billiontonstudy

The Regional Feedstock Partnership (the Partnership) has published a report to summarize its accomplishments from 2008–2014. DOE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) partnered with the Sun Grant Initiative and Idaho National Laboratory to co-author this report.

The report, entitled Regional Feedstock Partnership Summary Report: Enabling the Billion-Ton Vision, includes appendices describing study findings for nine different energy crops and containing a list of the more than 400 scientific presentations and publications produced by the Partnership.

A wide range of stakeholders will benefit from the Partnership’s work—farmers can gain further knowledge about energy crops, companies building biorefineries that rely on corn stover now have more yield-specific information, and students trained through the Partnership have the knowledge to become a ready workforce for biomass production, logistics, and conversion.

The Partnership has engaged the nation’s leading researchers to populate the Bioenergy Knowledge Discovery Framework (KDF) with new data on energy crop yields. Modeling crop yields reduces risks associated with the commercial planting of dedicated energy crops, and can be useful for farmers nationwide as they plan their crops in future years. Because of the information gained through the Partnership, many of the projections set forth in the Billion-Ton Study that were once thought by some to be optimistic have been proven reasonably realistic.

The 2016 Billion-Ton Report: Advancing Domestic Resources for a Thriving Bioeconomy is the third in a series of Energy Department national assessments that have calculated the potential supply of biomass in the United States. The report concludes that the United States has the future potential to produce at least one billion dry tons of biomass resources (composed of agricultural, forestry, waste, and algal materials) on an annual basis without adversely affecting the environment. This amount of biomass could be used to produce enough biofuel, biopower, and bioproducts to displace approximately 30% of 2005 U.S. petroleum consumption and would not negatively affect the production of food or other agricultural products.

This report, generally referred to as the Billion-Ton Study or 2005 BTS, is an estimate of “potential” biomass available within the contiguous United States based on assumptions about inventory production capacity, availability, and technology.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the United States Department of Energy (DOE) both place high importance on developing resources and conversion technologies for producing fuels, chemicals and power from biomass. The two departments are working together on several aspects of bioenergy. This report is the third to be produced from joint collaboration. This and other reports can be found at: http://www1.eere.energy.gov/library/default.aspx?page=1.

The website for biomass feedstock research sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) can be found at: http://web.ornl.gov/sci/transportation/research/bioenergy/. More general information about BETO's feedstock research program can be found at: http://www.energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/biomass-feedstocks.

The website for research and development sponsored by the USDA Forest Service can be found at: http://www.fs.fed.us/research/.
The website for bioenergy research sponsored by the USDA Agricultural Research Service can be found at: http:// www.ars.usda.gov/research/programs/programs.htm?NP_CODE=307.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are both strongly committed to expanding the role of biomass as an energy source. In particular, they support biomass fuels and products as a way to reduce the need for oil and gas imports; to support the growth of agriculture, forestry, and rural economies; and to foster major new domestic industries — biorefineries — making a variety of fuels, chemicals, and other products. As part of this effort, the Biomass R&D Technical Advisory Committee, a panel established by the Congress to guide the future direction of federally funded biomass R&D, envisioned a 30 percent replacement of the current U.S. petroleum consumption with biofuels by 2030.