An overflow crowd of more than 130 in the Upper Peninsula's Escanaba heard how biomass energy could both create jobs and improve the environment in the U.P.
The renewable fuels summit, part of the ongoing biofuels collaboration between Michigan State University and Michigan Technological University, brought Swedish bio-energy experts to Bay de Noc Community College.
Hans Gulliksson, an energy expert with a Swedish energy agency, spoke about bioenergy as both a development strategy and an environmental advantage.
"It makes jobs and it makes also a better environment, and on a global level it makes less CO2 impact," he said. "If you take away 300 cubic meters of oil, working with biomass, you make one local job."
Gullikson said his region of 300,000 inhabitants has created about 5,000 jobs in bio-energy.
Gullikson said Sweden is similiar in population and size to Michigan, with about 10 million residents, and similar in climate and economy to northern Michigan, northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota.
"We have an economy based on forestry and we have some agriculture but not much," he said. "We have an economy based on sawmills and furniture. For bioenergy we use refuse from forestry and wood industry -- branches and tops and stumps and sawdust ... Also what is growing from agriculture, straw, some grasses, but this is not very big."
Gullikson said that bio-waste provides a good chunk of the electricity and steam heat used by most Swedes at home and on the job, using a system of decentralized power plants.
"We do production in every municipality or village," he said. "To develop this in Michigan would be easy. You are at the level where we were 30 or 40 years ago."
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