Thursday, August 5, 2010 - 10:50 AM

OOS 38-9: Conversion of CRP grassland to cropping systems for bioenergy production causes large CO2 emissions

Ilya Gelfand1, Terenzio Zenone2, Poonam Jasrotia1, Jiquan Chen3, Stephen K. Hamilton1, and G. Philip Robertson1. (1) Michigan State University, (2) University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606, (3) The University of Toledo

Background/Question/Methods
To analyze the greenhouse gas effect of land-use conversion from CRP grasslands to a biofuel cropping systems, we conducted a full carbon accounting of land conversion of three such systems. The systems were converted to no-till soybean management. Additional CRP grassland served as control. The analysis included measured fluxes of greenhouse gases (N2O, CH4), net ecosystem productivity measured by eddy-covariance technique, and agricultural chemical and fuel use during the year of conversion.

Results/Conclusions
Conversion of CRP grasslands caused net emission of 1.4 ± 0.1 kg CO2eq m-2 y-1 including 95.6 ± 3.6 g CO2eq m-2 y-1 fossil fuel offset credit. An additional 4 to 93 years of biofuel cultivation would be required to offset this initial debt. The CRP reference site had a negative GWP impact of -282.5 ± 102.9 g CO2eq m-2 y-1. Were the CRP grasslands biomass used for cellulosic ethanol production, an additional mitigation of 322.0 ± 10.9 g CO2eq m-2 y-1 would be provided by fossil fuel offset, together with as much as 45.2 ± 1.5 GJ ha-1y-1 of energy in liquid fuels worth. Using established grasslands as cellulosic feedstock production systems rather than converting to grain-based biofuel systems will avoid the carbon cost and resulting debt of land conversion.