About a month ago Wayde Schafer, regional reprentative for North Dakota’s Sierra Club, gave me a brochure entitled Conserve Wildlife, Water and Soil or Produce Ethanol?  How North Dakota Can Do Both.

The issue, Schafer explained, is that the current high emphasis on creating clean energy through biofuels could encroach on wildlife habitats.  His sentiments were somewhat echoed in a recent North Dakota Outdoors podcast concerning the farm bill and how it could affect wildlife habitats in North Dakota.

During that podcast, Scott McLeod of Ducks Unlimited said that the emphasis on bio-energy puts pressure on farmers to put CRP land back into production.  He said that high commodity prices and land expiring from the program will lead to a significant loss of CRP land over the next three years, but he was optimistic that as prices stabilized, CRP acres would increase again.

McLeod also mentioned that the House had passed a separate Biomass Energy Resources program, and there was talk of the Senate doing the same thing.

Keith Trego, executive director of North Dakota Natural Resources Trust, was also on the podcast.

“If we all work together and plan properly, there’s the potential for the biomass issue to be a fairly positive thing for conservation,” he said on the podcast, although he admitted that both issues are still undecided.

North Dakota’s top industry is agriculture.  Tourism and the energy industry are also major North Dakota industries.  Many of North Dakota’s hunters and fishers come from out of state (off the top of my head, I can think of one from Arizona and one from New Jersey).  For the small towns that host out-of-state hunters, preserving wildlife habitat is economically as important as developing biofuels.  Finding a way to do both would be ideal.

The brochure that Schafer gave me offers a solution:  develop cellulosic ethanol.  From the brochure:

The next generation of biofuels–cellulosic ethanol–has the potential to provide energy more efficiently, with greater environmental benefits.  Native grasses, trees, other plants and agricultural wastes could double energy yields per acre, compared to corn.  Because these crops require lower fossil fuel inputs, the net energy benefit is expected to be much greater.  Cellulosic ethanol can reduce greenhouse emmissions by 85 percent over reformulated gasoline.  Most experts agree that for cellosic biomass to be economically viable, processing must occur near where the crops are grown, whichcould create more local economic development opportunities in rural North Dakota.  And biomass crops can create better habitat for a greater variety of birds and small mammals than food crops.

I’m unsure of what the water requirements would be for a cellulosic biomass fuel plant.  The technology is availaible on a small scale, I understand.  I don’t know of any mass production of cellulosic ethanol–yet.  Hopefully, North Dakota will be one of the first.  See a general overview of cellulosic ethanol here.

Meanwhile, one corn ethanol plant in Grand Forks recently shut down due to high corn prices, but three more corn ethanol plants are being built.