Grant will help Evansville farm to explore energy alternatives

Aug 6 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Gina Duwe The Janesville Gazette, Wis.

For years, corn lobbyists held power and influence over legislators to make them believe corn is ethanol and ethanol is corn, one analyst says.

"For a long time they were able to pass this phrase ... that funding could only go to corn, or maybe they'd cut the soybean people a brake," said Richard Shaten a UW-Madison faculty associate at the Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

But in the last couple years, there's been an institutional recognition spearheaded by President Bush that the future lies in converting cellulose into ethanol, he said.

Federal and state governments are so convinced that grass-to-ethanol systems are going to show promise that they're offering grants, low-interest loans and other incentives to companies on the cutting edge of technology, Shaten said.

Agrecol Corporation is a perfect local example.

The Madison-based company, which has an 880-acre farm northeast of Evansville, will use a $46,000 state agricultural development grant to explore the use of native grass in bioheating systems for commercial use.

Agrecol is the largest grower of native plants and seed in the Midwest, growing more than 120 native species, President Mark Doudlah said.

The company uses the byproducts from seed cleaning to make fuel pellets. The pellets are then poured into a boiler, which heats the entire 30,000-square-foot Rock Prairie Farm in Evansville.

The company has used the bioheat for the last two years, and went completely green last year, burning 75 to 80 tons of pellets, Doudlah said.

"In a nutshell, that became the miniature model of what we can do with bioenergy. So we took byproduct from our seed cleaning waste (and) figured out how to displace liquid petroleum at our facility," he said. "So we're green. We're decreasing our carbon footprint."

But could such a system be expanded to use commercially?

That's what the grant money will attempt to answer.

"We're interested in, 'How can we take this to the next level?'" Doudlah said. "Can we commercially produce it? Is the infrastructure there? Do we have the land base to produce it? And what kind of player can the Midwest be and particularly Wisconsin?"

Developing such a system could replace LP and natural gases, but it would be a long time before it would compete with coal, he said, because parity in agriculture is needed.

"We need to see the same tax incentives we have on ethanol on the bioheat industry," he said. "The same support we see for corn farmers and bean farmers in the farm program also needs to go to the diversity of biomass production."

But above all, energy crops need to have value or they'll never be produced, he said.

"I can't say it's a slam-dunk that the grass industry is going to take off," Shaten said.

But worldwide research into the issue will have an impact, he said.

"I think it's going to be viable within the next three to five years that growing grass to make biofuels will compete with growing seeds to make biofuels," he said.