The Second Generation of Biomass Energy Calls for Exhibition "China Advantage"

It is the consensus of the world to control fossil energy consumption, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and find renewable clean energy. Research on biomass energy has attracted a large number of researchers. However, while the first-generation energy crops such as corn, rice, sugarcane, and soybeans have won hopes for alternative energy sources for humans, they have also brought with it a series of negative effects such as low net energy output and competition with food crops for arable land. As a result, the search for second-generation energy crops has become an important issue in the field of biomass energy. An energy crop called Miscanthus has gathered people's attention...

Second-generation bioenergy R&D "China Advantage"

China is the country with the richest natural resources of Miscanthus. Recently, key breakthroughs have been made in the research of a new generation of energy crops initiated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany, the Wuhan Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Shanghai Institute of Life Sciences. After three years of planting experiments, Miscanthus that originated in China has abundant genetic diversity. After artificial domestication, it will have a revolutionary impact on the utilization of land resources and energy patterns in China. However, as China's second-generation energy crops research is in its infancy and there are institutional and scientific conflicts in research projects and transformation studies, relevant researchers suggest that the state should focus on projects for second-generation energy crop research and strengthen the integration of production, education and research.

The experiment surprised researchers in the 14 species of wild miscanthus in the world. China has seven species distributed throughout the entire climatic zone of China. It also has four species with the highest biomass yield, and is the country with the most abundant natural resources of Miscanthus.

In 2008, the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Botany, the Shanghai Institute of Life Sciences, and the Wuhan Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences composed the Miscanthus research team. The project was funded by the important direction project of the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the autumn of that year, the collection of wild Miscanthus was initiated. In 2009, Li Jianqiang, a researcher at the Wuhan Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others collected about 100 Miscanthus species in natural habitats, and they were planted in Xilingoluo National Grassland Ecological Station in Inner Mongolia and Qingyang in Gansu Province on the Loess Plateau. The other species were used as controls in Wuhan.

“We selected three wild species that have the largest biomass and roughly the same flowering time. We don’t start watering or fertilize the second year after planting. We rely on heaven to eat.” Li Jianqiang said that the biological properties and genetics of Miscanthus are unknown. What are the characteristics of the performance of these places in the country, my heart is looking forward to.

After two growing seasons of 2009 and 2010, Li Jianqiang was pleasantly surprised to find that some Miscanthus could grow in the cold Xilin Gol, while others were more gratifying in the more dry Qingyang, and the Miscanthus biomass in Qingyang, Gansu was higher than The original habitat of Miscanthus is in the Jiangxia area of ​​Wuhan.

Li Jianqiang said that this shows that Miscanthus species are rich in genetic variation and strong adaptability, and can be used to cultivate high-yield energy crops that are cold-tolerant, drought-tolerant and poor-tolerant.

This result made the researchers very excited. After many analyses and conclusions, in May 2011, the research team published the research results online in the magazine GlobalChangeBiologyBioenergy. At the same time, the magazine published a news release entitled "Miscanthus Adapts" and quickly received international attention. AAASEureAlert, Alpha Galileo, and Science Daily, CellPress News Aggregator, Science Newsline, etc. have all reported that they have been reproduced.

The “green” arid and semi-arid region research group in China conducted an investigation on the Loess Plateau region of China, and based on Miscanthus yield in China, conservatively conducted a benefit calculation.

In addition to cultivated land and unsuitable for planting land, 430,000 square kilometers of the Loess Plateau can be used for planting Miscanthus. According to the output of the Qingyang Experimental Base in Gansu Province, a conservative estimate of 11 tonnes of dry weight of Miscanthus per hectare is calculated, and the total output is 500 million tons. If all of these outputs are converted into ethanol, it will be roughly equivalent to the total amount of gasoline consumed in China in 2010.

According to further calculations, if 100 million hectares (1 million square kilometers) of Miscanthus are planted on barren and degraded lands concentrated in northern and northwestern China, the average yield per hectare is 10 tons and the total output is 1 billion tons. 1458 trillion kWh, emission reduction of 1.6 billion tons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 45% of China's total electricity consumption in 2007 and 28% of total carbon dioxide emissions; using half of it as raw material to convert ethanol, roughly equivalent to China 2010 Annual consumption of gasoline.

Li Jianqiang, chief researcher of the Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany at Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, concluded that the development of Miscanthus as a second-generation energy crop can achieve three major functions:

The first is food security. Miscanthus can replace grain and economic crops as a new generation of energy crops to ease the food crisis.

The second is energy independence. China has a large area of ​​marginal land that cannot be cultivated by drought or semi-arid. If this part of land can be used as a place of bio-energy production, it will change the pattern of energy-dependent imports.

The third is ecological protection. The strong environmental adaptability of Miscanthus can improve the vegetation of arid and semi-arid non-cultivated land, while maintaining soil and water and preventing desertification.

“In deserted arid and semi-arid regions, if you plant Miscanthus, imagine that you are excited. Green and bright, the people can also make a fortune.” Sang Tao, Director of the Key Laboratory of Plant R&D of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences Holding great hope.

To enter the artificial domestication stage to make all of the above become a reality, there is still a long way to go for the study of Miscanthus. Sang Tao said that the current research results have proved that Miscanthus is the best second-generation energy crop in China, and the next breakthrough is artificial domestication.

The so-called artificial domestication is the transformation of wild crop seeds into artificially grown and planted crops through artificial breeding and crossing. "The completion of the conversion of Miscanthus from wild plants to crops is the goal of artificial domestication," said Sang Tao.

In fact, people are no strangers to artificial domestication. Sang Tao told reporters that the rice and wheat we eat were obtained through artificial domestication. The domestication of food crops that began about 10,000 years ago laid the foundation for human civilization. For example, rice is the long process of transplanting, breeding and breeding of wild rice.

It is understood that according to the research team's arrangements, the next step is to improve the construction of Miscanthus genomics platform. Next year, the high-yield Miscanthus strains on droughty, barren, degraded lands and saline-alkaline lands will be screened for hybridization experiments. From 2013 to 2014, quantitative genetic analysis was performed on the resistance and yield traits of Miscanthus; the productive potential of Miscanthus sinensis energy plants in China and the environmental effects of large-scale planting were evaluated through simulation analysis.

As an expert in the field of plant domestication, Sang Tao said that based on the existing genetic technology, the basic domestication of Miscanthus can only take a few years. According to him, in 2011, the team conducted a trial in the saline-alkali land in Dongying, Shandong province and in the more arid region of Huan County, Gansu Province, and selected 300,000 individual individuals to pick out germplasm resources that are more drought-tolerant, cold-tolerant, and salt-resistant. Artificial hybridization and breeding, then genetic genetic analysis.

“This process will not be long, and this matter has not been done in the world at present, because Europe and the United States are not Manglade grassland producing areas, and they do not have germplasm resources. In addition, there are many cultivated lands in Europe and the United States, and there is no need for domestication to grow on dry and barren land. Energy crops, but they eventually also need genetically diverse crops that are likely to rely on our domestication breeding,” said Sang Tao.

Funding and policy support should be even more "powerful"

At present, China is vigorously developing bio-energy, but due to the bottleneck of biological resources, research on second-generation energy crops started relatively late, and some institutional constraints have also been encountered in energy crop research. Scientists and researchers recommend that the state increase the importance of second-generation energy crop research, increase investment, remove some obstacles in scientific research mechanism and production, study, and research, and accelerate the development of Miscanthus from research to production.

The Miscanthus research team of the Institute of Botany, the Shanghai Academy of Life Sciences, and the Wuhan Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences believes that energy-saving and emission-reduction are the internal pressures for the transformation of China's economic development mode, and scientific development has become the internal driving force for the development of bio-energy. In recent years, the development of China's bio-energy has made remarkable achievements. By the end of 2010, the nation's biomass direct-fired power generation capacity had reached 2 million kilowatts, and the production of biofuel ethanol using grain as raw material had reached 1.8 million tons.

In 2007, the country formulated the Medium- and Long-Term Development Plan for Renewable Energy, which proposes a target of 30 million kilowatts for biomass power generation in 2020 and a target of 10 million tons for biofuel ethanol. However, the industry believes that there are objective difficulties in achieving this goal. The main reason is that companies have launched bioelectric power generation projects, but they have encountered the problem of shortage of biological resources. This is caused by the contradiction between the seasonality and dispersion of biomass resources and the continuity and concentration of biomass power generation.

Experts believe that the development of Miscanthus as a professional energy crop in China can solve this problem, and the way to realize the large-scale utilization of biomass energy is specialized and industrialized. As the best choice, Miscanthus can take this responsibility.

However, the current study of Miscanthus is also facing some difficulties.

First of all, although the country currently attaches great importance to the research and development of bio-energy, the potential and prospects of bio-energy in China have not yet been evaluated scientifically. Domestic related research is also relatively weak and scattered, and scientific research resources have not yet been integrated.

Secondly, as the research on energy crops in China is mainly undertaken by plant research institutions, energy plant research projects are mostly reviewed by experts in China's energy sector. Most of them are experts in petroleum, coal and other fossil energy research. As little is known about energy plants, In the evaluation process of scientific research projects, it is not conducive to the establishment of energy crops and funding.

Compared with the United States' great emphasis on energy, China's energy industry, especially the new energy industry, and the promotion of energy and energy lags behind.

Sang Tao said that in fact, for the second generation of bio-energy research, China is more urgent than the United States and other Western countries. Every year, China imports more than 50% of its oil, while the US oil reserves are much higher than China's, and it has vast idle farmland and fallow farmland. The first-generation bioenergy production technology is mature, and food security pressures and arable land reduction pressures are not as large as China’s. . Therefore, China should increase its research on second-generation bioenergy to the height of its energy strategy and catch up with it in order to take the lead. Because we have the advantages of germplasm resources that Western countries cannot match.

Sang Tao called for the country to increase its support for the second-generation bioenergy research policy and funding.

In addition, at present, the study of Miscanthus is in the artificial domestication stage. It is necessary to speed up the process from research to production, and it also requires multidisciplinary cooperation to conduct systematic research on the entire industrial chain.

The research team believes that Miscanthus is not only an energy crop, but also a very good material and paint crop. It is recommended that relevant national departments integrate research resources and strengthen the emphasis and practical encouragement on the comprehensive development and utilization of Miscanthus.

In addition, the main force of China's current bio-energy research focuses on the transformation of plant energy, neglecting the research on the material basis of energy plants as a bio-energy conversion. At this stage, there is a lack of researchers for bioenergy in China, and there is still a large gap between European and American counterparts in Europe and the United States.

In view of the above issues, experts suggest that relevant national departments can increase investment in energy crop research, increase bioenergy to China's energy strategy for sustainable development in the new period, and strive to achieve artificial domestication of Miscanthus at an early date for the development of bioenergy. Provide high-quality, professional, continuous energy raw materials.

At the same time, systematic scientific research and experiments were conducted on second-generation energy crops from biological breeding, planting promotion, energy conversion, production mechanisms, and models. “One-stop R&D can speed up Miscanthus to realize its comprehensive benefits in three aspects: grain, energy, and ecology. It will eventually make China the forefront of the United States and the United States, becoming the main producer of new generation energy crops and a big bioenergy country,” said Li Jianqiang.

Experts also pointed out that at present, China has plant energy conversion technology, but it is not optimized and highly efficient. It is recommended to invest in the establishment of a Miscanthus bioenergy transformation pilot plant, so as to promote China's bioenergy R&D and production capabilities as a whole.

Finally, the experts suggested that the state should focus on supporting the development of China's bio-energy-related majors, and cultivate interdisciplinary comprehensive talents in biology, environment, and energy.

The Miscanthus energy crop is a new rookie and the fossil energy is on the rise. The pollution is becoming more and more serious. The development and utilization of new energy has become an issue of the times faced by all countries in the world. In the search for alternative fossil energy and first-generation energy crops, Miscanthus gradually entered the field of vision of researchers, and became the hope of the second generation of energy plants.

The first generation of energy crops and people grabbed land to compete for grain. In today's world, renewable energy has developed rapidly. Wind energy, solar energy, geothermal power, tides, hydropower and biomass energy have all achieved rapid development. Biomass energy mainly refers to green crops through photosynthesis. And formed organisms. Biomass energy is the energy form of solar energy stored in biomass in the form of chemical energy, that is, biomass-based energy. At present, the common biomass energy in China's rural areas includes straw and biogas.

The first generation energy crops are mainly grain and cash crops such as corn, rice, sugar cane, soybeans, and rapeseed. Most of these plants are of an annual nature and need to be sown every year. There is a lot of irrigation and fertilization. The energy input is large, but the net energy output is very poor. In addition, they also compete with food crops for arable land, which brings a series of negative effects. For example, people cut down forests for the purpose of supplementing cultivated land. As a result, the earth's carbon storage capacity is reduced, and it is not conducive to solving the greenhouse effect.

Countries such as the United States and the United States have a large amount of unused land. Therefore, they have developed superior first-generation bioenergy resources and have formed scale. However, for China, which has one-fifth of the world’s population, the area of ​​arable land is less than one-tenth that of the world. The use of arable land to produce the first generation of energy plants inevitably jeopardizes food security and national stability.

Miscanthus a variety of advantages gathered in one to resolve the contradiction between energy plants and food crops, all countries in the world are looking for reasonable alternatives. As early as the 1980s, the giant prairie grass in Miscanthus entered the field of vision of Western scientists. Western scientists have discovered that as a second-generation energy crop, the giant prairie has many advantages.

Miscanthus can grow on barren land and won't compete with food crops; they have high photosynthetic efficiency, can convert solar energy and carbon dioxide more efficiently and store it; they produce large quantities of biomass and can provide more biomass for conversion into fuel. . At the same time, Miscanthus has the ability to use water efficiently, use fertilizer, and photosynthesis, and it can sow for sustainable production for 10 to 20 years a year, with low input and considerable net energy output. It is because Miscanthus has many advantages, such as not competing with the grain for arable land, high yield, strong carbon reduction ability, and large net energy, and it has quickly become a new star in energy crop research.

Like cereal grain crops, Miscanthus belongs to the family of angiosperms in taxonomy. There are about 14 wild species in the world. Most of them are distributed in Asia. A few are produced in Africa and belong to the C4 plant. They have high light saturation point, high photosynthetic rate and high photosynthetic production efficiency and physiological characteristics. They consume less water and photosynthetic than C 3 plants. efficient.

The most widely studied in the world is the giant triploid hybrid that originated in Japan. Its parents are diploid awns and tetraploid pods native to East Asia (including China). In 1935, giant prairiegrass was introduced into Denmark as an ornamental plant. Half a century later, it was first recognized and tested in Europe as a potential alternative to energy crops.

Miscanthus has entered the Western New Energy Strategy According to Sang Tao, Director of the R&D Key Laboratory of Plant Resources Research of the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the United States has established four biomass energy research centers since 2007, mobilizing almost all relevant national laboratories in the United States and dozens of The research universities have conducted research on second-generation energy crops. Among the second-generation energy plant development projects in the United States, switchgrass, miscanthus, willow, poplar have become the focus of research.

National Energy Advisor Stephen? Long is one of the more in-depth scientists on Miscanthus. Recently, the results of their research showed that the dry biomass production of the giant pampas grass reached an average of 30 tons per hectare with almost no fertilization. If the species of Miscanthus is further improved to allow it to grow in a wider area and increase production, theoretically 6.2% of the arable land in the United States can produce 133 billion liters of ethanol, which can replace 20% of the US gasoline consumption in 2008. Reducing 30% of the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the United States due to the use of oil during the year.

American scholar Sam Moore upgraded the American bio-energy strategy to the Manhattan Project of the new century. When the United States responded to the financial crisis, it launched an energy campaign. Some people think that Obama’s dominant energy ** is the promotion of a new economy based on a green economy. This ** has far surpassed the simple economic revitalization plan and has been widely hailed as “opening up a green **”.

At present, the core of the economic renaissance plan promoted by the United States is the transformation and development of the energy industry. The ultimate goal is to make the United States significantly reduce its dependence on imported petroleum and rely less on fossil fuels in order to achieve reconstruction of the international order through energy transformation and transformation. , to promote the global economic restructuring. Specifically, this will create a brand-new industry that not only creates millions of jobs for the United States, but also will make major breakthroughs in new energy technologies and their applications. In the future, the United States plans to invest heavily in the development of green energy.

Therefore, the United States has high hopes for the development of second-generation energy crops.

The British giant panda fuel test is ahead of other European countries. According to Reuters news, the scale of the planting of the English giant prairie grows sharply. In the past five years, the harvest has increased by more than ten times, which will help the United Kingdom to better meet the European Union's renewable energy goals. Last year, Britain launched the giant bluegrass energy plan. Britain's largest thermal power plant, the Drax Power Plant, has started to mix coal and Miscanthus. The rise in British food prices in early 2011 also failed to change the UK plan.