All Fired Up from Wildlife Promise By Ryan Newhouse As more
schools convert coal-fired boilers to burn biomass or build
state-of-the-art energy facilities, they must creatively explore
their “backyards” for sustainable fuel sources. If done
correctly, this helps schools significantly reduce their
baseline GHG emissions. One school exploring all its options for
becoming carbon-neutral is the University of Iowa (UI), and its
biggest step towards that goal is an award-winning biomass
facility that runs in part on a breakfast cereal byproduct. “Our
goal is to be on 100 percent renewable [energy],” says Ferman
Milster, University of Iowa’s Assistant Director of Utilities.
The campus began using one of its two boilers for biomass
commercially in 2004, and since then it has been burning one
very particular source of biomass-discarded oat hulls from a
Quaker Oats facility in nearby Cedar Rapids. The oat hulls are
co-fired with coal so that 50 percent of the heat output of that
boiler comes from biomass. “In 2009, we