Sustainable Production and Distribution of Bioenergy for the Central USA
The Markets and Distribution team was responsible for evaluating farm-level adoption decisions and exploring policy, market, and contract mechanisms that facilitate broad scale adoption of perennials in the landscape.
The team focused on two research themes:
Bioenergy feedstock production will have inherent differences from current agricultural processes. These differences could increase the potential for workforce injury or death if not properly understood and if effective protective counter measures are not in place.
The Health and Safety research team addresses two key worker safety elements in the biofuel feedstock supply chain:
The Education team was led by Raj Raman and Patrick Murphy (Iowa State University) to prepare the next generation of workers for the emerging bioeconomy.
The team focused on two primary goals:
The Outreach and Extension team delivered science-based knowledge and informal education programs to farmers, the ag industry and to youth programs linked to 4H and FFA. The team produced extensive educational materials which are available in our Resource Library page.
Their goals included:
The goal of Feedstock Conversion/Refining is to prepare a detailed economic analysis of the performance of a biorefinery based on pyrolytic processing of biomass into liquid fuels.
