A joint USDA/DOE study finds that the United States has sufficient land resources to produce an ongoing supply of biomass–about 1 billion tons annually–sufficient to displace 30% of present U.S. petroleum consumption by 2030.

The report, Biomass as Feedstock for a Bioenergy and Bioproducts Industry, “does not attempt to assess the economic competitiveness of a billion-ton bioenergy and bioproducts industry, and its potential impacts on the energy, agriculture (food and feed production), and forestry sectors of the economy [p. 1].” But isn’t that the real issue? If the investments required to build a billion-ton bioenergy and bioproducts industry are commercially viable, government support is not needed. And if they are not commercially viable, no amount of government support can make them so.

Dennis Avery of the Hudson Institute, in a recent paper featured elsewhere on this site, argues that the USDA/DOE report makes “overly bold assumptions”:

• We will have cost-effective cellulosic ethanol, making ethanol from wood chips and corn stalks with genetically engineered enzymes. “We cannot yet make cellulosic ethanol cost-effectively, and do not know when we might be able to do this.”
• There will be public approval for harvesting far more wood and wood wates from nearly 700 million acres of our forests than we do today. “[This] would amount ot an industrial transformation of the nation’s forest regions.”
• We can have a 50% increase in crop yields. “This we also do not have.”
• We can gather all crop biomass not needed for no-till cropping, and all urban biomass refuse–almost regardless of collection costs. “The report only assesses whether we have the technical ability to pick up biomass,” not its profitability.
• We will make ethanol from manure. Removing the water from manure is energy intensive, and manure’s most valuable economic use is as an organic fertilizer.