will under different cropping systems for biofuels. And then finally there's these enabling technologies thrust which is sort of a how can we use all of the equipment and instrumentation on campus here to benefit all these other areas, and then a modeling thrust and an education and outreach thrust. So that's my very quick tour of GLBRC. All the different thrusts. And now if you'll allow me to just drill down for minute on the sustainability thrust, I can tell you a little bit about what our objective it. So the overall objective is to support this biomass to bioenergy pipeline by developing ecological, agricultural and life cycle practices that are economically and environmentally viable and responsive and that is to say -- to be able to quantify and take stock of these tradeoffs in ecosystem services so that as we make policy, we understand if we're going to grow a monoculture of switchgrass, what that's going to mean for water quality. What that's going to mean for diversity, etc. 

The fundamental thing that we're talking about though with respect to sustainability here is carbon neutrality. That is when we build these cropping systems, what's the balance of greenhouse gases between the terrestrial ecosystem and the atmosphere. And so we'd like to take stock of that, and then as I mentioned within this ecosystem services framework, also understand water quality and etc. Okay so we have this very well thought out framework for how we should go about doing this, and I'm not going to pour over this, but the idea is to come up with novel production systems whether it's a monoculture of switchgrass, a diverse prairie, or continuous corn and to compare things and to look at these different responses whether they're biogeochemical or biodiversity or economic. Build them into modeling scenarios and let that feedback on the whole process. The novel production systems aspect is the thing that I'm mainly involved with, and that is we've set up model systems to look at these tradeoffs in ecosystem services, and we've set them up along a gradient of input and diversity, so it's this confounded gradient. Everything from high input low diversity which we have up here as continuous corn, that is corn grown in the same spot year after year after year. With all of the fertilizer and pesticide that goes into keeping continuous corn thriving and productive. Down to the other end of that spectrum where we're looking at low input, high diversity and at that end of the spectrum, the high diversity is represented by native prairie, so diverse prairie. And then even early successional grasslands, early successional grasslands is just code for we just walked away and the thing succeeded into whatever it was going to succeed into. 

We just let the weeds go and we can harvest it every year for biomass and see how much we can get out of that. So we set up these model systems. There are other. I'm not going to talk about some of these other projects. I mentioned that we're interested in the carbon cycle and the carbon neutrality of these systems. And so we're trying to account for not only the inputs of carbon dioxide uptake from the atmosphere by plants but also the outputs, the microbial oxidation that occurs. To look at the carbon balance of the system. But also when I mentioned life cycle analysis, things like how much carbon was burned in gasoline to plant the corn each year versus the successional system or native prairie which we burn fuel once to get it established and then that was it. Also the fertilizer application which requires carbon to make the fertilizer. Pesticides the same. 

Lyme the same. And then these two other greenhouse gases which are very key: nitrous oxide and methane. They're key because there is much less of it in the atmosphere, but on a molecular weight basis they are much more potent greenhouse gases and so we want to account for those gases as well. Okay, so I'm not going to go through this little business. I'm going to cut to the chase. This was my effort to give you some data. But I will cut to the chase and show you the one data slide which is the take away message. These are data from Phil Robertson who is the head of the long term Ecological Research Station at Michigan State. And they'd been running a cropping systems trial not explicitly for biofuels but a lot of the systems are similar to what we might use for biofuels. Poplar which is indicated here. 

Alfalfa is something that has been talked about for biofuels. Here is this early successional system I talked about and then conventional corn, organic corn, and no-till corn. So these are just some examples of the types of life cycle analysis and carbon balance analysis we want to do, but explicitly looking at biofuels crops. The interesting thing about this is that what Phil has done is calculate something known as the global warming potential of the systems which takes into account what I just mentioned, the nitrous oxide, the methane, the CO2, the fuel, the fertilizer, the pesticide and it all gets integrated into one index, and it's the global warming potential. And here is the site for that paper. It came out in Science in 2000. And what you see is that conventional corn has a global warming potential of over 100 grams of CO2 in carbon equivalents per meter squared per year. The organic a bit less than that, the no-till even less, the alfalfa is actually a net negative. It's taking up carbon on net each year. The poplar was the best of the cropping systems. 

It's taking up even more carbon. In fact it's taking up as much as the conventional system is losing. The early successional system where we just walk away and let it succeed to whatever it succeeds to actually was the best performer. But of course over time it's going to become a mid-successional system and then eventually a forest and establish some sort of equilibrium where the net carbon balance is about equal on an annual basis. Question? 
- You wouldn't argue that we should cut down a lot of forests and then walk away from them. 
- Absolutely not. 
- How do you manage -- are there ways of managing our current forests to make them -- while maintaining diversity get back towards better carbon uptakes. 
- Managing our -- the question is are there ways of managing our current forests? So our current forest should be out here at the end here, and they're in some sort of equilibrium. 

That is they're taking up as much carbon as they're giving off on an annual basis. But they're not being harvested for biomass production. So if we were to start harvesting those forests you would set it back to an early successional system basically every time you harvested it. Is that -- I'm not sure if I'm addressing your question. 
- The question is most of our forests aren't being harvested or managed in any way. And you know you have exotic species, you have -- so how could you do 10% improvement on a temperate, hardwood, southern Wisconsin forest and optimize biomass compartments. 
- I'm going to cop out and say I'm a grassland ecologist and so you'll have to wait until you get a forest ecologist in here to talk about how to manage timber harvesting. I really don't have the expertise to speak to that other than the same principles apply and that is harvesting in a way that you're not mining soil carbon on a net basis. 
- (inaudible)

- I'm not sure you can get that out of this. I'm not sure where you're fitting oak savanna onto this framework. I don't think of an oak savanna as early successional. I think of that as a climax system. But I see what you're getting at and it's an interesting discussion but again I don't know about management of forests. Sorry about that. 
- So what's burning in California now? Is it just a bunch of bushes and grasslands with a few trees kind of all kinds of stuff? 
- What isn't burning in California? 

A lot of grassland, a lot of chaparral, a lot of forests. It's a little bit of everything. 
- 
(Inaudible)
 
- Again, I don't want to touch any forest ecology management questions. 
- 
(Inaudible)
 So let me wrap this up and say that this is the type of approach we're taking in GLBRC, this tradeoffs in ecosystem services, very focused on carbon balance. We're looking at multiple cropping systems, and I mentioned them earlier: Miscanthus, switchgrass, prairie. 

And this -- one of the reasons that I'm truly excited about this is that it's made for a grassland ecologist a question that was sort of a basic ecological question and that is how are things like diversity related to productivity, very relevant for management, and that's really exciting for me. So I'm happy to take any other questions and wrap it up right now. Yes sir. 
- I guess I'd like to go back to the issue of excess which I asked before, and bear with me for just a moment. The figures that I wrote down that you gave at the beginning about the amount of material needed and that acreage needed to displace I think you said 48 million gallons of oil. If I got the numbers right, you calculated 253 million acres would be needed, and at one point I think you said that there are 448 million acres in the entire United States. 
- Of cropland. 
- Okay, okay, of cropland. So that would be over half the cropland of the United States that would be needed. 
- That was all making some assumptions about productivity. 

- Right. With that kind of background, the thing that strikes me when you're talking about ecosystems and from an ecological perspective that one of the things that seems characteristic certainly of grassland ecosystems, but I think of all ecosystems is they produce a lot more material than they seem to ever be using at any one moment. And I'm wondering -- our whole method of sustaining ourselves on the planet are just to try to find -- to maximize the amount of material we can take out of the ecosystem and consume. And isn't that fundamentally a losing proposition ecologically. I mean shouldn't -- what I'm getting at is shouldn't the basic thing we'd be learning from studying these ecosystems that we really need to find a way of living that doesn't always push it right to the edge where we have to take every single piece of excess material and consume it somehow, or that we need to leave some back to keep replenishing the soil and keep the whole system working. And my question really is, is that being figured into the ecosystem services chart that you had that you showed, or kind of the protocol that you're working under? 
- Yes, so I think if I can distill the question it's are we as scientists here, as ecologists trying to understand how mining carbon that's taken up by plants is affecting the long term productivity and other services that we're providing -- that ecosystems provide us over time. And I think that we are getting at that by looking at how carbon accumulates in soils. I mean that's certainly one of the things we're getting at here is if we harvest switchgrass by taking off half of the biomass every year, what does that do to soil carbon and organic matter, and then how does that translate to further production. Because what we know in a lot of grassland systems is that -- I don't want to call it excess biomass, but that some systems are actually more productive when we harvest some of it some of the time because it opens up other resources and makes those systems more productive in the long term. 

And so a wetland is a good example of that. Now I'm not saying that we want to go out and harvest wetlands to make them more productive because they're very productive already, but if we look at a switchgrass stand, it's very likely I would say that there is some optimal level where we can harvest the above ground biomass and still put a significant amount of carbon building into the system, and that would make it a sustainable system in the long term. Now, can we do that at levels that are going to hit these benchmarks that President Bush set for us? That's sort of part of what I was trying to set up here. It's not likely. It's not likely, but I would argue if I can just get a little philosophical, I would argue that the fact that we're taking that step and trying to go in a direction that's different than oil, is a good step in the right direction, and hopefully will lead us to other forms of energy to undergo our human endeavors. You know and so I understand what you're saying exactly. And we have to learn how we as humans can go about what we want to do but without mining ecosystems to do it. Question in the back. 
- How efficient is switchgrass? 

If corn based ethanol is only -- we have to use 80-90% of the energy to produce, what about switchgrass? 
- I don't know. I can't give you an estimate off the top of my head, but I think that's part of what we're trying to work out in the GLBRC yet. I don't. That's a number that may be out there, but it's not available to me up here. 
- (Inaudible)
 But the problem with all the cellulosic step is it's either high acid, high pressure, high steam, or all of the above. And it's industrially more intensive than corn, so there may be some issues. 
- There are huge issues on the processing side of things, and that's frankly why the first three thrusts of the GLBRC are how are we going to overcome these bottlenecks which have to do with the efficiency of converting the biomass. 

You know I put up that 70 gallons per ton dry matter number, and that's sort of just a pie in the sky estimate for right now. We really don't know what the conversion efficiencies are going to be as you noted with your range. Question up here. 
- I understand about 20% of the carbon dioxide gets released into the atmosphere due to useless or needless burning of organic materials. Wouldn't that be the place to start? I realize this is a difficult task if these materials are in forests or all over, but wouldn't that be the place to start since these materials are being burned and released into the atmosphere anyway. 
- So the question is-- the estimates are 20-30% of CO2 going into the atmosphere is just comes from biomass burning that doesn't really serve any sort of purpose. I'm guessing that you're talking about the Amazon rainforest and that sort of thing where they're chopping down rainforest and burning it to clear it for pastureland. I agree with you 100%. That would be a good place to start. 

But here at home, one of the things that we're doing to try to change the carbon balance is go to something a little bit more forward thinking in terms of how we drive around. Yes sir. 
- Is super switchgrass under study right now, or is that assumed to be the ultimate? 
- Is there a super switchgrass? Well I mentioned Mike Hasler. He's a plant breeder in the Dairy Forage Research Center here on campus, and I've been out to his plots, and he has thousands and thousands of different accessions that he's going to be selecting for super switchgrass. But at this point I think it's safe to say that the increase in biomass from that sort of plant breeding effort is probably much smaller than just management and environmental variability. Mike might jump at me when I say that, but that's my guess. So I would say no, no super switchgrass. There are some cultivars that are very productive, and there's two or three of them, and those are the ones that tend to get identified and used most of the time. 

There is this super ornamental grass that people in Illinois in particular are very fond of and that's Miscanthus. It's a sterile hybrid, and we plant it as a rhizome, and it grows up to be some 15 or 18 feet apparently and will produce a tremendous amount of biomass. We still don't know about the quality of that biomass when it comes time to burn it, so that's something we're going to evaluate. Yes. I'm trying to mix it up here sir. 
- Are there other competitors out there as far as solutions to get to the goal of the ethanol burning that are motivating US scientists? 
- Are there competitors out there for solutions to producing ethanol or... 
- To reduce the dependency on foreign oil. 
- Sure. Conservation I heard somebody say. 

That's probably the most important one. There is the-- people are growing algae in these huge vats, and that's something that I've seen pictures of. And it's pretty interesting. There's lots of different things. That's not my expertise. Yes ma'am. 
- Brazil uses sugarcane to convert to biofuel and that's much more efficient than corn. What kind of climatic conditions do we need to grow sugarcane in the United States? Would that be possible 
(inaudible)

- So the question is can we grow sugarcane in the US like they do in Brazil and use that for ethanol production. I know we do grow sugarcane in the warmer parts of the US, in Florida in particular, and some of it may be diverted to ethanol production for all I know. 
- They're building a plant in Louisiana right now a gentleman in the back informs me. But it's not a plant that we could grow extensively through the US like we could switchgrass and other types of prairie grasses. 
- Is the Great Lakes Center, are you looking at all at the use of the switchgrass, or the switchgrass native prairie mix for electricity, you know direct burning for electricity generation, or are you just focusing on ethanol. 
- The question is are we using in the GLBRC are we looking at biomass for electricity generation, and the answer is no. The grant is specifically to come up with ethanol for transportation fuels. There are a lot of people in the state, myself included looking at biomass under other rubrics, looking at biomass both for residential wood burning -- sorry home heating, also energy plants. 

Alliant Energy I know is interested in burning biomass for electricity production. And in particular there was a very interesting study that just came out from the Agroeco company corporation, and Pam Porter was the lead author on that, and she was looking at the availability of switchgrass in Southern Wisconsin for home heating and residential and commercial uses. So there is a lot swirling around biomass, but GLBRC is focused on transportation fuel. Bruce. 
- I don't know, it seems like kind of a lost cause how much energy we expect, so do you feel overwhelmed as a scientist of what you're expected to come up with at times? 
- Only when I'm asked about forestry. Yeah. I feel overwhelmed every day about the questions that we're asking, but what I had hoped I could do is show you this amazing framework that's been put together by Tim Donahue and the other people who put together the research proposal to put this GLBRC together that we have this large structure in place that's very well thought out, realizing that we don't really know what breakthroughs are going to come and when they're going to come and that's it's all integrated and tied together has really been an amazing undertaking. And so I feel like there is a pretty good framework in place, and I go to work each day just thinking if I can chip away at that, that'd be good. Somebody else. 

- There was a group of investors that wanted to start a company that used biodiesel from soybeans. That thing folded about a month ago 
(inaudible) they said that they could produce four or five times more energy from the biodiesel per (inaudible) much better than corn. The reason given was the price of soybeans went to high. Can you comment about that? 
- Why did the biodiesel from soybeans fail? Well I don't think it has failed from a general enterprise. 

I think this group you're talking about in particular, it sounds like they didn't have a go at it, and it's likely because of the price of soybeans. And certainly the price of corn, and the price of soybeans always factors into whether or not this ethanol thing is really going to go. But as far as the biodiesel is concerned, I don't have an answer as to why it isn't attracting more of this type of funding if you will, like this GLBRC where a lot of money is being funneled into overcoming bottlenecks on its production. I really don't have an answer there. We don't drive diesel automobiles. That may be part of it. 
- The reason the prairie failed and a lot of them are failing, two years ago soil oil prices were twenty cents a pound. Now they're 55 cents a pound. And biodiesel you can make it for $5.50 a gallon. Right now you can buy regular diesel for less. 

So there's too much of a premium spread. But it is twice as efficient to run on. 
- I heard that in Hawaii it takes a ton of water to make one pound of sugar. Isn't that an awfully heavy price to pay for a little ethanol? 
- Yes. 
- All right. Thank you very much.