Des Moines Register
03-18-07
Emmetsburg hosts birth of biomass
Experts doubt Iowa can match its corn-ethanol dominance in cellulose
By PHILIP BRASHER
REGISTER WASHINGTON BUREAU
Emmetsburg, Ia. - This town wants to be to Iowa what Spindletop, the gusher
that launched the modern petroleum industry, was to Texas.
If all goes as planned, a $200 million project in Emmetsburg will turn 250,000
acres of corncobs into ethanol. Farmers would try to fulfill President Bush's plan
to replace 20 percent of gasoline use with alternative fuels by 2017. And Iowa's
rich soil would spout billions of dollars in new wealth.
However, Iowa's gusher could be a trickle.
Iowa, the king of U.S. corn-based ethanol, is an early leader in renewable
energy. But the nation's top ethanol scientists question whether the state is the
best place to produce fuel from biomass, including cornstalks and switchgrass.
Even the state's point man on biofuels acknowledges that it's an open question.
"That is the great debate in Iowa," said Robert Brown, director of Iowa State
University's Office of Biorenewables Programs.
Making ethanol from plant cellulose - which includes everything from grass to
trees - is the key to reducing the nation's use of gasoline. But huge logistical
challenges stand in the way of harvesting, transporting and storing the enormous
amounts of stover - leftover cornstalks and leaves from other crops - or other
biomass needed to supply an ethanol plant at a cost those biorefineries could
afford to pay. A typical project, producing 60 million gallons a year, would need
30,000 truckloads of stover - the equivalent of covering 100 football fields to a
height of 25 feet.
Even if those challenges are met, significant economic and environmental issues
limit how much biomass Iowa farmers can afford to provide. That means Iowa
may never produce as much ethanol from biomass as the state already produces
from grain, experts say.
10 BIOREFINERIES IN IOWA = $11.6 BILLION OVER A DECADE
The first clues to Iowa's future in biofuels will come from Emmetsburg, where a
leading ethanol producer, the Broin Cos. of Sioux Falls, S.D., will build one of the
nation's first biomass-to-ethanol refineries.
The project will be an addition to Broin's Voyager corn ethanol plant that's south
of Emmetsburg. The plant will make ethanol not only from the starch in the kernel
the way it does now, but also from the kernel hulls and the cobs. A waste
product, known as lignin, will be recycled to operate the biorefinery, dramatically
lowering its natural gas bill, a major cost in traditional ethanol production. The
project will need 83 percent less gas than a conventional corn ethanol plant of
the same size, the company says.
When completed, the project is supposed to produce 125 million gallons of
ethanol a year, with up to 30 million of that coming from the cobs and kernel
hulls.
Many details of the project are still being worked out, including how the cobs will
be harvested - potentially, they could be combined together with the grain and
separated at the plant - and how much farmers will be paid.
Broin won a government grant of up to $80 million to build the project but is
counting on still more help, including a $137 million loan guarantee and special
subsidies to pay farmers for harvesting and storing the cobs.
"It's fun to be first," said Craig Brownlee, an Emmetsburg farmer who sits on
Voyager's board. "It puts Emmetsburg on the map."
The project has the potential to remake the Iowa landscape in other ways.
Building 10 biomass refineries in Iowa would have an economic impact of $11.6
billion over 10 years, according to a University of Northern Iowa study. Each of
those refineries would produce 50 million gallons a year of ethanol.
"We know how to create ethanol more than any other state in the country, and
we've got the biomass to do it," said Mike Ott, director of the BIOWA
Development Association, a group of biotech companies. "These jobs are going
to be around for a long time and dramatically grow our economy."
Keeping Iowa in the lead will require state government to invest in research
biorefinery feedstocks, including the collection, transport and storage of biomass,
Ott said.
Such refineries could potentially produce plastics and biochemicals as well as
fuel.
"Long term, corn is the best dual-use crop on the planet," said Jeff Broin, chief
executive of the company his family founded.
TO MOVE BEYOND CORN, LAND USE MUST CHANGE
How much biomass ethanol could Iowa produce?
It could be as little as 420 million gallons, and that's if ethanol producers took 25
percent of the state's available corn stover, as Broin plans to do at Emmetsburg.
Or Iowa could produce 2 billion gallons or more. But that's only if much of the
idled cropland and pasture land in the state were converted to biomass crops like
switchgrass, a dense, tall-growing perennial prairie grass, according to the
calculations of Paul Gallagher, an Iowa State University economist who analyzes
ethanol feedstocks for the U.S. Agriculture Department.
Such changes would have dramatic effects on Iowa's farm economy, including
pushing much cattle production out of the state, Gallagher said.
Even that amount wouldn't match the amount of ethanol Iowa will get from corn.
Corn-to-ethanol distilleries now in operation in Iowa can produce 1.7 billion
gallons annually, and an additional 1.6 billion gallons of corn-based production
capacity is under construction, according to the Iowa Renewable Fuels
Association.
According to Gallagher's calculations:
- Iowa could produce 420 million to 840 million gallons of ethanol a year from
stover on lands where harvesting the cornstalk and cob residue is
environmentally feasible, primarily flatter lands in central and northern parts of
the state.
- Another 290 million gallons of ethanol could come from biomass crops from
800,000 acres of former cropland now idled through USDA's Conservation
Reserve Program. That acreage would represent about 40 percent of the Iowa
land now enrolled in the program.
- The biggest single source of ethanol would have to come from land now used
for grazing cattle and other livestock. That land could produce as much as 1.2
billion gallons of ethanol, if 80 percent of grazing lands were converted to
biomass crops, a shift that Gallagher acknowledges would be highly
controversial.
Gallagher's estimates assume that 1 ton of biomass will produce 80 gallons of
ethanol. The Energy Department has estimated that current technology will
produce 65 gallons of ethanol per ton of biomass. Broin claims to be getting more
than 80 gallons per ton in its research.
But producing any cellulosic ethanol in Iowa won't be easy - or cheap.
For one thing, farmers won't part easily with their stover. Farmers turn their
stover into the soil each fall to restore vital nutrients such as potassium for the
next year's crops, feed the earthworms and microorganisms that nourish the soil,
and to prevent erosion that can carry pollutants to nearby streams. Stover also
can be sold for cattle feed.
"Farmers aren't going to just give their stover away," said Brownlee, who farms
5,000 acres and runs a farm-management business out of Emmetsburg.
In hilly areas of Iowa, none of the stover is likely to be used for ethanol because
of erosion concerns, agricultural experts say. On the flat land of northern and
central Iowa, erosion control is less of an issue, which is why Broin considered
Emmetsburg an ideal place for its project. Even so, Broin plans to use only about
25 percent of the available stover.
Industry and government officials say stover is needed to get biomass production
off the ground until the nation develops much larger sources of ethanol
feedstocks from grasses and fast-growing trees. "In the next 10 years, it's still
stover," said Tom Foust of the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy
Laboratory in Golden, Colo.
WILL 'THE SWITCHGRASS STATE' BE IOWA OR FARTHER SOUTH?
Hosein Shapouri, the Agriculture Department's chief ethanol economist, said
cellulosic ethanol production would likely develop first in Iowa and Illinois, where
stover is plentiful, but later shift to other states.
Only so many places in Iowa would make economic sense to grow the large
acreages of grass needed to produce ethanol, and there are few areas where
trees would grow well, experts say.
Land that's good for growing corn and soybeans is too fertile - and too profitable to be used for grass, economists say. Last year, land suitable for growing corn
rented for twice what pasture land did, and now the price of corn has hit 10-year
highs, driving up cropland values even more.
"The move is totally away from that kind of a crop (grass) and into corn," said
Mike Duffy, an Iowa State economist who tracks farm finances.
That means energy crops like switchgrass are most likely to be cultivated on land
not suitable for corn: Some of the 2 million acres of environmentally sensitive
land in Iowa now idled under the federal Conservation Reserve Program or on
acreage are used for pasture, experts say.
But converting CRP land to biofuels crops won't be easy politically. In a letter to
Congress last year, wildlife organizations and conservation groups cautioned
lawmakers that cutting grasses from CRP acreage could deplete valuable habitat
for pheasants and other wildlife, depending on when and how the harvesting is
done.
Southern states are better suited for energy crops, experts say, for a variety of
reasons: The land is cheaper and, while it isn't fertile enough for high-value crops
like corn, the growing season is longer than in the Midwest, rainfall is plentiful
and farmers can harvest more switchgrass per acre. Studies show Southern
states can produce 6 tons of grass per acre compared with 4 tons in Iowa.
Researchers at Auburn University in Alabama have gotten switchgrass yields as
high as 15 tons per acre in one year and 11.5 tons annually on a six-year
average. Scientists are working on improving switchgrass yields through
increased conventional breeding and genetic engineering.
HIGH COSTS, TECHNOLOGY QUESTIONS RAISE DOUBTS FOR MANY
Critics say issues with land availability, high crop costs and ethanol technology
will inevitably doom the cellulosic ethanol business, both in Iowa and nationally.
"We do not have enough of the environment to be producing 35 billion gallons of
ethanol every year, year after year, for decades," said Tad Patzek, an engineer
at the University of California at Berkeley and a longtime critic of the ethanol
industry.
The Energy Department estimated in 2005 that the nation could produce 1.3
billion tons of biomass material annually, enough to supply one-third of the
nation's transportation fuel.
The projection assumes that crop yields could be increased by as much as 50
percent and that up to 75 percent of crop residues could be harvested, a
prospect that some experts believe is unrealistic.
Shapouri, the USDA ethanol expert, said the Energy Department projection was
based on "back-of-the-envelope" estimates of the nation's biomass potential.
He said 20 billion gallons of fuel can come from domestically produced ethanol 5 billion from cellulosic and 15 billion from corn. The rest will have to come from
other sources, such as imported ethanol and coal-derived fuels.
Energy Department officials and the industry insist all the challenges with
cellulosic ethanol can be overcome, including the Bush administration's goal of
making cellulosic ethanol competitive in cost with grain ethanol within five years.
That will require improvements in processing technology and reductions in
feedstock costs.
"There's so much unknown on cellulosic," said Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill
Northey. But, he added, "You have to pursue it. It makes so much sense. We
need it."
EMMETSBURG: FAIRY TALE OR THE 'SILICON VALLEY OF ETHANOL'?
Emmetsburg, population, 3,958, already is enjoying something of a boom, thanks
to a new casino on the edge of town, the Voyager ethanol plant that Broin
opened in 2005, and soaring crop prices, which flash all day long on a bank sign
along the town square.
People who put down the $50,000 a share that it took to invest in the plant say
they've already recouped their money. The planned expansion will take the
plant's capacity from 50 million gallons to 125 million gallons a year.
"The Silicon Valley of ethanol production is something we would like to see," said
banker Rick Brennan.
Still, there are skeptics.
"To me, it's a fairy tale," said John Kerber, who operates a feed mill on the main
highway in Emmetsburg and several hog farms.
But, Kerber added that he didn't invest in the existing ethanol plant because he
had doubts about that, too.
"I'm not going to say it isn't going to work," he said.