Biomass Energy Update -- Minnesota's Perspective -- The StarTribune

Link to StarTribune here.

Minnesota has spent more than $11 million in taxpayer and utility funds to advance technologies that burn biomass for heat and electric generation or convert it to a synthetic gas. Now, it's getting difficult for the technology to compete.

"The era of low-priced natural gas has blunted opportunities for biomass and other renewables," said Doug Tiffany, an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota.

Natural gas prices have dropped by half since their peak in 2008 as exploration using hydraulic fracturing opened new gas fields in shale formations beneath Texas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

What's been a bonanza for those states has been just the opposite for Chippewa Valley Ethanol in Benson, Minn., 125 miles west of the Twin Cities. The cooperative spent more than $20 million in 2008 on a system that gasifies wood chips and corncobs.

Of course this is just part of the story. Minnesota bans coal-generated electricity from North Dakota.