Forester Receives Grant to Study Wood Chips for Ethanol Production

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Courtesy of Media Services

Dr. Sayeed Mehmood

     Using wood products to create ethanol as a substitute for petroleum-based energy sounds like a great idea, but will private landowners buy into the concept, and will homeowners pay initially higher costs for "green" energy?

   Those are questions being asked by a University of Arkansas at Monticello forest economist as part of a research project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to determine the economic feasibility of producing bioenergy from wood.

   Sayeed Mehmood, assistant professor of Forestry at UAM, is a forest economist and public policy analyst. He is working with colleagues at the University of Florida and Virginia Tech to determine the right mix of public policy options that would encourage private landowners to sustain and manage their forests for biomass and bioenergy production in Arkansas, Florida and Virginia.

    Mehmood and his colleagues recently received a federal grant of $656,525 to conduct a study of public policy options which would best encourage ethanol and other bioenergy production from wood products. According to Mehmood, such policy options might include technical support and government-sponsored price supports for salvaged wood material such as dead oak trees killed by the oak borer or young trees thinned seven years after planting.

   Other options include economic incentives to cover the cost of biomass transportation, subsidies for the production of wood energy, and cost-sharing capital investments in building wood-fueled plants, or retrofitting existing coal or natural gas plants to burn ethanol. Mehmood and his fellow researchers will also look at the possibility of investments to advance technologies of biomass production and its use in energy production, and the feasibility of price supports for bioenergy or a tax on conventional energy to encourage the use of bioenergy production.   

   The researchers will survey private landowners first, Mehmood said.

   "We'll ask them what it would take for them to grow and supply wood for bioenergy production," he explained. "What kind of tax incentives, subsidies and timber prices would it take to encourage them to enter into sustained biomass production?"

     Mehmood will then talk with households to determine if they would be willing to pay a premium for bioenergy.

    "The appeal would be clean energy," he said. "And it won't always be more expensive. Bioenergy is like any new technology - look at hybrid cars. They cost more now, but the price will go down in the future. It will be the same for bioenergy production. The question is will homeowners be willing to pay more initially for green energy?"

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