Green Energy and Carbon Credits?
I know I'm probably not the first to mention this. I read an article recently that NASA calculated the area of Lawns in the US to be 50,000 square miles a little more than the area of the state of Mississippi.
After reading an article on corn stover to ethanol and another one written on corn stover pellet power, I couldn't help but wonder why we don't collect the lawn debris for processing into fuel.
1st most people would like to take it off their yards but have no place to go with it.
2nd if it is allowed to compost into the yard it decays into CO2 and Methane both of which are GHGs. {Green house gasses} Methane is a 25 times worse GHG than CO2.
3rd It looks like it could be a good resource for fuel.
Roughly, 10,000 lbs per acre per year @ 7000 BTUs per dry lb = 70,000,000 BTUs per acre or 44,800,000,000 BTUs per square mile X 50000 =2.24E+15 BTUs possible. Or, at 8600000 BTU per barrel of crude oil, the annual lawn debris crop would have a heat value of about 260,450,000 barrels of oil.
The simplest way to use this fuel could be to just offset the fossil-fuel in a coal fired power plant with this green fuel and save all that carbon from the atmosphere not even mention the methane creation or release. Also, No interference with existing crops and the harvest would progress over a six or eight month period with a huge labor force already working on part of the harvest.
