Grass pellets heat up Big Red Barn in first New York public demonstration of new biofuel stove

With winter in full blast, patrons of the Big Red Barn on Cornell's central campus are warming their toes before a new kind of fire. A grass-pellet stove has been installed in the fireplace in the barn's central eating area. It is the first public demonstration of this biofuel technology in New York state.

At first glance, the unassuming black box looks like any other stove. However, instead of wood, this one is burning pellets made from grass. The introduction of the stove springs from the work of Jerome Cherney, the E.V. Baker Professor of Agriculture in the Department of Crop and Soil Sciences at Cornell, who has been investigating the feasibility of grass as a bioenergy source.

"Grass pellet biofuel is a very promising sustainable and environmentally friendly energy source," says Cherney. Grass has about 95 percent of the energy value found in wood, and grass can be pelletized as easily as wood. The challenges with grass are its relatively high ash content and a higher concentration of corrosion-causing elements compared with wood.

Cherney and others involved in the installation said that the pellet stove in the Big Red Barn -- with its accompanying informational display -- will serve as an educational site for classes and, hopefully, will spark some interest in this technology among graduate students and researchers, the primary patrons of the barn.

As the United States focuses on energy security and how people heat their homes, grass bioenergy is one way that rural communities can move toward energy security, says Cherney.

"A grass pellet biofuel system can be a completely closed-energy loop, with production, processing and utilization all on a local level," he notes. This system also could provide much-needed job development in depressed rural economies, he says.

New York state has about 1.5 million acres of unused or underused agricultural land, most of which is already growing grass. Cherney points out that grass biofuel production does not need to divert any of the current agricultural productivity into the energy market, and this biomass industry can be completely independent from, and complementary to, the production of food or animal feed. All grass species and mixtures are acceptable for pellet burning, he says. At Cornell, the barn is using pellets purchased from a Canadian farmer who has a pellet-making machine. Cherney says he is mixing the grass pellets with some corn in the barn's stove to facilitate the burning process.

Ethan Rainwater '06, Cornell's sustainability intern, was a driving force behind the stove's installation.

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