$3.3M DOE Project will Measure Bioenergy Crop Carbon Emissions

In Illinois, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded a $3.3 million grant to a multidisciplinary research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a precise system for measuring greenhouse gas emissions from commercial bioenergy crops grown in central Illinois. The three-year project through the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) is expected to reduce emissions associated with ethanol and other biofuels by enabling new technology for managing bioenergy crops, improving yield, reducing overfertilization, and designing new tools for “smart farms.”

The vast data collected will be publicly available and could someday lead to financial rewards for farmers who reduce emissions through sustainable crop management.

Led by Kaiyu Guan, an Assistant Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES) and a Blue Waters Professor at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the team will establish the Midwest Bioenergy Crop Landscape Laboratory (MBC-Lab) to monitor emissions on three 85-acre maize and soybean fields in Champaign County.

Corn and soybeans are the two major crops marketed to biofuel producers, with more than 75 percent grown in the Midwest. But current practices to grow those crops emit nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4) into the atmosphere — all greenhouse gases (GHG) associated with global warming. N2O, which also degrades the Earth’s ozone layer, is a product of excessive fertilizer use. And annual tilling aerates the soil, allowing microbes to break down carbon in the soil and release CO2 into the air.