The Northeast Woody/Warmseason Biomass Consortium - New Business Models for Perennial Biofuels.

The Northeast has substantial demand for transportation fuels, an educated and capable rural workforce, and over 3 million acres of marginal, degraded and abandoned land that could become productive, profitable sources of biomass with improved management. Under-utilized agricultural land that can be used to grow short-rotation woody crops and perennial grasses can play important, complementary, co-evolving roles in creating a sustainable, reliable, and affordable feedstock supply for biofuels, bioenergy, and biomaterials production for the region. The NorthEast Woody/warm-season BIOmass (NEWBio) Consortium will design, implement, analyze, and evaluate robust, scalable, and sustainable value chains for biomass feedstocks from New England to the West Virginia.  NEWBio is a unique collaborative network of public and private universities, businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies organized around a set of four large-scale demonstration sites, each forming the basis of a 500 to 1200 ton/day supply chain of lignocellulosic biomass suitable for advanced transportation fuels. Each demonstration is stakeholder driven, with commercial collaborators committed to feedstock production, logistics, preprocessing and conversion.