Iowa’s switchgrass visionaries are a patient lot. Fifteen years ago, the Chariton Valley Resource Conservation and Development Inc. (RCD) board, made up of area farmers, began looking to grass to solve local water quality problems. In 1996, they landed one of five U.S. DOE biomass energy grants. Out of those five projects, it’s the only one still alive and nearing commercialization, says Bill Belden, the consulting manager for Prairie Lands Bio-Products Inc., a nonprofit formed as part of the project that is also developing Prairie Lands Biomass LLC as its business entity. A decade of research has been completed and the final reports were submitted in September. Yet, Belden expects it will be another two to three years before Alliant Energy Corp. will be using switchgrass to cofire its boilers around the clock at the Ottumwa (Iowa) Generating Station.

The four counties in south central Iowa—Lucas, Wayne, Appanoose and Monroe—comprising the Chariton Valley RCD contain highly erodible soils on rolling terrain. The immediate problem in the early 1990s centered on Lake Rathbun, a man-made lake which had experienced several fish kills and was targeted by the U.S. EPA because it had high levels of Atrazine, a pesticide commonly used in corn production. The Chariton Valley group considered using grass to mitigate the environmental issues and while investigating which grass to pursue, they learned that the U.S. DOE had already identified switchgrass as a promising energy crop. In 1996, Chariton Valley RCD landed a DOE grant to launch a comprehensive study on switchgrass.

Switchgrass, a native, warm-season prairie grass, which can grow to 5 feet, is widely used on Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres along with other species of prairie grass. It has potential as an energy crop because it produces about 70 percent of the energy that an equal weight of western coal would produce. Yet, there’s a huge difference between using light seeding rates of switchgrass as part of the grass mix planted on CRP acres and maximizing its production as a biomass crop. For the RCD board there also was the challenge to create new economic development opportunities. The Chariton Valley Biomass Project dove into the details, recruiting researchers from Iowa State University and the University of Iowa to conduct numerous studies that are now available on a Web site, www.iowaswitchgrass.com. Among the topics covered are:

• How to improve a thin stand of switchgrass on CRP acres
• How different varieties of switchgrass perform on different soils and terrains
• The impact of grass production and harvesting practices on wildlife, soil and water quality
• The soil carbon sequestration potential for switchgrass
• Preliminary variety comparisons and production costs

While the project covered a lot of ground, much of the field work was cut out of the budget when the funding began to dwindle, says Dora Guffey, coordinator of the Chariton Valley RCD. They still needed to work on varieties, and to find out whether a switchgrass monoculture could have disease and pest problems. “We have much to learn yet,” she says. Also, educational materials and crop budgets aren’t in place to help farmers evaluate the crop. “You have to realize that it’s not like corn,” Belden says. “There have been no economic drivers to create the infrastructure for farmers. The biomass industry [today] is probably where the seed corn industry was in the 1930s. The production systems date back to the era when we broke the prairie and just started using fertilizer. You can’t handle square bales with an 8-inch [grain] auger. There’s no elevator in place and no Chicago Board of Trade to put a value on it. An infrastructure has to be built.”

Although the fieldwork was curtailed, the group was able to identify potential markets in the early years of the project. The farmers approached their power provider Alliant Energy Corp. to ask if the company would consider using switchgrass to cofire the 726 megawatt Ottumwa Generating Station. Alliant understood the importance of reducing its emissions and helping their farmer customers solve environmental problems and meet economic development goals, says Bill Morton, a project engineer with Alliant. “It’s been an interesting multifaceted story.”

Test Burns Generate Data
Alliant provided oversight for the project when the test burn phase started in 2000. Those burns provided crucial information to the power provider. Morton says they relied on a Danish engineering firm with several years experience cofiring wheat straw in Europe. As it turned out, introducing switchgrass was not a big investment or challenge, he says.

The test burn phase took many years to complete because of the time needed to accumulate enough switchgrass to conduct adequate tests, Belden says. For the first phase in 2000-’01, they needed 1,300 tons of grass, or 2,600 bales, to make sure the existing processing equipment could deliver the needed volume of ground switchgrass. “It couldn’t,” Belden says flatly. “It couldn’t deliver the capacity needed to fuel the boilers, and there was too much dust in the building with the equipment designed by the engineers.” That led the group of farmers to redesign the processing system in the middle of the burn.

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