Biomass +

Biomass + (526)
Biomass accumulation + (2)
Biomass production + (18)
Biomass residue + (1)
Dead biomass + (2)
Microbial biomass + (2)

Synopsis: 4. biotech: Biomass +:

there are many different kinds of biomass which can be used to create biofuel, and there are many different ways of taking that biomass and converting it,

and all of those things have different properties in terms of how much they cost and how efficient they are.

and also just the sheer size of the land area that would be needed to cultivate enough biomass to feed the growing aviation industry.

By 2050, it is estimated that we could triple our resource consumption to a whopping 140 billion tonnes of minerals, ores, fossil fuels and biomass per year.

Megafaunal biomass (that's anything weighing more than 97lbs, or 44kg) is greater now than at any time

Organic soils also were superior in carbon sequestration, microbial biomass, enzyme activity, and micronutrients. Via Treehugger Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati r

and final biomass concentration on sugar media composed of two pentoses, xylose and arabinose. Marie Gorwa-Grauslund, from Lund University

such as solar thermal power, modern biomass production and the Seawater Greenhouse. The resulting synergies enable restorative growth in the worlds most arid regions.

Pyrolysis takes plants, animal manure or any other kind of organic biomass, traps it in an oxygen-free environment and heats it to around 550°C. At the end, youre left with biochar,

and enough combustible gas to fire up the next batch of biomass. Advocates have hoped long that biocharpread over farm fieldsould improve soil quality and crop yields,

And biomass burning which occurs mainly as a result of tropical forest fires, deforestation, savannah and shrub fires emits large amounts of organic carbon particles that block solar radiation.

while the shipping, biomass burning, and industrial sectors will have a cooling impact. By 2100 (right), the model finds that the power and industrial sector will become strongly warming as carbon dioxide accumulates.

biomass burning, and industrial sectors of the economy promote aerosol-cloud interactions that exert a powerful cooling effect,

an essential step in producing ethanol from cellulosic biomass. Brachypodium may hold the key to finding ways to produce plant cell walls that are easy to break down,

Mcmahon is able to calculate the biomass of a tree. He specializes in the data-analysis side of forest ecology. oewalking in the woods helps

Parker and Mcmahon suggest that a combination of these three factors has caused the forests accelerated biomass gain.

both targeted because of their promise as biomass feedstocks for biofuels production. oethis is a milestone for soybean research

because they are so abundant they provide at least 200kg of biomass for every human. The European commission is offering the money to the research institute with the best proposal for investigating Insects as novel sources of proteins#.

Run by CEO Jim Mason who owns the space#the 5-year-old startup now produces technology used to transform dense biomass like corn husks or wood chips into clean, sustainable,

#Gasification, in which dense biomass smoldering #but not combusting#in a low-oxygen environment is converted to hydrogen gas,

and most energy sources, even others based on biomass, contribute to the problem. That s because, Price said,

burning the biomass releases the carbon back into the atmosphere. By comparison, because there s no combustion in All Power Labs gasification process,

Rather, it is pulled from the biomass and converted into charcoal. Thanks to gasification and the fact that that charcoal can be put back into the ground

One reason for that growth is that dense biomass is everywhere. Think about America s heartland,

And while the system can t convert every form of biomass, Price said that one of the company s biggest aims is to make it possible to use any organic material.

and leaf litter biomass builds up on the forest floor and frequently causes wildfires. In addition many of Madagascar's plants have evolved defenses against large herbivores such as spines

The satellite called BIOMASS will use long range radar to pierce through clouds and collect data from forested regions inaccessible from the ground such as the boreal forests of Russia and the Amazon rain forest.

BIOMASS will be a hugely important instrument for global environmental science research in the coming years and its observations will be the basis of significant environmental policy in the areas of carbon cycling

and global warming Hank Shugart an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia and member of the BIOMASS advisory committee to the ESA said in a statement.

The BIOMASS satellite will cost roughly $525 million and is the seventh in ESA's fleet of Earth Explorer satellites

and accumulate it in its biomass. Then harvest. Getting the gold into plants is the easy part.

Ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday 41 leading scientists sent a letter to the U s. Environmental protection agency (EPA) calling on the agency to protect U s. forests from the growing sucking sound created by biomass power plants.

or other plant materials known as biomass to generate electricity. The biomass industry argues that because trees grow back biomass offers a carbon neutral form of energy.

But not all biomass is created equal. Trees are not the same as perennial grasses or harvest residues that can either regrow quickly would otherwise be burned in the field

or are needed not for other purposes. And the latest science reveals that burning whole trees for energy results in more carbon emissions than burning coal for decades.

That's because trees are less energy-dense than coal and harvesting them for fuel means foregoing the carbon they would have absorbed from the atmosphere if left standing.

The agency issued to biomass-burning plants a three-year exemption from permitting requirements under the Clean Air Act (basically a requirement that each new and modified industrial source gets a construction permit before starting to build showing that it will use the best available control

and could result in regulations that distort the marketplace towards greater use of unsustainable sources of biomass with significant risks to our climate forests

and ensuring that a rigorous accounting for biomass carbon emissions will be critical to the effort's integrity.

As the scientists conclude the only way to encourage bioenergy facilities to source low-carbon biomass resources efficiently burn

With its potentially high biomass yield and its suitability to fit into existing crop rotations hemp could

Due to the high self-tolerance of hemp cultivation over two to three years in the same field does not lead to significant biomass yield losses.

See Photos of Leopards in Western Maharashtra The researchers found that domestic dogs were by far the most common prey making up 39 percent of the leopards'diet (in terms of biomass.

Really, the options that are available are salvage logging of the wood for biomass or long-lived wood products to keep the carbon from the atmosphere,

and his colleagues have calculated that 6 million tonnes of biomass carbon stock were lost in the prefecture between 1976 and 20031.

which they convert, through photosynthesis, into biomass. But plant growth benefits from elevated CO2 levels only up to a point,

Nature Newsvehicles propelled by biomass-fired electricity would travel farther on a given crop and produce fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than vehicles powered by ethanol,

Burning biomass to produce electricity is generally more efficient than converting it into ethanol. And electric vehicles although often more expensive to make

suggests that, on average, an electric vehicle powered by biomass will travel 81%farther than an internal-combustion vehicle powered by cellulosic ethanol

where forests contain less biomass, says co-author Greg Asner, a scientist with the Carnegie Institution of Science in Stanford, California.

Now people are moving north and west into the higher biomass forests. The results underscore the danger posed by deforestation,

We have to monitor biomass, he says. Driven in large part by agriculture, deforestation in the Amazon averaged about 1. 6 million hectares annually from 2001 to 2007,

who in 2007 produced the most comprehensive biomass maps of the Amazon. We were surprised that nobody had done this before,

Saatchi says that earlier biomass maps had only coarse resolution and were often based on models.

They then extrapolated to build a biomass map of the Amazon basin circa 2000; the results were published in Global Change Biology. 2 It basically provided a benchmark map of the biomass carbon in the Amazon,

Saatchi says. He calls the Carnegie analysis very simple and neat and says his team is conducting a similar analysis on the impacts of fire.

The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.

says global biomass business development manager Cynthia Bryant. The company has partnered with the agricultural products supplier COFCO

relies on gasification to turn biomass into hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Proprietary bacteria then ingest the gases and produce ethanol

A Perspective published in Science in August noted that biomass-derived hydrocarbon fuels, such as petrol and diesel replacements, could be more attractive

or biomass-derived petrol, says Alexander. And the plant delays are giving alternative technologies a chance to catch up.

BIOMASS TO LIQUIDS

US agriculture research gets priority plan: Nature Newsus agricultural research is getting a makeover. The National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) opens its doors on 1 Â October, with plant biotechnologist Roger Beachy at its helm.

In the household energy and food and agriculture sectors, the proposal with the biggest impact on both climate change and public health was a 10-year programme in India to replace 150 million indoor biomass-burning

Satellites beam in biomass estimates: Nature Newswhatever agreement emerges from the climate meeting in Copenhagen,

the first satellite-based estimates of the biomass contained in the world's tropical forests. Current biomass estimates for the tropics are gathered based on data by the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO),

and their quality varies greatly from country to country. As a result, baseline figures for biomass are some of the biggest uncertainties in calculating emissions from deforestation and forest degradation,

recently estimated to be around 15%of global carbon emissions (G r. van der Werf et al. Nature Geosci. 2, 737-738;

But Saatchi says that the study provides additional information about biomass levels at regional and national levels.

You need to know how biomass is distributed and how it's changing over time, almost everywhere, with some resolution and accuracy.

Also at Copenhagen, researchers at the Woods Hole Research center in Massachusetts presented another pantropical biomass assessment,

Richard Houghton, a biomass expert at Woods Hole says that it is good news that multiple teams are tackling the big-picture question of tropical forest biomass.

We need a couple of independent estimates just to see how well they match, he says. Anybody can make a map.

Asner has developed also a system for assessing biomass at finer resolution, which will be necessary if forests are going to be linked to international carbon markets.

The new pantropical biomass maps from Saatchi and Woods Hole won't accomplish that goal, but they can provide scientists and policy-makers with a better understanding of carbon trends.

Asner has found that deforestation in Brazil is moving into higher biomass areas in the interior of the forest.

researchers have engineered a bacterium that can convert a form of raw plant biomass directly into clean, road-ready diesel.

LS9 says that the shift from sugars to biomass as a feedstock would reduce greenhouse gases even further.

This paper is a representation of the types of efforts that are going to move us to biomass,

total whale biomass today is less than one-fifth of what it was in 1900, before whaling decimated the population.

Oregon, could eventually sequester 9 million tonnes of carbon in their combined biomass. He compares it to planting trees.

and accumulate that as biomass. Whales take carbon out of the system through their food,

there could still be a substantial increase in total biomass owing to the difference in size between whales

any given food source (such as krill) can support a lot more biomass in a whale than in a small animal such as a penguin.

And even though all of these animals'biomass combined represents a small fraction of total human carbon emissions,

The large Brazilian ethanol producer ETH Bioenergia announced on 18 february that it would take over the debt-ridden Brazilian Renewable Energy Company (Brenco) to create a world-leading company to make ethanol from biomass.

adds that Chinese farmers could also leave dead crop biomass on the fields to help rebalance the soil.

but ground data provides clear evidence of biomass loss and an increase in tree deaths.

The change in the growing season may mean there is less grassland biomass available for grazing says Xu.

Cellulosic ethanol producers are trying to generate fuel from biomass such as leaves and branches. These feedstocks have the advantage that they are plentiful

Like most forests, peat-swamp forests store large amounts of carbon above ground as biomass

Koh and his colleagues calculate that this conversion led to the release of about 140 million tonnes of carbon from biomass above ground

The 9 may study examined the future of six renewable energy sources (biomass, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal and oceans).

converts sunlight into biomass ten times more efficiently than the average plant and has need little for fertilizer.

and transporting the biomass. Scalability remains the big problem: people have farmed seaweed for hundreds of years,

biomass stoves, brick kilns and coke ovens. Other measures would reduce the burning of agricultural waste

and biomass maps to model the change. The difference is in large part due to a natural lag as carbon stocks slowly decay

A direct conversion of that lost biomass into carbon would suggest a drop in annual carbon dioxide emissions from more than 1. 1 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2004 to 298 million tonnes of CO2 a reduction of nearly 74%.

and aerial studies to create more accurate maps of forest biomass, which can then be used to calculate emissions.

has promised to build up research on biomass technology and double EMBRAPA s funding for that area,

currently comprising an estimated half of all insect biomass worldwide. One of the first clues that a tropical carpenter ant has become infected with Ophiocordyceps is that it will leave the dry tree canopy

with its biomass and fullness still below pre-drought levels in 2009 when the satellite suffered a mechanical failure.

The deal offered an extra year for electricity producers to claim 10 years of tax credits for wind, geothermal and biomass projects.

The single simulation that predicted biomass loss for the Amazonian and Central american rainforests in the current study used a model called Hadcm3

They face a choice between three projects  Biomass, PREMIER and Coreh2o (an acronym referring to cold regions

The Biomass project aims to take radar measurements of global forest biomass to assess terrestrial carbon stocks and fluxes.

2013), nor Japan s Advanced Land Observing Satellite-2 Â to be launched later this year have sensors that can measure forest biomass with the precision of Biomass, for example.

But data on global forest biomass a major store of land carbon and a key indicator of biodiversity are no less important,

who is part of the Biomass assessment group. In particular, he says, satellite observations are needed to quantify global carbon emissions for tropical forests, for

which raged northeastward from the Bay of biscay, slashing forest biomass by 16 million tonnes. By the end of this century, model studies suggest,

it must map biomass across a staggering 155 Â million hectares the largest tropical forest in a single country outside Brazil

because biomass can vary by up to 50%between patches of forest. With a map at 100-metre resolution

and height at several hundred ground plots the classic way to calculate forest biomass. The biomass estimates are used then to calibrate imagery from NASA s Landsat spacecraft and radar data from Japan s Advanced Land Observing Satellite,

to produce a measure of carbon for all 155 million hectares of jungle.""We have limited only areas where it s safe to land.

dried grasses and other indigestible plant matter could greatly improve the efficiency of converting waste biomass to fuel.

But most of the biomass produced in agriculture and forestry lies unused in more-complex chains of sugars, for example lignin and cellulose.

"I think there is a great potential for this approach in biomass processing, says Harvey Blanch, a bioenergy researcher at the Joint Bioenergy Institute in Emeryville, California,

director of biomass applications at enzyme company Novozymes, based in Raleigh-Durham, North carolina. But Luterbacher says that his team's enzyme-free process has plenty of potential for improvement."

By contrast, GVL is made easily from biomass, and easily recovered from a mixture of dissolved sugars.

or applying extremely high temperatures to break down biomass into syngas (hydrogen and carbon monoxide). Claire Curry, a bioenergy analyst at the information firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance, expects that some 50 million to 60 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced commercially worldwide this year up from just a few

Tapping the storehouse of biomass left after the harvest is much less controversial. Ethanol made from corn stover produces at least 60%less greenhouse-gas emissions than petrol,

The process requires the biomass to be ground up and pretreated with acids. A cocktail of enzymes must then be applied to chop up the tough biological polymers inside all before the yeast is added to the resulting sugars.

In a new program the U s. Forest Service is fueling a biomass power plant in Colorado with trees killed by a pest called the mountain pine beetle Greenwire reports.

Supporters say the beetle trees-to-biomass program is environmentally friendly but not all groups agree.

Biomass power plants do use a renewable fuel but nevertheless contribute to global warming because they put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Some environmental groups such as the council are worried also about the Forest Service encouraging logging for biomass plants.

Forest biomass currently comprises about 75 percent of global biofuel production. The study appears in the journal Global Change Biology-Bioenergy.

Formed from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuel biofuel and biomass it is emitted directly into the atmosphere

The area currently has little vegetation biomass due to heavy degradation but has an excellent climate for tree growth

and cool because highly flammable dead biomass is allowed not to accumulate for many years at a time. This gives animals ample escape routes

and the carbon contained therein was transported into the microbial biomass. For these kinds of residues we can give the all-clear signal

and therefore valuable supplies of biomass across the globe by reducing the need for biofuels Based on our analysis this freeing up of biomass is one of the key system-wide consequences of electrifying transport says Mccollum.

Available biomass could then be used for example in plastics manufacturing or steel production which are otherwise challenging to decarbonize.

rdenas head of the Project said that the intention is to implement a permanent monitoring system with the help of satellite images to quantify the biomass

The specialist at Centro Geo indicated that satellite images allow to monitor different biophysical variables including forest biomass.

rdenas explained that currently the most popular method for measuring trees biomass is by field sampling by the Forest National Commission

and height expecting to build maps of each region's biomass. He added that this results hope to support public conservation politics

However the expected long-term and larger market for Miscanthus is in digesting the celluloses in the biomass to sugars for fermentation to ethanol

If the stand has experienced high mortality caused by bark beetles it can be thinned more heavily without sacrificing timber biomass or volume increment and plant diversity.

Teasing apart the complex relationship between soil fungi and plants is likely to have an impact on improving biofuel production from plant biomass.

One-year-old wheat straw and new hay had the lowest levels of weed biomass compared with new wheat straw and the no-mulch control.

The experiments also proved that the thickness of the mulch affected weed control with mulches applied in two layers resulting in significantly less weed biomass than those applied in one layer.

and sent them to 289 preselected forest plots to measure the number of trees tree girth and biomass per hectare.

and equipment community members with limited education can accurately monitor forest biomass--previously thought to be the domain of highly-trained professionals.

and the properties of the blossom the researchers concurrently grew new varieties with a higher proportion of rubber and biomass yield.

Conservation areas such as Queen Elizabeth and Murchison Falls which formerly contained the highest biomass of mammals On earth depend on the delicate balance between predators

as a result of high aboveground biomass production that when incorporated into soil progressively mineralized and increased the available N content said the study's lead author Francesco Montemurro.

The researchers determined that strawberry biomass nitrogen accumulation showed a consistent pattern across fields with limited N accumulation from fall transplanting through March followed by a consistent rate of crop N uptake through the rest of the production season.

Up until now it has been underutilised as a biomass residue and waste material. These were the conclusions of a study conducted by the TLL (Thueringian regional institute for agriculture) the DBFZ (German biomass research center) and the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research (UFZ.

According to them from a total of 30 million tons of cereal straw produced annually in Germany between 8 and 13 million tons of it could be used sustainably for energy or fuel production.

Enhancing expression of these genes resulted in vastly increased oil content in leaves the most abundant sources of plant biomass-a finding that could have important implications for increasing the energy content of plant-based foods and renewable biofuel feedstocks.

The idea behind Xu's studies was to find a way to reprogram plants to store oil in their more abundant forms of biomass.

Burning plant biomass with such energy density to generate electricity would release 30 to 40 percent more energy

and the nutritional value of feed made from such energy-dense biomass would also be enhanced greatly.

Xu is now collaborating with Brookhaven biochemist John Shanklin to explore the potential effect of overexpressing these key genes on oil production in dedicated biomass crops such as sugarcane.

and because the total biomass of animals is vastly lower than the plants that they rely upon

And these indirect effects can be quite huge--and disproportionate to the biomass of the species that are instigating the change.

Genetically enhanced tobacco could be an alternative source of biomass in areas like Extremadura and Andalusia the traditional tobacco producers.

or wheat As cereals are currently being used as the raw material to produce bioethanol genetically enhanced tobacco could be an alternative source of biomass

and phosphorus in the soil and has increased rhizome production and aboveground biomass which in turn facilitates its spread and establishment.

But now there is a lot of interest in using sorghum for other things such as growing sweet sorghum in areas where they grow sugarcane and growing biomass sorghum for bioenergy through combustion or cellulosic technology.

and use the genes that we bred for in grain sorghum over the last hundred years and move them into sweet sorghum and biomass sorghum.

or biomass sorghum researchers will need to bring in some of the genes from grain sorghum for traits like seed quality or early-season vigor.

But the bigger problem with biomass sorghum right now is the moisture content of the biomass.

Because biomass sorghum is grown annually growing until frost comes when it is harvested it has a high moisture content.

When we cut it down there's tons of biomass. I don't know that there's anything else that can match it in the area

but the biomass is really high moisture. For the existing cellulosic idea as it stands now that is not very useful he said That's one of the roadblocks to biomass sorghum right now he said.

Sweet sorghum where you squeeze the sugary juice out like sugarcane may be closer on the horizon.

In addition to his work on the bordered pits in wood Goodell works in the area of advanced engineered composites fabrication and in biomass bioconversion.

which some day may be used in biomass conversion processes for energy and sustainable biomaterials production. His study of the brown rot fungi led him to study tree defenses at the nanostructure scale.

Using a new satellite-based vegetation monitoring system researchers found that about 12 percent of the biomass has disappeared in this country that's more than twice the size of Texas

Related research has found that heavy grazing results in much less vegetation cover and root biomass and an increase in animal hoof impacts.

%The team also determined that at most of the sampling points the oil content in the biomass of the male tree was greater than that in the biomass of the female tree.

#Sharing the risks/costs of biomass cropsfarmers who grow corn and soybeans can take advantage of government price support programs

but similar programs are not available for those who grow biomass crops such as Miscanthus. A University of Illinois study recommends a framework for contracts between growers

The current biomass market operates more along the lines of a take-it -or-leave-it contract

and promote a more sustainable stable biomass supply a new kind of contract needs to be created said Jody Endres a U of I professor of energy and environmental law.

If we get these considerations into the contracts those who finance this new biomass crop industry will have more certainty to invest.

The study identifies considerations that should be included in the framework for a biomass contract including a control for moral hazard risk incentive tradeoff existing agricultural practices

The perennial nature of biomass crops also makes developing contracts challenging. We're in a unique environment

Crop insurance is not currently available for farmers who grow biomass crops so they take on additional risk.

and do not want to be locked into a multi-year contract with a lessee to grow a perennial biomass crop.

although sustainability requirements are important having an adequate supply of biomass is important as well. We're trying to envision a future in

which we have a lot of biomass and one way to secure that is to recognize all of the risks

A newly forming biomass standards group in which Endres holds a leadership role is looking at how the value of sustainability practices can be measured at the watershed eco-shed or air-shed level rather than on the scale of individual farms.

and consumers of biomass including through contracts. I'm optimistic that it can be done she said.

There's also a real need for education in both developed and underdeveloped countries about biomass contracting Endres said.

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