New Fuel Source Grows on the Prairie

Cellulose, like starch, is made up of glucose molecules, but packed so tightly they're extremely hard to break apart. Plants use cellulose chiefly as a structural material -- it helps trees and grasses stand upright. If efficient ways were developed to break open the molecules, a wide variety of agricultural wastes or specially planted energy crops could feed the new industry.

Scientific progress has been slow, but now it seems to be accelerating. Enzymes needed for the process used to cost more than $5 per gallon of ethanol, but biotechnology companies, under government research contracts, have reduced that to 30 cents per gallon. A handful of small companies, exploiting the drop, are already making small amounts of ethanol from biomass, and claim that they are close to doing so at competitive prices. Not only are they shopping for locations for bigger plants, they are also signing contracts with farmers to supply raw material.

A remarkable variety of groups, ranging from the Natural Resources Defense Council to conservative national-security hawks, have endorsed plans for biomass ethanol. "I've never seen anything with this many interest groups lining up behind it," said Brent Erickson, a vice president at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, which supports the efforts. A study by the government's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has estimated that the United States could replace more than 30 percent of its imported oil with fuel and chemicals made from biomass. Coupled with domestic oil, more corn ethanol and improved automobile efficiency, that would take the nation a long way toward energy independence.

Now a new set of questions is dawning in farmhouses across the land. If the industry takes off, what would be the practical realities of gathering hundreds of millions of tons of bulk material to feed the ethanol factories of the new age?

Waste to Energy

The high, dry, volcanic plain of eastern Idaho may be America's answer to Brazil's equatorial sugar-cane fields. There. under brilliant sunshine, farmers pull plentiful snowmelt off the Tetons to produce bumper crops of wheat, barley and potatoes.

It's an agricultural system that creates so much waste straw that orange flames sometimes lick the desert air as farmers burn off the excess. "That's energy that should be going to run cars," said Corey W. Radtke, a scientist at Idaho National Laboratory.

In a few years, it may be doing just that.

Iogen Technologies LLC, a Canadian company in the vanguard of those trying to turn biomass into liquid fuel, is eyeing Idaho's Snake River Valley. The company operates a pilot plant in Canada and claims that it could make biomass ethanol in a bigger plant for about $1.30 a gallon, comparable to the production cost of corn ethanol. Royal Dutch Shell PLC, the big oil company, is among the early investors. Canada and Germany are wooing Iogen, but if the U.S. government comes through with loan guarantees, many people expect the company to build its first big plant in Idaho.

Ray Hess is more than ready. A prominent Idaho farmer with ruddy skin and bushy white eyebrows, he sat at a restaurant table the other day gazing at the Snake River and outlining the high yields and other assets that make the area so attractive to companies like Iogen. "They've been through 900 counties in the U.S., and this is the one that works the best," he said.

Hess has helped Iogen line up hundreds of farmers as potential straw suppliers. They're confident that they can deliver many tons of straw a year, in neat bales, for the company to shred and turn into ethanol.

But they also realize they're a special case -- there may be no cleaner, more accessible form of biomass in the country than the wheat and barley straw in the Snake River Valley. If ethanol made from biomass is to grow into a huge business, it will need to spread far beyond Idaho, using wood chips, waste paper, rice hulls and other materials that are harder to handle than straw.

The single biggest source, in the near term, is likely to be the leaves, stalks and stubble left over when corn is harvested -- a material known as corn stover. A group of young farmers in Imperial, Neb., is far ahead of the rest of the country in thinking about how to handle stover.

Members of Imperial Young Farmers & Ranchers hope to land a biomass ethanol plant for their area, but -- like farmers everywhere else -- they lack elementary information about how such an industry might work. They've won federal and private grants exceeding $3 million to help them find out.

With help from scientists, they're studying how much stover can be pulled from farms without damaging the soil. Baling the stuff is difficult, so the farmers have built a mountain of stover outside town to see if it can be stored for months in big, damp piles. Farmer Rod Johnson and his sons have lent some of their property for testing; a weather station in the middle of one of their fields beams data back to the nation's scientific establishment. "We're young farmers, and we're optimistic," one of the sons, Curtis Johnson, said the other day.

Yet questions like these may need to be answered county-by-county across the country, and the work has barely begun. With the nation vulnerable to oil shocks from abroad, with oil prices spiraling higher, and with scientific evidence of global warming mounting, many people feel a sense of urgency.

Bryan M. Jenkins, a professor at the University of California at Davis, said a more intensive effort is needed to solve the scientific and economic problems standing in the way of greater use of biofuels in the United States.

"We're going to need to make this transition fairly soon," he said. "I don't think we can afford to wait another century before we do something."