Perhaps the most important development was the recent creation of the Biomass Energy Center to enhance coordination and collaboration among the many and varied green-energy research projects in progress and planned across the university. An interdisciplinary initiative that also includes the Eberly College of Science, the College of Engineering, and the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, the center is housed in the College of Agricultural Sciences’ Environment and Natural Resources Institute.

“We have both the agricultural expertise and the energy expertise,” says Biomass Energy Center director Tom Richard. “Penn State’s Energy Institute has been doing cutting-edge energy research for decades, and we are merging that with cutting-edge agricultural research to produce social, economic, and environmental benefits. And we have the infrastructure to disseminate what we learn to farmers, foresters, and businesses through our cooperative extension network.”

Energy is one of the pressing issues for the coming century, and biomass is one of the most promising alternatives to fossil fuels because it is carbon neutral and renewable and can be produced domestically, according to Richard, an agricultural and biological engineer. “While biomass cannot solve all our energy needs, it can provide a third of our transportation fuel needs and a significant amount of our other energy needs,” he says. “Congress is considering a ‘25 X ’25 pledge,’ with a goal to derive 25 percent of our total energy from biomass by the year 2025.”

Using renewable “crops” such as corn, soybeans, switchgrass, trees, and manure—just to name a few—to produce that much energy is credible, contends Richard, who noted the federal departments of Energy and Agriculture estimate that there are a billion tons of biomass available in this country on a sustainable basis to make energy. “Penn State has strong research programs using thermal, chemical, and biological mechanisms to convert biomass to electricity, transportation fuels, chemicals, stationary power, and heat,” he says. “More than 50 faculty members at Penn State currently are involved in research related to biomass energy.”

Richard is convinced that huge societal changes will be needed to break the country’s dependence on oil imported from overseas. “One way to think of this is that for the last 150 years in Pennsylvania, we have had a petroleum-based economy. In the coming decades, we will be transitioning to a biobased economy.”

If that biobased economy is going to be different from our last biobased economy of the 1800s, we are going to have to do some innovative things, Richard contends. “In terms of production, we need to develop cropping systems that provide food and fiber at levels at least equivalent to today, but also come up with energyproducing crop rotations such as cover crops to grow between food crops,” he says. “We need to use land more intensively but in an environmentally sound way.”

The focus of the Biomass Energy Center is to coordinate and facilitate research and outreach across the university, building teams to address the complete value chain of biomass energy systems. Center activities can be classified into four categories, notes Richard: improved production of biomass feedstocks; the integration of biomass production into sustainable agrosystems; conversion of biomass into energy; and technology transfer to companies, state agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and citizens throughout the commonwealth and beyond. Each of these categories is critical to the whole if biomass energy is to achieve its potential, he believes.

Among the most significant research areas at Penn State is ethanol production from plants other than corn. “Live green, go yellow,” urges the now often-heard slogan about putting ethanol in the gas tanks of vehicles, with the “yellow” of course referring to the color of corn, the main source for the biofuel in the United States today. But in a few years, according to green-fuels experts in the college, Pennsylvania and the Northeast will be producing more ethanol from other plants than from corn.