America and North Carolina have a clear imperative to reduce total reliance on largely imported, carbon-emitting, politically destabilizing and unsteadily priced petroleum-based liquid fuels. How to effectively gain new biofuels in coming years is a technological, agricultural and economic challenge still being shaped nationwide. North Carolina has emerged among states strongly addressing the challenge.
Your lead July 5 editorial, "By the ears," notes that reliance on federally subsidized corn-based ethanol cannot meet the challenge, for varied reasons. North Carolina came early and smartly to that recognition in 2007, when the state's 10-year biofuels strategic plan was presented to a responsive General Assembly. By policy, North Carolina's long-term biofuels endeavor is not based on corn.
As a result, other materials for conversion to both ethanol and biodiesel must necessarily be identified and matched to agricultural capabilities in different regions statewide. With corporate, regional, university and N.C. Department of Agriculture partners, the state-funded Biofuels Center is strengthening capabilities for other agricultural biomass, both crop- and forestry-based. Energy grasses hold strong economic and agricultural promise, joining other feedstocks in coming years in a new agricultural mosaic across our landscape. In Eastern North Carolina, a nationally significant project is under way with the swine industry to verify growing of such grasses on hundreds of thousands of acres used for environmental remediation.
