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High hopes for using switchgrass plot for fuelGUYMON, Okla. (AP)--Curtis Raines describes himself as "just a dumb old farmer," so he's not afraid to ask what seems to him like an obvious question: Why grow corn for use in fuel when it could be used to feed hungry people? "That just doesn't make a lot of sense to me," Raines said. The 64-year-old Oklahoma Panhandle farmer is growing a 1,000-acre plot of switchgrass, billed as the world's largest of its type, to test whether the native plant could replace precious corn in making ethanol. The experiment, a project of the Oklahoma Bioenergy Center that is being led by the Noble Foundation, is to determine whether small-scale experiments of using switchgrass in ethanol can be duplicated on a large scale. The crop will help feed a biorefinery plant planned for southwest Kansas. Switchgrass has advantages over corn. "There are a lot of really nice characteristics that it possesses that pique one's interest," said Blake Simmons, a vice president at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, Calif. As a perennial native to the Great Plains, it doesn't need to be replanted and, so, takes less tractor fuel and fertilizer to produce than corn. It can be grown on marginal land, doesn't require as much water and most importantly, isn't used for food, so it wouldn't drive up grocery prices. "I'm a farmer. I want good money for my crops," Raines said. "But I don't think taking corn and making gasoline is an answer to our problems." "This," he said, pointing toward the switchgrass fields, "could be. I'm enthused about this. Deep down inside, I think this is going to lead somewhere." Simmons said that while "we're still years away" from cellulosic biofuels, such as switchgrass-based ethanol, being produced at the levels of corn-based ethanol, the switchgrass research will answer important questions. "We need to do some very massive projects very early on to find out the feasibility of this endeavor and see what improvements have to be made," he said. "We need a lot of these types of activities to find the best path forward. We have to be persistent and patient and have foresight and vision to keep our eyes on the target." In recent years, production of ethanol has taken off with federal mandates aimed at easing dependence on foreign oil. Last year, Congress decided to require a total of 36 billion gallons of biofuels to be blended into gasoline by 2022. But food prices have increased along with ethanol producers' heightened demand for corn. The price of corn has tripled since 2005. The federal government has resisted calls from Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Republican presidential nominee John McCain and other senators to cut this year's requirement for 9 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol in half to ease rising food costs. Meanwhile, researchers have intensified their work looking into other ingredients that can be used to make ethanol, including alternatives such as switchgrass. Oklahoma's energy secretary, David Fleischaker, said using switchgrass for use in ethanol makes sense, especially as rising food costs have "resulted in a pushback against renewable fuels." The switchgrass being used in the Oklahoma experiment was planted in June. A few months later, it was just poking through the weeds. It will gradually take over the field, developing a deep root system and shading out the weeds. Hitch Enterprises, one of the biggest agricultural operations in the Panhandle, is leasing the land to the Noble Foundation for the study. Raines, a farm manager for that company, spent a week modifying his equipment to ensure the seed was planted in the way researchers recommended. He does the day-to-day maintenance on the fields, while Noble Foundation researchers make frequent trips from their offices in Ardmore to Guymon--a 360-mile one-way trip--to monitor the progress. "We're all kind of learning together," Raines said. The Noble Foundation also is managing a 150-acre switchgrass plot near Maysville, while Oklahoma State University--a partner in the state bioenergy center with the Noble Foundation and the University of Oklahoma--manages another 150-acre plot near Chickasha. The bioenergy center is spending $2.165 million on the work being done on the three fields, said Noble Foundation spokesman Adam Calaway. In the first year after planting, about a quarter to a third of the switchgrass stand's eventual yield can be harvested. That number jumps to about two-thirds after the second year and 100 percent after the third year. The switchgrass will be taken to a $300 million biorefinery in Hugoton, Kan., 35 miles from Guymon, that soon will be built by Abengoa Bioenergy with the help of a $76.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. "The thing this plot has let us do is take the next step out of a research focus and put it in a real-world setting," said Billy Cook, a consulting support research manager in the Noble Foundation's agricultural division. "We can get some real-world numbers to see, potentially, what will it take to produce this crop for the traditional, typical farmer in this area. "The food vs. fuel deal--that's a pretty polarizing issue. If we have a way to overcome that with a different crop and we're not displacing productive land, then it has a lot of viability." 10/20/08 Date: 10/16/08
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