Ethanol's new wave

Using switchgrass could ramp up production

By DEAN KLECKNER

“America is addicted to oil,” President Bush said in his State of the Union address last month. That’s the line everybody remembers – the top sound-bite.

Pop quiz: Do you know what Bush said next?

Here’s the whole sentence: “America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.”

And here’s what I’m thinking: Is there a more stable part of the world than America’s corn belt? It’s been awhile since the governor of Iowa was overthrown in a coup.

The president’s words demonstrated that for renewable fuels, the time is now. Fortune magazine’s Feb. 6 edition stated the matter plainly: “After decades of being merely an additive to gasoline, ethanol suddenly looks to be the stuff of a fuel revolution. The next five years could see ethanol go from a mere sliver of the fuel pie to a major energy solution in a world where the cost of relying on a finite supply of oil is way too high.”

Brazil already has shown us that ethanol can power a major economy: About 40 percent of Brazilian cars run on ethanol rather than gas.
When it comes to ethanol, Brazil has a few natural advantages over the United States. Labor costs are less, a major factor in making ethanol affordable. A warmer climate means that Brazilian motorists don’t have to deal with the cold-start problems that many Americans face in January. Ethanol doesn’t ignite as well in low temperatures.

Yet innovation — an American specialty — will help us overcome these and other problems. “The best way to break this addiction is through technology,” Bush said. “And we are on the threshold of incredible advances.”

The president spoke of “cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips and stalks or switchgrass.”

Although the president’s reference to this triumvirate of potential new fuel sources drew snickers from some, they are worth serious attention. Scientists have shown that cellulosic ethanol — i.e., the kind derived from wood chips, stalks and switchgrass — holds incredible promise.

Consider switchgrass. It’s a native prairie grass that once covered the plains before the arrival of settlers who farmed the land. It could be an ideal source of biomass for ethanol — even better than the corn-based ethanol we produce now because it would produce more gallons per acre.

Research indicates that with smart breeding, we might harvest more than 12 tons of switch grass from a single acre. Test plots at Auburn University have generated 15 tons per acre. While an acre of corn produces about 400 gallons of ethanol, an acre of switchgrass can produce more than 1.100 gallons per acre.

Switchgrass is also good for the environment. It provides an excellent habitat for wildlife while defending against soil erosion in hilly areas.
In the near term, breaking our economic dependence on oil will require more reliance on corn-based ethanol. Here in Iowa, it already fuels a lot of cars, including mine, and it will fuel more in the years to come. But as the president made clear, corn is just the beginning.

Maybe some future president will speak of our country’s addiction to switchgrass. We should be so lucky.

DEAN KLECKNER of Urbandale chairs Truth About Trade and Technology. He is an Iowa farmer and past president of the American Farm Bureau.

Biotechnology advances make it feasible

BY JAMES GREENWOOD

In his State of the Union address, President Bush outlined his Advanced Energy Initiative to replace 75 percent of oil imports from the Middle East with domestic fuel production by 2025, including cellulosic ethanol.

This plan is feasible because advances in biotechnology can play a vital role in meeting this energy challenge.

Industrial biotech companies are using advances in genomics from health care and applying them to our energy problems. With these new advances the United States could soon produce billions of gallons of renewable energy.

Until now, scientists have been unable to economically convert the plant matter in crop wastes into cellulosic ethanol for transportation fuel. But industrial biotech companies are perfecting a new enabling technology to make cellulosic ethanol. They’re developing and isolating enzymes that can convert corn stalks, wheat straw, and switchgrass to sugars that can be fermented into ethanol. By treating crop wastes with these natural enzymes, we can now produce large quantities of ethanol in modern biorefineries. This technological breakthrough is causing a dramatic paradigm shift in energy production.

Cellulosic-ethanol production will provide numerous benefits for Americans. We need huge volumes of ethanol to enhance our energy picture, and ethanol from corn starch alone cannot provide the supply we need. Once we add crop wastes as the new “renewable crude oil,” we can begin to significantly ramp up ethanol production.

The Natural Resources Defense Council notes that by using switchgrass and biotech enzymes we could be making enough cellulosic ethanol to displace 7.9 million barrels of oil per day by 2050, half the current daily oil demand for the transportation sector. NRDC also points out that cellulosic ethanol can help rural areas by creating new jobs and increasing farm income by a whopping $5 billion a year by 2025.

The technology is ready today, and sustainable agricultural feedstocks are abundantly available in most states. The president’s biofuels initiative can help bring cellulosic ethanol to fueling stations throughout the country within a few short years, if we can build the biorefineries needed to produce large volumes of this domestically grown fuel.

Last year’s Energy Policy Act established several programs to fund research and aggressively develop advanced biofuels technologies. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman has proposed increasing funding for research in cellulosic ethanol by more than 50 percent, and that will help. But more important, Congress and the administration must fund and carry out provisions of the energy bill signed into law last year that were designed to build biorefineries, expand markets and increase acceptance and use of all types of biofuels.

Important parts of the energy bill reward companies that construct biorefineries to convert crop residues to ethanol; give tax breaks to fuel retailers who install pumps to sell ethanol; and award cellulosic-ethanol producers an incentive to reach the goal of refining 1 billion gallons a year. Other provisions require increased use of ethanol and cellulosic ethanol in all transportation fuel by 2012 and require use of renewable fuels in all government-fleet vehicles. If these provisions are fully funded by the appropriators in Congress, it will spur significant private investment in cellulosic-ethanol production.

Congress can build on the president’s proposal and can hurry a more secure energy future by fully funding the cellulosic-ethanol provisions already on the books. Doing so will help farmers, the environment and consumers while also enhancing our national security. With benefits like that, we can’t fail to act decisively to make cellulosic ethanol and national energy security a reality.

JAMES C. GREENWOOD is president and chief executive officer of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.