Sustainable Production and Distribution of Bioenergy for the Central USA
Our vision is to create a Midwestern regional system for producing advanced transportation fuels and bioproducts derived from perennial grasses grown on land that is either unsuitable or marginal for row crop production. In addition to producing advanced biofuels and bioproducts, the proposed system will improve the sustainability of existing cropping systems by reducing agricultural runoff of nutrients and soil and increasing carbon sequestration.
Welcome to CenUSA Bioenergy. We are the home of an ambitious Iowa State University-based, USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) sponsored, research project investigating the creation of a Midwestern sustainable biofuels and bioproducts system. This website is dedicated to sharing our work and work products with everyone interested in producing advanced transportation fuels and bioproducts derived from perennial grasses grown on land unsuitable for or marginal for row crop production.
Iowa State University's Ken Moore is the project director for our of nine institution network: Iowa State University, Purdue University; The Ohio State University; University of Wisconsin; University of Minnesota; University of Nebraska-Lincoln; University of Illinois; University of Vermont; USDA Agricultural Research Service. Read more.
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:
The System Performance team focuses on providing detailed analyzes of feedstock production options. The team also creates models to assist policymakers, farmers, and the bioenergy industry to make informed decisions about which bioenergy feedstocks to grow, where to produce them, what environmental impacts they will have, and how biomass production systems are likely to respond to and contribute to climate change or other environmental shifts.
The Feedstock Logistics team works on developing systems and strategies to enable sustainable and economic harvest, transportation, and storage of feedstocks. The team focuses on the development and evaluation of harvest and logistics systems that are easily adaptable, produce consistent and quality feedstock for conversion, and are economically, energetically, and environmentally efficient and sustainable.
The goal of Feedstock Development is to develop new and improved perennial grass cultivars and hybrids that can be used on marginal cropland in the Central US for the production of biomass for bioenergy and bioproducts.
Our Feedstock Development team members have produced an extensive resource library with material for everyone involved in the development of perennial grasses. Click the links below to jump to each one on the page:
Based on our vision of Midwestern regional system for producing advanced transportation fuels and bioproducts using perennial grasses grown on marginal lands, our research efforts are concentrated on ten objectives:
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 Germplasm to Harvest research group was led by Rob Mitchell, Research Agronomist at the USDA Agricultural Research Service (Northern Plains).
Below are the four research teams in this group. Learn more about what each team researched and the materials they produced on the pages below:
