C-CHANGE Grass2Gas: Bio-Based Value Chain from Perennial and Winter Crops

- All right, hello, everyone.

My name is Daniel Ciolkosz with Penn State Extension, and welcome to the 2023 Grass to Gas Webinar Series.

Now, this webinar series is part of the C-CHANGE Grass2Gas project.

It's a five-year, USDA-funded research, education, and extension project led by Iowa State University in partnership with Penn State and other stakeholders.

Now, the theme for this year's webinar series is Innovating a New Future for Anaerobic Digestion, and we'll be featuring and discussing some emerging research findings related to anaerobic digestion, and we'll talk about possible future directions that it could be taking in the coming years.

The webinar series is hosted by Penn State Extension in partnership with Iowa State University and the Iowa Learning Farms initiative.

Now, we have an amazing lineup of speakers and topics scheduled for this winter, and I encourage you to join us for all of these tremendous learning opportunities.

These topics, they span the range from today's overview and vision discussion, to technical anaerobic digestion breakthroughs, to emerging understanding of social constraints and opportunities related to anaerobic digestion.

And if you're here today, you should be on our mailing list now for announcements of future webinars.

But if you know of someone else who should be added or if you have questions about the webinar, you can just contact us at GreassToGas@psu.edu.

Now, before we begin, please note that this webinar is being recorded and we'll be making it available to people who couldn't join us in person.

In fact, we will send you out a link to the recording afterwards as well.

Now also, we really are hoping that you'll engage with today's speaker by typing out lots of questions and comments.

In fact, there's a large part of the hour that will be specifically devoted to discussion time.

So please enter any questions you have using the Q&A button that's found at the bottom of the computer window.

Now, if you're having technical problems, please use the Chat button and we'll do our best to help you out with that as well.

Also, please note that we're going to send out an email link to an online survey, a very short survey that'll just ask a few quick questions about how you felt the webinar went.

So please do take a moment to share your input on that survey with us so that we can improve future events.

Now let's move on to the webinar presentation.

Our featured speaker for today is Lisa Schulte Moore.

Dr. Moore is a professor of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University.

She is co-director of the Bioeconomy Institute at Iowa State.

She's director of the C-CHANGE project and she's also a recent awardee of a MacArthur Scholarship.

We are really pleased to have such a distinguished speaker here with us today.

Dr. Schulte Moore, the floor is yours.

- Thank you, Dan.

It's my pleasure to be able to help launch this seminar series with an overview talk of the C-CHANGE project.

Thank you and the Penn State team for hosting.

It has been a really great opportunity to get to learn about a new, or for me, a different agricultural part of the US and be able to compare and contrast, and then, not only in terms of the agriculture but the science that's happening in these two locations.

I will now share my screen and it's so great that we have wonderful participation here today.

I saw somebody put in the chat that they're logging in from Sonora, Mexico, so hola, and glad you could join us.

As Dan mentioned, my presentation title today is about transdisciplinary engagement towards creating a new biobased value chain from perennial and winter crops.

That's what we're about with the C-CHANGE project.

And let me just check.

Dan, can you see my slides in presenter mode?

- [Dan] Yes, your slides look good.

- Okay, thank you.

Well, with that we'll get started and I'm gonna start really big picture.

So for, you know, millennia agriculture has been all about trying to provide for people on our planet, and the question of how we provide for this growing human world is still very relevant, obviously, and of growing relevancy as we move towards a planet with 10 billion people, and then no changing in the amount of space or the, you know, basic resources that we have to support that growing human population.

So sort of the grand challenge for agriculture is how do we continue to provide for this growing human world while also being more attentive to sustaining our planet, our planet home?

And this is actually even more challenging than it's been in past generations because of, we don't have all the resources we did historically to try to meet human needs.

Many of the world's agricultural soils are degraded in comparison to what they had been historically.

And so this is a map, outdated now.

The soils are more degraded than even when these data were collected.

But just showing, you know, even in our world's major agricultural regions here in the US and of course in Europe, Australia, and in South America, Central America, that even moderate to strong soil degradation.

So we have to provide for this growing human world while at the same time thinking about how we do a better job of supporting that foundation of our agriculture by doing a better job by our soils.

And it's even more challenging, we know, because of changing climate systems and the effect of anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases into our atmosphere and how that's changed our climates in comparison to the past, and moving forward, wanting to stay below 1.5 degrees warming in terms of the change of climate, and agriculture has a really important role to play here, not only because agriculture is a source of greenhouse gas emissions, about around 12% here in the US, globally more closer to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, also thinking about the changing land use associated with agricultural change.

But also because moving forward we're looking to agriculture as a way to actually draw some of that carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in durable places.

So that's a big challenge for us.

So those are the challenges, but there's a lot of good news in the agricultural story as well.

For those of us involved in agriculture, we're very familiar with our ability to produce our products more efficiently given that lack of change in the amount of land that we're dedicating to agriculture on the planet.

And so here are some data from Our World in Data, just showing how since about 2000 we've been able, the year 2000, we've been able to decouple improvements in agricultural production from actually transitioning some more of the world's natural areas into agricultural production.

One of the pieces behind this graph that it doesn't show, however, is that what's really changing is the amount of land devoted to pasture and that many of the world's pasture lands are continuing to move into crop production.

But overall, this is a good-news story and our ability to grow more, to provide for human society without needing to convert more of our planet's natural areas into agricultural production.

And if we were to take a look at some of these data, at a US scale, it looks like this, where the total amount of farm inputs has not changed that much over time, but yet the total agricultural output has changed dramatically.

And again, this has to do with the science and technology innovation, it has to do with business innovation, it has to do with the improvements in efficiency, such that even in challenging years with drought conditions like we've had throughout much of the Midwest this year, we have been busting yields in many cases because of the improvements in technology.

So that is really an amazing and a good-news story.

One of the challenges, however, that goes along with this is that with our increases in efficiency, we really don't need very many people on the land anymore to produce the agricultural goods for society.

And that's meant that as even as we continue to increase our productivity, the number of farms in our agricultural communities, or associated with our agricultural communities, has declined.

And so here are data from the US just showing the change in number of farms over time.

Our farms have gotten more efficient, which is great, but that requires fewer people, and we're seeing a decline in rural communities such that rural vitality can't be sustained anymore.

Farmers, farm families can't get their basic services in terms of medical care, access to grocery stores, or even we see closures of schools and even having social networks has been challenged, associated with this increasing productivity, increasing efficiency, and not very many people needed in order to provide that.

So this is not, probably, these patterns are probably nothing new to you.

And indeed, there was a report published by the US National Research Council in 2010 articulating some of these linked challenges and recommending that the US really needed to think about transforming our agricultural systems, not only to address some of the challenges from the environment, but really also looking at some of the challenges to the human aspects of agriculture.

And this report recognized that farmers in particular are not acting alone, but they are a part of a broader system.

And my slide is not moving forward now.

Oh, there we go.

Okay, so here's a graphic from this report, showing that many of these decisions in terms of how agricultural systems are put together, they have an effect on farmers, but that the farmers are not acting alone.

They are linked to markets, they're linked to policies, they're linked to knowledge institutions, consumers, stakeholders, and they're affected by all of these things, including social movements looking for agriculture to change, in many ways, to provide for a cleaner environment as well as meet other social goals that people have for agriculture.

USDA responded to this growing body of knowledge and this National Research Council report by establishing a new program.

The program is now called the Sustainable Agricultural Systems program.

There was an earlier version of the program called the Coordinated Agricultural Program.

But basically what USDA NIFA, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, seeks to do with this new Sustainable Agricultural Systems program is to help transform the US food and agricultural system to increase the production in sustainable ways as we approach this growing human population, but also recognizing we need to do so in the context of diminishing land and water resources, the changing climate, and increasing frequency of extreme weather events, threats of outbreaks of diseases and pests to the crop production, and then challenges to human health and wellbeing.

The role of this program is to solve these challenges, and it does so through a convergence of science and technology to optimize agricultural productivity, ensure safe and affordable as well as nutritious supply of fuel, trying to reinvigorate and realize the promise of the bioeconomy, and then also grow a greater agricultural workforce.

So the C-CHANGE project is one of those Sustainable Agricultural Systems projects that's funded by the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture, and there's many of these projects that work in different parts of the US, and even some of 'em that have overlapping geographies with the C-CHANGE Grass2Gas project.

Our focus, however, is in this area.

We're looking at advancing am agricultural value chain.

And why a value chain?

Again, coming back to that National Research Council report, farmer decisions don't occur in a vacuum.

They're linked to other systems that also serve society as well as businesses and science and stakeholders.

And we are looking at how we can advance this value chain based on the production of renewable natural gas, so a renewable energy source, and associated products through the anaerobic digestion of herbaceous feedstocks combined with manure.

So that's the project in a nutshell, and I'll dig into all of those facets in a little bit more detail here in a moment.

But one of the things that I really want to emphasize, that while I get the opportunity to launch this with you today, that it is a really big team of researchers, educators, extension professionals, farmers.

We have advisory board members that represent government and NGOs as well as agricultural businesses.

Roeslein Alternative Energy, a renewable energy business, is a part of our project.

We're all working together in order to be able to create this new system, this value chain, in a way that makes sense to as many people as possible and make sure that our science is really holistic.

In terms of the structure of the project, as Dan mentioned, I'm the lead, the Project PI, the principal investigator on the project, but I can't do my work alone.

It takes a whole bunch of people to help me move the team forward and fulfill specific roles in terms of expertise.

And so also Chris Costello is the lead at Penn State University.

Rudi Roeslein is the founder and now the director of the board of Roeslein Alternative Energy.

And then Maggie Norton is our project manager and she works with me here at Iowa State University.

The project overall is broken up into three key research areas.

So the first is a area that we call our bioprocessing goal, and this is led by Mark Wright, a faculty member here at Iowa State University.

And our Goal 1, our bioprocessing goal, is to advance anaerobic digestion of herbaceous feedstocks.

And our second goal, let's see, is a agroecosystems goal, and this is to try to advance productive, profitable, and sustainable sources of herbaceous feedstocks.

Goal 2 is led by Heather Karsten, faculty member at Penn State University, and Andy Vanloocke, faculty member here at Iowa State University.

And our third goal area is for human dimensions, and what we're really seeking to do is understand stakeholder perspectives on the feasibility of this Grass2Gas scenario that I'll present to you here in a moment.

And Goal 3 area, Human Dimensions, is led by J. Arbuckle, a faculty member here at Iowa State University.

And we're also very keen to try to in increase leadership from the next generation, and so Elmin Rahik is a student rep on our executive committee, and he works in the Goal 1 area with Mark Mba Wright and Robert Brown as UN.

So as I mentioned, and with the picture, you saw that there's a lot of people involved in the Grass2Gas project, and that's true of all of USDA NIFA's Sustainable Agricultural Systems projects.

Overall, there's about 60 people affiliated with the project, and I just wanna show you this graphic, while I'm not gonna go into detail, so you can kind of understand the structure in terms of the executive committee, the three goal areas, and then also point out that extension, education, and data management are really important components of the project as well as work that we do in collaboration with farmers on demonstration farms.

And as Dan mentioned and showed you with the schedule to come there, please stay tuned for more information with additional experts that will provide you with deep dives into the various bioprocessing, human dimensions, and agroecosystems work that we're doing on this grant.

What I'm gonna try to do in my remaining time is kind of explain how the team arrived at that overall project overview of wanting to look at renewable natural gas as a potential way to address those three-part challenges I introduced at the beginning, and do that by looking at the growth of herbaceous feedstocks and turning those herbaceous feedstocks into renewable natural gas while working with animal-based agricultural systems for manure.

And then also, you know, what exactly is the value of this proposition to society?

So what I'm gonna do for the rest of the time is give you sort of a, you know, deep dive into, you know, why we're looking at these facets and then also some of our findings that we're going to develop, but the real detailed analysis of the findings will be shared in the presentations that will come in the rest of the webinar series.

So one thing I wanna point out to start with is that we have to focus geographically, and for this project we are focused on two key geographic regions.

One is the Corn Belt, where I'm located, and the second being the Mid-Atlantic region, where Penn State is located.

And a key reason is obvious.

You know, that's where our team has our expertise, but also because of the fact that we produce so many of our nation's agricultural products in this region.

So Iowa alone is the lead producer of corn in the US, oftentimes the second leading producer of soybeans, leading producer of pork production, eggs, and ethanol.

And with Penn State, of course, Pennsylvania is much more closely located to population centers on the eastern part of the US, and in addition to producing crops, produces a lot of dairy.

So by focusing in on these two regions, we can look at many of the interlinked challenges as well as opportunities associated with agricultural systems in the US.

So secondly, you know, why herbaceous feedstocks?

Well, given those two regions that I mentioned, the way that the existing agricultural systems have developed, and developed to be so productive, one of the challenges is that in general we leave the land bare through so much of the year.

So for example, here in Iowa, the corn or soybeans are planted in April or May, oftentimes have roots living in the, you know, once the plants have germinated, we have living roots in the soil by late May.

And of course the plants are growing throughout the summertime and starting to senesce in September.

And then again, from October through that next April, May, there's no living roots in the soil, which makes all kinds of sense in terms of efficient agricultural production, the way the systems have developed, but it is really challenging to especially our soils resources, which we know are so foundational to our agricultural productivity at present and our potential agricultural productivity moving into the future.

And so why herbaceous feedstocks?

We basically wanna develop ways to alleviate situations like this where during spring rains the runoff is bringing all sorts of our valuable soil with it and when we're seeing substantial amounts of degradation of our soil.

Also, we wanna address some of the water quality problems associated with our current dominant cropping systems.

So for example, I like this figure, which is not a new one, developed by Andy Heggenstaller and several other scientists in the 2000s.

So in these regions, the primary crop is growing throughout the summer, but however, in the spring and the autumn parts of the year, very vulnerable to nutrient loss from these systems.

So the valuable nutrients that farmers apply to try to grow their crops, when they don't make it into the crop, they are lost either through moving with the soil, they're lost through the soil profile, or they're gassed off as potentially harmful gases.

And so one of the challenges is, you know, how do we reduce that loss and try to be able to actually address some of the challenges while also potentially creating new value chains around crops that can be grown during that spring season as well as in the autumn into the winter?

And this is where herbaceous feedstocks could fit within our current dominant cropping systems.

And this is not a new idea.

People have been looking at this opportunity to produce more biomass from agricultural systems for some time.

We're just looking at it in slightly new ways.

And so for example, this picture shown at Bryan Sievers's farm, one of our cooperating farmers, Bryan has, in addition to crop production, he has a beef cattle operation, and here we see that a winter crop is grown for feed.

The biomass is also being collected for use as bedding with his cattle and can be used in an anaerobic digestion system to produce biogas, and then now being cleaned up for producing renewable natural gas.

So adding another crop into a rotation is one example of a way we can integrate in herbaceous crops, or we can look at taking some of the land, especially the lower productive acres, out of our annual cropping systems and putting it into a perennial crop.

And here we see a farm in Wright County, Iowa, where the farmer put a area that was vulnerable to soil loss and to nutrient loss on his farm, put it into native perennial prairie species as a potential way to address some of those concerns.

And I've been working with another team, the STRIPS Project, for 15 years now to look at this way of integrating in our native species into our currently dominant agricultural cropping systems to try to address some of the concerns, environmental concerns, and the Grass2Gas project now really looks at, okay, is there economic ways that we can benefit from having this herbaceous biomass integrated into the landscape?

I'm gonna tell you a little bit about STRIPS, because it helps you understand why, you know, integrating prairies or herbaceous biomass crops could make sense within our agricultural systems.

So first of all, STRIPS stands for Science-based Trials of Rowcrops Integrated with Prairie Strips, and the basic idea is being really strategic with land and working with farmers and putting in our native species back into our agricultural landscapes in ways that make sense to address their concerns.

And so that field view that you saw is actually on this farm here, up in Bremer County.

And you can see that this farmer, Dick Sloan, put multiple prairie strips on the contour.

What he's trying to achieve with these prairie strips is to reduce soil loss by helping, you know, keep his soil in place when there's intense rain and the soil starts to run off, as well as trying to filter nutrients out of the water and build soil underneath these prairie strips.

Work that the STRIPS team has found over time, we found that by strategically adding about 10% of prairie to no-till corn and soybean fields, that we can address all sorts of soil and water measures.

So we see a 95% reduction in the sediment loss from fields that have prairie strips as opposed to fields that are entirely farmed with row crop farming.

We see a reduction in water runoff of 37%, a 77% reduction in phosphorus runoff, and phosphorus runoff is a big challenge in both Corn Belt agricultural systems as well as Mid-Atlantic agricultural systems, as well as nitrogen loss, and we can reduce nitrogen runoff as well as subsurface nitrate concentration by 70%.

In these particular fields where these measurements were taken, the field was not tiled.

We also see that we can address greenhouse gas emissions, so a 75% reduction in a very potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, when prairie strips are put in a footslope position on sloping fields, and that we can accrue soil organic carbon by about 0.07 tons per acre per year.

We can also provide for our native biodiversity.

We've shown that we can triple the number of pollinators using the fields as well as double the number of birds that are using fields with prairie strips.

And in terms of other parameters that are very important for farmers, we find that the influence on the annual crop yield is proportionate to the area put into the prairie cover.

We don't create any additional weed problems in the crop fields for the farmer, and that this option is cheaper than some other options that they may have for their farms.

Just a few other data points to kind of help you understand, again, why perennials might make sense in these landscapes.

The device that you see in these pictures is called an H-flume and it's used to take water quality measurements.

Matt Helmers will probably talk about some of the data that his team has taken in this experiment and others using this monitoring device.

But what you see is on some of our experimental sites, what these flumes look like after a four-inch rain in early June in Iowa, and again, with 100% row crops, we're losing about 4.5 tons per acre per year of soil.

It's moving within those fields.

Whereas with the prairie strip you can see a dramatic reduction, that center one, you can see a dramatic reduction in the amount of soil that's leaving the crop field.

So it's reduced by 95%.

And another area near our experiment that was in 100% prairie, and you can see that areas of the land that are entirely in prairie, they don't lose their soil.

And again, now addressing some of our challenges for agriculture moving forward, not only do we wanna reduce greenhouse gases but we also wanna be able to draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Our perennial systems are really good at doing that.

And here we see Tim Youngquist, our farmer liaison on the STRIPS project, holding two shovel-fulls of soil, one from an area that was under the prairie strip and another from the corn and soybean cropland right next to it, and you can see the difference in the soil, and that equates not only to changes in soil organic carbon, but multiple measures of soil health that our team has measured over time.

If those metrics sound pretty good to you, you're not the only one.

Since 2019, when prairie strips became available as a conservation reserve-eligible practice through USDA, we've seen dramatic increase in the number of farms with prairie strips on them.

And our initial field site is shown with the marker here in the middle of Iowa, and there were about 12 acres of prairie strips as a part of that experiment.

The numbers that you see in the Midwestern states in the image are the numbers of acres in prairie strips and signed up for the Conservation Reserve Program prairie strips since 2019.

And so we've gone from very few acres of known prairie strips in 2007, when we established our experiment, to over 19,000 acres of prairie strips today on approximately 190,000 acres of cropland and in 14 US states.

So there's growing awareness for the practice and growing acceptance of establishing prairie strips on vulnerable acres by farmers and farmland owners in the US, which is great.

However, some of the other human dimensions research that J. and Suraj Upadhaya, a faculty member at Kentucky State, have done, have looked at farmer willingness to adopt not only prairie strips but various conservation practices, and what are some of the barriers to adopting those practices?

Based on farmer survey responses, Suraj and J. and I published a paper just recently showing that farmers can kind of be, these are Iowa farmers, can kind of be grouped into four different types when it comes to the lens through which they're viewing conservation on their farms.

And the four types are a conservationist farmer, a productivist farmer, a deliberative farmer, and traditionalist farmers.

I encourage you to read the paper, 'cause I'm not gonna go into detail on this in today's webinar, but what I wanna point out is that one type of farmer, the conservationist farmer, is the most willing to adopt prairie strips as a conservation practice, whereas productivist and deliberative farmers suggest lower level of willingness, and traditional farmers suggest no willingness whatsoever to put prairie strips on their croplands.

So what this means is that farmers, basically we need more options for farmers if we want to see them achieve some of those conservation goals along with their production goals.

And new research indicates that there could be positive impacts from harvesting fertilized winter crops grown in soybean rotations.

This work has been led by Rob Malone, a scientist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service, located here in Ames, Iowa, as well as Tom Richard and Steph Herbstritt.

Tom is going to be speaking next month, and I'm sure you'll hear more depth about this research in Tom's talk, and Steph completed her PhD associated with C-CHANGE and is now working for the Clean Air Task Force.

I'm not going to go into deep detail on these results now, but I did wanna give you some sense of the kind of quantitative information that the C-CHANGE project and partners are starting to develop.

So in this paper, recently published by Rob and others, found that long-term winter rye biomass yield across the North Central US could yield over 5 megagrams per hectare, or 2.2 tons on average, when grown prior to soybean without seeing a soybean yield reduction, as soybean follows the winter biomass crop.

We also see that there is potential to positively influence producer revenue with this system.

And that not only in this system, but if you look at the scientific literature overall, most studies find an increase in net return and greater overall crop reduction per unit area when a relay or double cropping system is integrated onto the farm in comparison to the prevailing cropping systems.

So that's a little bit about why perennial and winter crops.

Now I wanna switch direction just a little bit here and say, you know, why are we looking at anaerobic digestion for renewable natural gas?

Well, anaerobic digestion is using microbial process in the absence of oxygen to break down some of that material into primarily methane as well as carbon dioxide.

The amount of methane and carbon dioxide will vary based on anaerobic digestion processes, but it's roughly a 60% methane and 40% carbon dioxide ratio when you break down various sources of organic material.

One of the reasons this group has chosen to focus on anaerobic digestion as a process for conversion in renewable natural gas in particular is because over the last decade, renewable natural gas from biogas has grown dramatically in terms of a, as a fuel source.

So in 2014, almost 0% of the cellulosic fuel in the US was comprised of renewable natural gas, and today, 95% of the cellulosic biofuel that we're producing today in this country is renewable natural gas.

And again, showing you some of the detail that we're developing in the project.

We have numbers in terms of what we can expect in terms of the amount of renewable natural gas per unit dry matter when we're looking at converting a winter rye biomass crop.

And we also have some sense of the potential on farm revenue generation associated with converting that biomass.

Now, there's all sorts of logistical challenges, we know.

Like, we need anaerobic digesters out there on the landscape that can accept that material.

We need to optimize those processes within the digester to try to get as much as possible good material out of that rye biogas or good material of that rye biomass.

We need to figure out, you know, transportation sectors.

We need to figure out, you know, which farmers are willingness to supply and all kinds of things.

But this should give you some sense of what you can see and what more you can learn about in future talks as a part of this series.

And why renewable natural gas at all, (chuckles)

you know, with the big push for electrification and all of the renewable electricity generation capacity that's being built in this country and elsewhere today?

Well, the reason is, is that while electrification is great, there's still some sectors of the economy, or parts of those sectors, that are extremely hard to electrify.

And so this is a graphic from a new paper coming out by Wendy Shaw and many other US Department of Energy scientists, engineers, and affiliated scientists looking at, you know, what portion of our different sectors can be broken down or what sectors can be electrified versus which are pretty hard to electrify.

And what we see is that, for example, with our transportation sector, I think that's about 60% of the sector can be electrified, whereas another 40% is going to be very difficult to electrify, and liquid fuels will be needed for that sector.

So the next goal is, for those liquid fuels, let's make sure that they have as low as possible greenhouse gasses emitted with them, and that's where Grass2Gas comes along.

And here I'm going to just preview some results that if you wanna go into detail, please watch Mark Mba Wright's webinar coming up here in a few weeks showing some technoeconomic and lifecycle analysis that Mark and a student, Olumide Olafasakin, are working on.

And so when we look at natural gas, the total emissions is about 61.1 grams per megajoule.

Mark and Olumide have looked at what is the potential for a grass-to-gas scenario, and find that substantial reduction in the amount of total greenhouse gases through this scenario, reducing total greenhouse gas emissions by about 67%, so well over that threshold of a cellulosic fuel as categorized by the USEPA.

And that analysis was done in a particular watershed spanning Iowa and Missouri here.

The A, B, C, D, E, F are potential candidate sites for establishing anaerobic digesters that could accept grassy biomass.

And through their analysis, they're looking at under what conditions does a grass-to-gas scenario make sense from an economic perspective, and when does it not?

And so you can see here in this analysis that the amount of material that can be grown associated with a biomass cropping system is really important to the economics and that the net present value can vary between about -97 million for this watershed to about 442 million.

But the cost or the net present value is very dependent on environmental credits, and with it, the existing environmental credits, the grass-to-gas scenario can be profitable.

Another thing, however, associated with this analysis is that the loss of renewable natural gas through leaks or associated with digestate fertilizer can really affect the amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted and associated with the scenario.

So it's really important to be able to reduce those losses to the greatest extent possible, and Heather Karsten, in her webinar, she's going to talk about digestate management with that idea of, you know, we need to reduce emissions associated with digestate fertilizer.

And in other analyses we're also looking at that potential to reduce the leaks associated with methane and reduce that loss to the extent possible.

So one of the big questions is, you know, I've showed you some data suggesting that grass to gas makes sense in some cases, but will society accept it?

And our Goal 3 project team is really addressing that, the willingness of society to accept a grass-to-gas scenario, and they're doing so by engaging with stakeholders through in-depth interviews, through workshops, one-on-one interactions with stakeholders, and then sharing what they're learning with the biophysical scientists and engineers on the project.

The scenario that the Goal 3 team has shared with the stakeholders as they're working with is such.

So anaerobic digester systems can convert biomass from perennial grasses, cover crops, and other soil-building crops to renewable biogas, digestate, and soil amendments.

And here are some of the characteristics.

We're looking at local feedstock sheds, ranging from one to a few dozen farms.

We're looking at integrating the biomass crops with animal manure and food waste that will also be used as feedstocks.

We're looking at the potential for farms cooperate together or with private companies, and that the biogas could be used for electrical production on-site, sold to the grid, or refined to RNG, renewable natural gas.

I've focused the pieces thus far that I've shown you on renewable natural gas, because this is really a research project, and the pathway to electricity based on biogas is fairly well known.

What we've heard from stakeholders ranges from a lot of excitement, so great potential for the grass-to-gas scenario, to highly skeptical.

And the stakeholders have specific concerns about different aspects of the scenario as presented.

In general, stakeholders see many potential benefits, such as greenhouse gas reductions, additional farm revenue, ecosystem service provision, but they also see potential negatives and barriers for the scenario to develop.

So for example, the potential methane leakage is a big concern among stakeholders, as well as the skepticism around the economics, the potential viability of the scenario given the cost of digesters as well as cleaning the biogas to renewable natural gas and getting it into the existing natural gas pipelines.

In general, there's a lot of questions, which is why it's great to have a big team of experts who can begin to answer some of those questions.

The questions can be framed either broadly, or have been framed very broadly, about who benefits and who pays, as well as about some really key technical details around the economics, the logistics, and the capacity.

And I'm just about here to close, but one of the things I wanna mention with regards to the concerns for leaks, there's continued methane leaks around converting grassy material to methane, is that there is continued innovation, technological innovation in this area and that will continue to move forward.

And in particular, one of the things that we're watching is also the potential for renewable natural gas to enable a hydrogen economy.

And whereas in certain parts of our study region, for example, within the Pennsylvania, the Mid-Atlantic area where they're so close to large population centers, the grass-to-gas scenario might not make as much sense there in comparison to the middle of our country where we're further from our population centers but have huge land bases and farmers are looking for opportunity to get more value from their farms and cropping systems, and this link to the clean hydrogen economy may be where renewable natural gas is going in the future.

So I just wanna close by coming back to these three project goals, being able to look at bioprocessing, agroecosystems, and human dimensions of that grass-to-gas scenario.

And what I think, you know, is a really important part that I wanna emphasize is that all three of these offer solutions space, and as a team, what we're really trying to understand is if there's that point in the center where grass to gas makes sense from all three perspectives, from the bioprocessing, from the environment, as well as from the humans that our agricultural systems are supposed to benefit.

So again, I hopefully whet your appetite and gave you some context for what this team, what the project is about.

But in terms of real detailed getting into the nitty-gritty, I encourage you to tune back in to some of the upcoming webinars, and in particular one up just next month.

Tom Richard, emeritus professor from Penn State, will talk about new targets, sustainable markets, and re-imagining anaerobic digestion for the future.

And finally, I wanna give you also a plug for an upcoming conference next month on November 6th through the 8th here at Iowa State University.

The team is partnering with the USEPA Region 7 as well as the University of Iowa to offer an Anaerobic Digestion on the Farm Conference, and we'll be looking at many of these topics that I talked about today as well as others in great detail.

So with that, I'll close, and thank you for tuning in, and I'll let Dan moderate the questions for me.

- Terrific. Thank you so much, Dr. Schulte Moore.

This was a great presentation, really enjoyed it.

I'll encourage everyone to start typing in more questions.

We already have several in the Q&A window there that we can get started on, but for the rest of you, please go ahead.

If we run out of time answering the questions, we will send those to Dr. Schulte Moore and ask her to respond by email so that we don't miss any of those.

And I will also note that as you're typing, the chat window, we have the link to the registration site for next month's exciting webinar.

So I encourage all of you to register for that one as well.

You need to register for each webinar individually.

It's not one registration for all of them at once, so.

So that being said, I'd like to start with a question.

You mentioned something about how different locations may have different applicability.

So, you know, what sort of applicability do you see for this grass-to-gas vision in terms of where it could make sense, maybe not just in the United States but throughout the world?

- Yeah, that's a excellent question.

Well, most of our world's, you know, premier agricultural areas are located on areas, on lands that used to be in grasslands, right?

There's pretty much a one-to-one correlation between our most productive agricultural areas and, you know, what were our historical grassy areas.

And so the applicability of sort of integrating in, you know, grass into the landscape makes, I think, sense globally in how we can address many of our environmental goals by doing so.

But the challenge is, you know, what do those landscapes also need to produce?

And so I think the opportunity for reintegrating in, you know, grasses for biofuels is probably gonna vary depending on, one, you know, location close to human population centers, that's gonna be a huge thing, and then, two, you know, to what extent does it make more sense to run the grasses directly through an animal for producing food for humans, either dairy or meat production.

And that just really, as we've learned in the project, that's really gonna be dependent on the farm.

You know, does the farm have animal production on that farm?

Do they have the capacity to harvest grassy material and provide it as feed for their animals?

If the farm doesn't have animals and doesn't want animals, crop production farmers may look at integrating in the biomass crop as a part of their production system, and it could, again, be fed to a livestock farm or it could be provided to a digester.

That's kind of the way that we're looking at this, is that it makes sense, it could make sense for some farms, but it probably does not make sense for all farms, and we're trying to understand how.

The other thing I will just say is that human diets are changing, and as diets change into the future, right, we still wanna be able to support our farms and our rural economies, and grass-to-gas scenario may make more sense at some time points in the future or just change over time based on what the highest value market is for society.

- Terrific, thank you. Thank you very much.

Our next question comes from Kip File, and he's asking about this growth of RNG instead of cellulosic ethanol.

And he's asking, "Is this the case because cows are just better than machines at breaking down cellulose?" What's the reason why RNG is so popular, or seems to be growing in popularity?

- Yeah, and that's a fantastic question and one you should really get into with Tom Richard here next month.

But really, high level, a big challenge with the cellulosic biofuel industry was, well, twofold. (chuckles)

One, in order to make economic sense, they had to start really big.

And so, you know, the transportation associated with moving biomass feedstocks across the landscape got really, really challenging.

The other part of it is it needs a really pure process in order to, say, change a herbaceous feedstock into, convert a herbaceous feedstock into ethanol.

Renewable natural gas is growing based on manure, and so cows have already figured that out.

Animals, you know, cattle have already figured that out, how to take a diverse feedstock and break it down.

And so, but there's still a lot of value in the manure once it comes out of the animal.

And so the renewable natural gas industry has been trying to capture, or has been capturing, some of the carbon value that is still there in the manure.

And it has all...

The animal industry has already concentrated the feedstocks, right, for the purpose of food and the cattle have figured out how to break it down.

The renewable natural gas industry is now looking at getting more value, you know, from that material.

- Great, thank you. Thank you very much.

Fernando Fuchter is interested in, I think, sort of emerging contaminants in the ecosystem, and is wondering, is that part of the C-CHANGE vision, the Grass2Gas vision?

Is there opportunity there for dealing with and removing, you know, nutraceuticals or other types of compounds as part of this whole system?

- Yeah, great question.

There's all sorts of work being done, you know, on phytoremediation and the environment, and we know that perennial plant systems work very well for that.

In the projects that I've been involved with, we've looked at putting in, you know, prairie strips in the agricultural environment to keep neonicotinoid pesticides out of our waterways.

And what we've seen is that the prairie strips do a really great job of sort of holding, keeping the neonics from getting into our surface water, and then the soil within the prairie strip at breaking down that pesticide.

We've also looked at prairie strips as a way to keep manure in the crop environment as opposed to, again, letting it get into our surface water.

You know, so we know that plants in particular are good at capturing all sorts of chemicals in the environment.

One of the challenges with the grass-to-gas scenario is, you know, how do the potential contaminants affect the microbial community within the digester?

You know, can you still run the digester at an optimal level economically if some of those contaminants are potentially having a negative effect on those microbial communities?

And again, that would be a really great question to also ask Tom Richard, who is an expert in that anaerobic digestion process.

- All right, thanks so much.

I think maybe we just have time for one more question, and thank you to everyone for your great questions and things you're inputting here.

This question comes from Steve Schmitz, and Steve is asking about the C-CHANGE vision relative to kind of standalone or dedicated energy crops.

Is there room for that in the C-CHANGE vision?

Is that something you're actually looking at actively, or is that something completely different, or are there reasons why maybe it's not being looked at in this part of this project?

- Yeah, no, that's a great question, and I would say that the C-CHANGE vision is big enough to include dedicated energy crops.

We're looking at the winter biomass crop as well as the prairie as, you know, dedicated energy crops.

But we haven't thus far looked at things like miscanthus thus far, and certainly, there's also lots of interest in using corn stover as a dedicated energy crop.

Just outside of Ames is VERBIO, which is a company that is using anaerobic digestion to break down corn stover.

So I think it fits within our vision.

It's just, you know, even though we're a big project, we've had to focus in on a few key areas where we thought, you know, maybe the research gaps were bigger and we had the interest and capacity as a team to really address, and so we really focused on sort of winter rye and prairie as feedstocks.

- Wonderful. Thanks so much.

Well, we've come to the close of our hour, but we still have a lot more interest and questions, which is exactly what we hope is going to happen here.

I think a lot of them are gonna be addressed in future webinars, so we'll look forward to seeing many of you in the coming months.

So Dr. Schulte Moore, thank you so much for joining us, sharing your expertise and your vision for the C-CHANGE project.

And we look forward to seeing all of you at a future webinar soon.

Thank you very much, everyone.

- Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks, everybody, for coming.