Des Moines Register
03-22-07
Ethanol: What's in future?
EMMETSBURG, Iowa -- 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.
"That is the great debate in Iowa," said Robert Brown, director of Iowa State
University's Office of Biorenewables Programs, the state's point man on
biofuels.
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 and
financial challenges stand in the way of harvesting, transporting and storing the
enormous amounts of stover -- leftover cornstalks and leaves from crops -- or
other biomass needed.
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
might never produce as much ethanol from biomass as the state already
produces from grain, experts say.
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 plant - an addition to Broin's existing Voyager corn ethanol plant - will make
ethanol not only from the starch in the kernel, but also from the kernel hulls and
the cobs. 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.
"It's fun to be first," said Craig Brownlee, an Emmetsburg farmer who sits on
Voyager's board.
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.
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.
Producing any cellulosic ethanol in Iowa won't be easy - or cheap.
For one thing, farmers turn their stover into the soil each fall to restore vital
nutrients 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.
Industry and government officials say stover is needed to get biomass production
off the ground until the nation develops larger sources of ethanol feedstocks from
grasses and fast-growing trees.
Southern states are better suited for energy crops, experts say, for a variety of
reasons. The land is cheaper and, although 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.
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 50 percent and
that up to 75 percent of crop residues could be harvested, a prospect that some
experts believe is unrealistic.
"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."