tagged w/ cattail
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STREETER, N.D. - Those pesky cattails that have provided a safe haven for millions of blackbirds in the region may suddenly start disappearing from the landscape if a project being looked at by the North Dakota Department of Commerce becomes a reality.
“Interestingly enough, there are some significant uses for cattails,” the Department of Commerce's John Mittleider told those attending the Grass-N-Beef Research Review at the Central Grasslands Research Extension Center (CGREC) near Streeter.
“One of the uses is to make a very high quality paper and you can also produce ethanol from cattails,” Mittleider said. “In addition, the by-products from the ethanol and paper production can be used in a burner process to make electricity.”
Some preliminary work done by the Commerce Department indicates about 18,000 acres of cattails would produce about 400,000 tons of dry cattails, which is what it would take to run one of the facilities, and that would result in about 100,000 tons of pulp for the paper industry.
“The sugar stream that comes off the pulping process would be enough sugar to produce about 15 million gallons of ethanol every year, plus you would have the by-product to fire an electrical generating plant,” he said. “The agronomic value of a plant such as this is estimated at $116 million per year, according to our best estimates. If we could harvest every cattail in North Dakota that would be over $3 billion worth of economic value each year, but obviously that's not going to happen.”
There are several economic advantages for using cattail pulp in place of wood pulp in the paper-making process, according to Mittleider. First of all, the costs for making pulp from cattail are about one-third less than the process costs using wood chips.
--ExcerptSTREETER, N.D. - Those pesky cattails that have provided a safe haven for millions of... more
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