US at BBEP (Cornell University): Day 9

Today was really cool. We spent the whole morning at Cornell's Lab of Orinthology and heard from three dynamic speakers covering the topics of Green Buildings and LEED Certification, to Biochar as a bioproduct, and the usage of marginal land as a place for possible bioenergy feedstock production. Equally as cool as the speakers was the tour of the lab and the opportunity to see a Great Blue Heron nesting site full of fledglings. Lastly we did a

Side note: check out the lab's nest cams - Red Tail Hawks and Great Blue Herons.

Green Buildings - Lew Durland, PE

Our first speaker of the day was Lew Durland. Lew is a Professional Engineer as well as the Board Vice Chair of the US Green Building Councils New York Upstate Chapter. Lew spoke a lot about the LEED Certification process for new buildings and existing structures. This is of particular interest to me as the new academic wing at US is hoping to achieve a LEED Silver rating.

First lets consider that 40% of primary energy use and 72% of electricity consumption is accounted for in the running of our structures (Environmental Information Administration Annual Energy Outlook, 2008). If you then consider the benefits of building a "green" building and compare it to our sustainability diagram, the logic becomes more clear.

Benefits of a Green Building

What is LEED?

Stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design
It was developed by the US Green Building Council in 2000.
LEED provides building owners and operators with a framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.

Put simply, Lew described LEED in the context of the building and it's ability to influence it's occupants. "Buildings that use less energy provide a superior indoor air quality, enhance occupant productivity and well-being, and improves the bottom line for developers, owners, and tenets.

A LEED certification requires an independent, third-party audit of the building process and design. The auditor compares the building's design parameters to the check list of points defined by the LEED framework. The number of points achieved dictates what level your building attains: Certified, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

LEED Certification point distribution

Biochar - Dr. Dominic Woolf, Swansea University

The second speaker of the day was Dr. Dominic Woolf, a visiting scholar from Swansea University in England, who is working at Cornell. Dr. Woolf talked about biochar, a charcoal-like byproduct of heating biomass in a limitedly oxygenated environment. If you heat grasses, wood chips, or other biomass feedstocks, in this environment you produce a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide, otherwise known as syngas and leave behind biochar in a process called gasification. The gasses are burnable as fuels. The biochar that is left behind can be used as a highly effective soil amendment due to the increased surface area within the char particles available for nutrients and water to remain.

Biochar stove and the residual biochar from gasification of sugarcane.

If you burned the fuel in an open stove you would release carbon dioxide and water vapor to the atmosphere. In third-world countries this is a large output of greenhouse gases (GHG) relative to other part of the world and is a major cause of indoor air pollution. The ability to capture carbon in the form of biochar acts as a type of sequestration that keeps carbon out of the atmosphere for decades if not centuries. I foresee designing and building a biochar stove as a lab/design activity in my Environmental Science class.

Marginal Land Feasibility - Dr. Brian Richards

Our last speaker of the morning was Dr. Brian Richards of Cornell's Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Richards talked about the usage of marginal land for the production of biofuel feedstocks, such as grasses and woody crops. Marginal is a term that describes the quality of the land that you want to grow your crop on. It is defined as land or lands that have fallen or will be falling out of production because they can no longer be economically farmed. This could be do to loss of nutrients, an increase in water retention to the point of flooding, an excess of stony soils, or simply being too remote to economically get product to market.

Professor Richards's marginal land plot

Dr. Richards's group is interested in determining if switchgrass is capable of being economically farmed on marginal land. Dr. Richards's research appears to directly approach the idea that food prices will rise if we secede land over to biofuel feedstock production. If we, instead, grow biofuel feedstocks on land that will not be used to produce food on the basis of economics or environment, we gain back that part of the argument.

Cornell's Lab of Ornithology Tour

Since the entire day was spent at the beautiful Lab of Ornithology, it only makes sense that we would take a tour of the building. The lab is set away from the main campus and is nested up against a large span of woods, making it a wonderful location for the study of birds.

Visitor Center at Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology

We were taken on a tour of the facilities which includes an incredibly diverse biological collection, including obviously birds, as well as aquatic species, as well as an incredibly thorough sound library of recordings from birds around the world.

Inside the audio library at Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Bird samples within the biological collection

Algal Photobioreactor Lab

The second to last event of the day was to build a photobioreactor for algae. Earlier in the week we had a talk about the possibilites of using algae as an oil producing species. This experiment uses plastic bottles (Gatorade, Pepsi/Coke Bottles, spaghetti sauce, etc.), a culture of chlamydomonas algae, some MircleGro, and a fish tank aerator. Similar to the bioproducts lab earlier in the week, this lab begs to have students create their own experiment. There are just so many variables that can be manipulated or controlled.

Photobioreactors with different amounts of MiracleGro added to chlamydomonas

Tour of Cornell's Compost Facility

We finished the day by taking a quick tour of Cornell's Compost Facility, which is run by the school's Farm Services division. The facility composts 850 tons of food waste generated from their 11 dining halls, however they compost more than just food. The facility receives 3,300 tons of animal waste from the various livestock the agricultural school manages, as well as around 300 tons of plant waste from the various greenhouses and test plots/fields around campus. They turn the piles biweekly and manage the facility to produce salable compost for the community and beyond. The facility also added a 224,00 gallon leachate pond to collect run-off from the facility, which is then sprayed over adjacent fields as fertilizer.