Achievement

John Field (IGERT Fellow in Mechanical Engineering) and Greta Birch (IGERT Fellow in Soil and Crops Science) were involved in an interdisciplinary project to assess the feasibility of biofuel and biochar production from waste materials, including beetle-killed pine wood in the Colorado front range. Biochar is a coproduct of certain thermochemical biofuel production technologies that has promise as a soil amendment and carbon sequestration strategy. The team of engineers, economists, and ecologists used data generated at CSU and elsewhere to model a variety of thermochemical conversion processes and predict the yields and performance of the resulting biochar. The analysis showed this strategy can in fact result it optimal systemwide environmental performance, but only becomes practical when greenhouse gas mitigation is valued at $50/Mg CO2eq or greater. The results were published in the journal GCB Bioenergy.