By Warren Brown
Sunday, May 25, 2008

INDIANAPOLIS Thirty-three cars will roar around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway today , marking the 92nd running of the Indianapolis 500. Olympic gold medalist and "Dancing With the Stars" champion Kristi Yamaguchi will wave the green flag, sending the high-powered automobiles on their way, thus becoming the first woman at the Indy 500 to do that honorary starter duty.

News organizations, certainly those relying on celebrity gossip as feeder stock, will make a big deal over Yamaguchi. But they might overlook another Indy 500 first:

All 33 cars on the track will be running on 100 percent ethanol derived from corn.

That might shock and even offend people who have come down on the side of food in the food-vs.-fuel debate. But they have no reason to fret in this case. The same ears of corn providing fuel for the race cars also could put cereal on breakfast tables, sugar in coffee and tea, and corn chips on TV snack trays.

"We are demonstrating that there does not have to be a food-versus-fuel debate" in the production of ethanol to power products as varied as race cars and lawn mowers, said Bill Becker, president and chief executive of Lifeline Foods, based in St. Joseph, Mo.

Becker's company is providing ethanol for the Indy 500 cars.

"There is no reason why we cannot have food and fuel from corn," Becker said. "I'm not talking about a theory here. I'm talking about something we're actually doing right now," he said, nodding toward a concept, ethanol-powered Chevrolet Corvette Z06 that is serving as a pace car in this year's race.

Lifeline and ICM, a Kansas company specializing in ethanol research, have developed a process called "fractionation." Simply put, fractionation is the ability to separate the components of a thing, such as an ear of corn or even a corn kernel, into many usable parts.

At the beginning of the process, "we separate 50 percent of the corn's useful value, the hard starches, into food products," Becker said. "Then we use the softer starches to produce ethanol."

Lifeline also has found a way to use corn stalks and fibers to develop cellulosic ethanol, which can be derived from nonfood sources such as wood chips and switch grass.

The bottom line, Becker said, is that "we have rendered the food-versus-fuel debate unnecessary. There is no reason why we can't have both."

Also aimed at diminishing that debate is work being done by Coskata, a renewable energy company in Warrenville, Ill., about 200 miles north of here.

Coskata, which has attracted huge investments from such companies as General Motors, specializes in turning waste products, "biomass," into ethanol.

"We're talking about the next generation of ethanol," said William J. Roe, Coskata's president and chief executive. "We're talking about ethanol that is not reliant on food sources."

Simply described, Coskata employs a three-part process to turn biomass into biofuel. First, the material is placed into a what the company calls a "gassifier," in which quick, high heat turns the biomass into synthetic gas. The synthetic gas then goes to a fermentation unit where patented microorganisms consume the gas and excrete the results as ethanol, which is then recovered through vaporization.

Coskata says its process, now in place at a demonstration plant in Madison, Wis., can produce ethanol for about $1 a gallon. That does not include retail expenses such as packaging, marketing and transportation to sales outlets.

Citing research from Argonne National Laboratory, Coskata executives say their process is energy efficient, delivering 7.7 units of energy for every unit invested. They argue that it is environmentally useful, having the ability to turn trash into energy as opposed to more deposits into landfills, and that it has the potential to remove the automobile from the environmental equation, at least in terms of fossil-fuel consumption and its enormous carbon footprint.

Roe says his company will open its first full-production plants within two years.

It isn't wishful thinking, he said. "It's not a dream. We can do this," he said. "We can prove that it does not have to be either-or when it comes to ethanol and food."