MSU Scientist Urges Biomass Development to Replace Petroleum
July 11, 2004
STARKVILLE, Miss.–A Mississippi State research scientist is urging Congress to consider plant and animal materials as a replacement for dwindling supplies of petroleum in the future production of fuels and other important chemicals.
“With our worldwide petroleum reserves playing out their capability to support industrial activity over the next 100 years, new options for future energetic and industrial feedstock needs must be developed,” Mark E. Zappi told a U.S. Senate committee during a recent hearing to evaluate the potential energy uses of biomass.
Zappi, the university’s Texas Olefins Professor of Chemical Engineering, urged the Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry to establish an industrial economy based on the “vast energetic and chemical resources literally growing around us.”
“Biomass (materials from plants or animals) is the fully renewable and natural analogy to petroleum,” said Zappi, director of the Environmental Technology Research and Applications Laboratory in the Swalm School of Chemical Engineering. “I fully believe that industries of the future need to and will be based on multiple feedstocks based on lipid, sugar, protein, hydrogen, synthesis gas, and methane platforms.”
Zappi, who also directs the U.S. Department of Energy/Mississippi University Research Consortium for the Utilization of Biomass, urged the establishment of regional centers of expertise within the nation’s diverse geographic areas. He maintained that would promote development of the agricultural resources unique to each region and better position U.S. industries to become global leaders in biomass commercialization.
“A good example is my home state, Mississippi, where great quantities of biomass are produced every year that are quite comparable to the biomass quantities produced in the great state of Iowa,” he said. “However, the diversity of the biomass in Mississippi is so different from the biomass in Iowa that technologies feasible for use in Iowa may not be well suited for use in Mississippi, and vice versa.”
Zappi also urged the development of non-traditional biomass such as algae and municipal wastewater treatment sludge—in addition to traditional crops—as potential feedstocks that could be used to produce liquid fuels, other chemicals and electricity.
“This is a period in world history where government leadership and technologists must work in unison to solve a pressing societal crisis literally on our horizon, via the development of a fully renewable industrial economy,” he told the committee. “A reasonable investment in technology will provide significant payback to this country.”