Category: NEWBio

NEWBio research discovers social, cultural, and economic motives behind local bioenergy decisions.

Collaboration between farmers and bioenergy experts. Photo: Great Plains Institute

Landowner and other stakeholder responses to bioenergy crop production play a critical role in the bioenergy industry’s future. NEWBio’s Human Systems Team set out to understand the social, cultural, and economic factors that drive decisions about bioenergy development in the Northeast U.S. Drawing from social science disciplines, the team found evidence that social-cultural and economic factors of bioenergy …

NEWBio shows producers new methods that can save them sizable costs in their biomass operations, including a 20% reduction in harvesting.

Figure 1. Bioenergy supply chain from the production of dedicated energy crops through harvesting, storage, preprocessing and transportation to an end user. Courtesy of Tom Richard.

Harvesting, preprocessing, and storing biomass and then transporting it to biorefineries or other end users is a critical part of the bioenergy supply chain. Those functions can account for more than half the …