{"id":1847,"date":"2010-04-14T10:11:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-14T14:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/14\/heat-a-future-north-country-cash-crop\/"},"modified":"2010-04-14T10:11:00","modified_gmt":"2010-04-14T14:11:00","slug":"heat-a-future-north-country-cash-crop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/04\/14\/heat-a-future-north-country-cash-crop\/","title":{"rendered":"Heat: a future North Country cash crop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/northcountrypublicradio.org\/blogs\/ballotbox\/uploaded_images\/jm12-738604.jpg\"><img style=\"float: right;margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px;cursor: pointer;width: 200px;height: 150px\" src=\"http:\/\/northcountrypublicradio.org\/blogs\/ballotbox\/uploaded_images\/jm12-738546.jpg\" alt=\"\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a growing body of evidence that finds farming crops to  produce fuels that power cars and trucks actually costs more energy than  it creates.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.news.cornell.edu\/stories\/july05\/ethanol.toocostly.ssl.html\">Cornell&#8217;s David Pimentel is one of the leaders in this  research.<\/a>  &#8220;There is just no energy benefit to using plant biomass for  liquid  fuel,&#8221; he says.  &#8220;These strategies are not sustainable.&#8221;  This  includes ethanol and biodiesel.<\/p>\n<p>But the North Country ag  community is positioning itself to grow crops that heat things &#8211; in  other words, dry biomass that&#8217;s burned, not consumed as liquid fuel.   Wood pellets are the most promising example.<\/p>\n<p>Massena&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northcountrypublicradio.org\/news\/story\/13917\/curran-pellet-plant-ready-to-open\">Curran  Renewables<\/a> is already finding success making pellets from scrap  wood.  A couple years ago, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.northcountrypublicradio.org\/news\/story\/11863\/grass-pellets-growing-the-north-country-s-own-energy\">I  reported on farmer Tom Lee&#8217;s switchgrass experiment.<\/a>  There are  also woody biomass boilers in various places in the region.<\/p>\n<p>St.  Lawrence County planner Jon Montan has taken on this issue as a pet  project of his.  He&#8217;s launched <a href=\"http:\/\/slcgrassenergy.org\/\">a  new website<\/a> with some great resources and pictures.<\/p>\n<p>Do you  use a pellet stove?  Would you use one?  If you&#8217;re a farmer, would you  grow grass for energy?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s a growing body of evidence that finds farming crops to produce fuels that power [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1847"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1847\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}