4
At the Farmgate
This chapter provides an updated assessment of the potential economic availability of biomass resources from agricultural lands reported at the farmgate. Resources evaluated in this chapter include crop residues and dedicated biomass energy crops (herbaceous and woody) produced on agricultural land. Both of these biomass types can play a unique and important role in a national biofuels commercialization strategy. This study employed the Policy Analysis System (POLYSYS) and found the following range of residues and energy crops to be economically available at a farmgate price of ≤40 – ≤80 under imposed constraints: between 30 million tons and 734 million tons under a baseline scenario of 1% yield growth per year, and up to 1.068 billion tons under a high-yield scenario of 3%. Supply potentials vary by year, with a greater supply potential occurring in later years of the simulations as energy crops are established and return higher yields.
Figure ES.2: . County-level map of primary agricultural resources at the county-level for all feedstocks identified in chapter 4. Feedstock supply is reported by default as a density value, potential county-level supply at the farmgate divided by county land area. Supply quantities in blue are correlated to having a feedstock density of 100 dry tons per square mile or more, which corresponds to the approximate minimum quantity to supply a hypothetical facility at 800,000 dry tons per year.