 I've come to the island of Oahu to talk to HNEI alternative energy researcher Scott Turn about biomass. The use of biomass as a renewable energy resource depends on creating a value chain. We need to produce biomass material that could be agricultural residues, forest wastes or purpose grown crops. We need then to aggregate them into economic quantities, take them to a conversion facility and then post-conversion distribute those products out to end users. Describe the chemical process involved in biomass. We're using biomass as a raw material, principally carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. There's a remainder, which is made up of all the other elements. And these are the typically the elements you see in the bottom of your barbecue or your fireplace. This morning we were at the Waimanalo experiment station for the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. It's about 130 acre facility located on the eastern side of the island of Oahu. The folks that do research there are working on developing, among other things, new plant varieties that have potential for biomass production, which would be then converted to bioenergy, biofuels and chemicals and value added products. So there is a range of materials that come out of the biomass process. We're not just producing typically one product, something called the biorefinery concept. So as the biomass comes in, it gets transformed into a slate of products. One of them being fuels, maybe chemicals, bioplastics. There's a whole suite of things that could be made. And we need to find the mix that makes the economic sense. The materials that we saw this morning, the lusena and the vatagrass are raw materials that then we work on from understanding how they behave in pre-treatment applications as well as conversion processes. We want to be able to understand how elements present in the plant partition and how we can manage them so that they don't have negative impacts on the process. And we want to look at different processes that will produce bio oils, possible gases, coal substitutes, etc. The idea here is that if we take those types of materials, we do the basic research to understand how they behave under conversion conditions. Then that can be a resource for industry trying to develop larger scale production. Do you need a lot of acreage to actually provide enough power from biomass? We only have four million acres in the state of Hawaii. About two million of those are zoned agricultural and about a million of those are actually productive lands. We have very little land to produce materials on and we need to make good decisions in land use applications. So understanding how the value chain might be put in place, doing the types of analyses that will enable either policy to support that or businesses to invest, these are the types of information pieces that we need to provide to decision makers. Depending on the location and the plant material, less than 10,000 acres could produce enough material to service a single conversion facility. In the case of electricity, that single conversion facility would be sufficient to support perhaps 10% of Maui's electricity grid. Biomass is one of the renewable energy resources that will really help to contribute toward displacement of petroleum resources and fossil fuel resources and help move toward a cleaner energy future that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions.