Farmers, ethanol industry experiment with biomass
But during this year's harvest in western Minnesota, those corn cobs are being collected to fuel a local ethanol plant.
Last week, brothers Lonnie and Ryan Fosso watched two combines simultaneously harvest their corn and collect the corn cobs.
"I wish (my grandparents) could see this," said Lonnie Fosso.
Chippewa Valley Ethanol Company has been feeding biomass to a gasifier that can turn the biomass — normally wood chips — into a synthetic gas that can replace natural gas.
During four months of trial use, the gasifier has show it can displace about 25 percent of the natural gas the plant uses, officials said.
Gene Fynboh, a member of the company's board of directors and coordinator of the biomass harvest project, said plant officials hope to someday have biomass replace up to 90 percent of the natural gas used at the plant.
The ethanol company hopes its members will help by providing the corn cobs, which are relatively easy to collect. They're also easier to store and handle compared to other types of biomass.
If the plan works, the ethanol company would rely much less on natural gas sources, some of which come from overseas, Fynboh said. And he said that so far, locally produced biomass appears to be a lower-cost fuel than natural gas.
But while many Minnesotans used to collect corn cobs for fuel, a modern and reliable system of harvesting and storing the corn cobs is something that still needs to be developed, he said.
"This is something we haven't done for 50 years," Fynboh said. "We have to learn it all over again."
A trial run at the Fosso farm was part of that learning process. The combines demonstrated two different ways to collect the corn cobs. The first combine had a cob harvester attached to the back of it to collect the cobs. The other used a cob recovery system that was mounted on top. Both methods required the cobs to be dumped into trucks from time to time. And both methods will also add fuel costs for farmers when they harvest the corn. Besides studying the costs and benefits of collecting the cobs, Fynboh said researchers are also looking at how much biomass can be taken from farmers' fields without having an adverse affect on the soil or future yields. ———
