Did you know?
Question:
How do grass pellets compare economically to fossil fuels?
Answer:
As of now, we do not have any economic comparisons of cool-season grass pellet systems with fossil fuels. REAP-Canada has made some comparisons of switchgrass with fossil fuels and estimated that switchgrass may be economically superior to all but natural gas. As the price of natural gas continues to climb, grass pellets will ultimately be cheaper than natural gas, if that has not already happened.
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Why use grasses as a biofuel?
It takes 70 days to grow a crop of grass pellet fuel.
It takes 70 million years to grow a crop of fossil fuel.
Grass pellets have great potential as a low-tech, small-scale, environmentally-friendly, renewable energy system that can be locally produced, locally processed and locally consumed. As the US focuses on energy security, grass bioenergy is one of the ways that rural communities can move towards energy security.
New York State has about 1.5 million acres of unused or underutilized agricultural land, most of which is already growing grass. Grass biofuel production does not need to divert any of the current agricultural productivity into the energy market; this biomass industry can be completely independent from, but complimentary to, the production of food or animal feed. It is also a very “farmer-friendly” way to get producers exposed to biofuel production.
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