Public Engagement

As I've written before in this blog, our energy future - with all the attendant issues of global politics and global warming - is one of the most important issues to which university research can make a contribution. I was therefore pleased that today's Star Tribune carried an editorial about the important work being done by David Tilman and his collaborators at the University of Minnesota's Cedar Creek research station. Some of the findings:

• Land planted with a mix of grasses and prairie plants ... can yield as much as 238 percent more bioenergy per acre than land planted with a single species.
• Such plant mixes are well-suited to acreage whose poor soil quality or topography makes it useless for other agriculture -- and they require far less fertilizer, pesticides, irrigation water and labor than typical crops.
• Compared to today's main biofuel crops (corn, soybeans, sugar cane) ... these "low-input, high-diversity" plantings also provide excellent wildlife habitat.
• Because of their deep root systems, these mixed plantings captured up to 14 times as much carbon below ground as would be released in burning fuels made from their aboveground biomass.
• The world's degraded and abandoned farmlands, if managed along the lines of the Cedar Creek experiments, could stoke enough synthethic-fuel plants to provide about 13 percent of the world's motor fuels and 19 percent of its electricity.
• By displacing fossil fuels ... those plants would eliminate about 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions -- in addition to carbon they capture.

Perhaps by coincidence, the Star Tribune also carried a front-page story about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty's "ambitious proposal to make the state more energy independent." Somewhat surprisingly, the connection between the front page and the editorial was not explicitly drawn. But it's clear that energy science, technology, and policy is a realm where university engagement with real-world governmental and commercial issues can have a big impact.