While cheap oil has slowed development of alternative fuels, that won’t last forever. What would the ag economy look like if more biofuel crops were raised, and there was increased attention on capturing carbon?

The National Science Foundation has a four-year, $6 million project to look at that question. The University of Wyoming, NASA, Montana State University and the University of South Dakota are all part of the project. At the University of Wyoming, ag economists will generate models of what economies in the Upper Missouri River Basin might look like if raising biofuels and carbon-capture technologies were implemented.

The aim of the project is to determine if changes in commodity production and capturing carbon are sustainable, or even feasible, in the basin.

The group looking into this future-think about crop production involves more than 31 private, state and federal institutions. There are also more than 50 people taking part with the project, which got rolling in 2016. You can learn more about the project details at waferx.montana.edu.

Selena Gerace

Each participating university is receiving $2 million. UW’s role is developing the economic models, according to Selena Gerace, UW Extension outreach coordinator for the biofuel and carbon-capture project.

MSU will study agriculture and biofertilizers, food security, clean energy, and water supply and quality. USD will focus on land use, biodiversity and ecosystem services assessment.

The goal is to decrease atmospheric carbon. Many experts have long thought that there may be agricultural practices, which, if implemented, would reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. In this project, the aim would be to perhaps remove even more that is going into the atmosphere through alternative agricultural and energy approaches, including biofuels, and above- and belowground carbon sequestration.

According to Gerace, global scale modeling of carbon reduction has already been done. This project looks at the issue on a regional scale. “How would we fit into this?” she says. “What would it look like in the Upper Missouri River Basin?”

This is the region that includes the Missouri River and all its tributaries upstream of Sioux City, Iowa. The area includes all or parts of Wyoming, Montana, South and North Dakota and Nebraska, as well as more than 20 Native American reservations.

Gerace says the project is an investigation of what would be socially and technically feasible and what that might look like. “If we were to do wide-scale bioenergy production, how much is that going to impact the amount of food being produced, and what are the economic, ecological and social tradeoffs?” she says. “Our piece of the puzzle [at UW] is looking at what would happen at both the farm and regional scales.”

Asking these questions now can help develop rational long-term ideas to take on the bigger challenge — perhaps avoiding projects that won't work.

Source: University of Wyoming