Pavlovnia - highly productive culture for the production of biofuels and wood

Abstract

Purpose. Creating Ukraine’s own feedstock base for the development of the biofuel industry through the use of energy-efficient technologies for growing high-yielding bioenergy crops on special energy plantations, which, along with high biomass growth for biofuel production, actively absorb carbon dioxide and emit significant amounts of oxygen.
 Research methods. Field, accounting, statistical, analytical.
 Results. Energy plantations of wood crops, which in a short term gives an opportunity to obtain a variety of high quality wood products. This line of business is new, which has already proven itself in world practice as one of the most profitable and reliable ways of investment. This process occurs most intensively in highly productive bioenergy crops of group C4, such as: paulownia, sugar sorghum, corn and sugar beets. As a rule, the invested funds are repaid for 3−5 years from the beginning of planting the energy plantation. For plantations with a short growing season, mostly fast-growing trees are used, which allows to reduce the growing season of trees from 10−20 to 3−5 years. This type of wood from specially created energy plantations can be used as a business and to process part of the raw material from waste, which is about 50% in the form of twigs, for fuel chips.
 Conclusions. The expediency of growing highly productive bioenergy crop of paulownia in different soil and climatic zones of the country in order to produce feedstock for the construction industry and biofuel production is substantiated. Ukraine has all the necessary prerequisites for this.