IRVINE, Calif., June 9 -- VIASPACE Inc. -- a clean energy company growing Giant King? Grass as a low-carbon, renewable energy crop, today announced it has increased Giant King Grass production capacity by leasing an additional 34 acres in Guangdong Province, China. The new land leased for 25 years is contiguous to VIASPACE's current land and includes the ability for irrigation.
With the new acreage, just planted with Giant King Grass, VIASPACE now has 279 acres under cultivation to support its expanding needs, including commercial production of Green Log? fireplace and campfire logs, supplying seedlings for planting additional acres to support large biomass projects, and manufacturing biomass pellets for replacing coal in electricity generating power plants.
Green Logs, manufactured from Giant King Grass, are the Company's first commercial renewable energy/biomass product and are now available for sale through a U.S. distributor. Manufactured fire logs represent a $400 million annual market in North America. With more than 100 million logs?made primarily of wood chips and sawdust?burned each year, VIASPACE sees a substantial opportunity. Green Logs are the most environmentally friendly manufactured log available, and Green Logs generate greater heat output than conventional logs. Its non-chemical, natural campfire aroma makes it even more appealing.
The VIASPACE acreage also acts as a nursery, which can provide sufficient seedlings to plant more than 10,000 acres of new crops per year to support partners' annual needs for biomass for their power-generating projects. VIASPACE is in discussions with potential business partners operating in China, Europe, India, Indonesia and other regions, where their biomass power plants have been built or are under construction.
Additionally, the Company's acreage can be harvested for manufacturing biomass-energy pellets for co-firing with coal in existing coal-burning power plants to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Co-firing can be achieved with only a modest modification of the existing power plant and, by using 20% Giant King Grass, will reduce the net carbon emissions of the power plant by 20%. Co-firing with Giant King Grass is the quickest and lowest-cost alternative for coal power plants to meet the industry's carbon reduction goals by 2020.
VIASPACE Chief Executive Dr. Carl Kukkonen remarked: "With this new land under cultivation, we will continue to accelerate the production of renewable Giant King Grass crops to support large, low-carbon biomass energy projects. Potential projects include direct combustion of Giant King Grass as biomass and Giant King Grass in pellet form to be co-fired with coal. Co-firing is prevalent in Europe, and new markets for biomass are also developing in Japan and Korea. And if limitations on carbon emissions are also adopted domestically, the U.S. will also become a large market, for which we are positioning our operations for this eventuality."
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