According to the company's offering circular, the investment would offer a 2.3 percent loss in its first 16 months of construction, but then would average 26 percent annual return on investment in its first full year of operation.

Mark Erickson of Scranton, N.D., one of 21 board members, and Frank Kirchenhelter, the project coordinator, were in Fargo, N.D., last week meeting with media, the G.L. Ness advertising company, which is helping to put them in contact with potential investors, and with public relations.

Kirchenhelter says some 300 people have invested at least the minimum of $10,000 in the project. About 30 percent of the money has come from farmers, he says.

North Dakota has invested $3.2 million in the project. The 21 board members invested a total of the first $1.2 million in "seed capital" in the plant. Funds have been used for such things as regulatory permits, which are all in place. If it's successful, they'd be rewarded by a 3-to-1 stock split.

Kirchenhelter and Erickson say the project is limited to North Dakota investors. They say if the program had been opened to South Dakota investors, it would have been "sold out by now." They say 8,000 South Dakota "families" have invested in 11 plants in that state.

"We think North Dakota has to step up," Erickson says. "It's an opportunity for every North Dakotan."

Erickson, who has been a district sales manager for REA Hybrids, a seed company based in Aberdeen, S.D., for four years, acknowledges that if the plant were successful, he could stand to benefit from potential increases in seed corn sales. However, the plant expects to bring in 75 percent of its corn from out of the region. The other 25 percent likely would come from the immediate 200-mile radius, which would reach to the Jamestown and Fessenden areas in North Dakota.

Red Trail has a contract with New Vision, a commodities marketing company based in Worthington, Minn. Red Trail will lease a 110-car shuttle train that New Vision would load at its most cost-effective source and ship to Richardton. New Vision already manages two other shuttle trains in that way.

"At any given moment, when we need the corn, we'll have the corn," Erickson says.

The plant will be managed in a five-year contract with an experienced company.

North Dakota currently produces some 114 million bushels of corn, Erickson says. Of that, some 80 million bushels is within the 200- mile reach of the plant. Red Trail's appetite only would be about 18 million to 20 million bushels a year.

Production has grown. In Stark County, where the plant would be built, there only were 5,000 acres of corn two years ago. In 2004, there were 55,000 acres, Erickson says.

"Obviously, we'll never be the Corn Belt, but we'll accomplish 50 percent (of our needs) locally, and every time we add a percent, we'll add dollars to the bottom line," Kirchenhelter says.

He says the freight cost is $7 per ton less by truck than it is by rail.

Erickson says that while critics sometimes have focused on the distance of the plant to the corn production, he says the plant has a big advantage in its proximity to the lignite coal industry. The plant has a 10-year locked contract price of lignite energy at $1.30 per decatherm, while plants that use natural gas are penciling out energy costs at $6 per decatherm, and some analysts are projecting $8 per decatherm, Erickson says.

The project also touts its western location as a benefit because the ethanol will be closer to West Coast population centers and users of fuel.

They say the distillers' dried grain feed product also has a ready livestock market. It would take about 220,000 cattle to use all of the DDG from the plant. A 100-mile radius already has more than a million cattle. The high-quality feed could become a boom to the backgrounding or feedlot industry in the region.

SIDE BENEFACTORS OF ETHANOL: If the Red Trail Energy L.L.C. ethanol plant gets on its feet, look for an increase in the body shop business in southwest North Dakota. How's that?

Well, the way project coordinator Frank Kirchenhelter of Richardton, N.D., sees it, more ethanol will mean more corn in that part of the state.

More corn will mean even more pheasants than currently reside in the ring-neck-rich area.

"I'm thinking the fee hunting operations will have a hard time because the birds will be everywhere," Kirscnehelter says, only half joking. "Pheasants love corn!" (Of course the fee places will have their established clientele.) Anyway, with the extra pheasants on the road, it'll mean more vehicles hitting pheasants on the road as the colorful birds peck at gravel or look for spilled grain.

The body shops will have a field day, fixing creases in car hoods and the like.

"Heavens, this thing keeps going on and on and on," Kirschnehelter say.

It's just another benefit of ethanol.

--Mikkel Pates