§16232 Bioenergy Program

Summary

The Secretary must run a national program to develop, test, and help bring to market bioenergy. Two key terms are defined: biomass means organic material grown or leftover that can be turned into energy (including some forest and wood wastes, but not municipal trash or commonly recycled paper); lignocellulosic feedstock means plant parts or plant leftovers not grown for food, with examples such as barley grain, grapeseed, rice bran, rice hulls, rice straw, soybean matter, and sugarcane bagasse. The program must cover research, development, demonstration, and commercial use for biopower, biofuels, bioproducts, integrated biorefineries, feedstock research, and economic studies. The Secretary must run demonstration projects for integrated biorefineries across different regions and may not give more than $100,000,000 to any single project. The program should show many kinds of feedstocks and uses (like liquid transportation fuels, high-value biobased chemicals, petroleum substitutes, and electricity or heat) and test ways to collect and treat feedstocks. Proposals had to be solicited not later than 6 months after August 8, 2005, and chosen projects must show they can be profitable without ongoing Federal subsidy after initial construction and be easy to copy. The Secretary must also run a university biodiesel demo for diesel generators using fuels up to B100 and study blends, cold-weather performance, storage stability, and other factors. Finally, the Secretary must fund work to make biorefineries more energy efficient and to retrofit corn-based ethanol plants so they can use a range of biomass, including lignocellulosic feedstocks.