EESI’s Ned Stowe Addresses Ohio Biomass/Waste-to-Energy Meeting

In January, EESI policy associate Ned Stowe gave a presentation entitled “Overview of the Bioenergy Policy Landscape: Current Status, Future Trends” for the Biomass/Waste-to-Energy Conversion Workshop at the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) in Wooster, Ohio. The workshop was organized by NorTech Energy Enterprise as part of its advanced energy road-mapping project in Northeastern Ohio. About 75 people attended the workshop, representing a broad spectrum of agricultural, industrial, renewable energy, engineering, research, and non-profit organizations from within the region. Ned’s presentation focused on the national and international policy drivers that will shape the bioenergy industry in the years ahead.

While there, Ned toured the research and development facilities at OARDC, including a state-of-the-art commercial-scale anaerobic digestion system owned and operated by Quasar , which produces renewable biogas from food and agricultural waste streams. The biogas provides about half of the electricity for the OARDC campus, using a generator, and the biogas is also refined and compressed to fuel a number of campus vehicles. Researchers at OARDC are developing methods to optimize biogas production using various waste feedstocks, developing new ways to use the co-products of anaerobic digestion in agriculture and to produce algae for bio-based products and bioenergy, and investigating whether raw biogas could be used to run fuel cells. Other research projects are investigating ways to use cellulosic biomass from agricultural and forestry residues instead of petroleum-based chemical feedstocks to produce rigid foam board insulation material for construction and soft foam that can be used in car seats.