Oklahoma field is lab for alternative fuel source

GUYMON, OKLA. — Curtis Raines describes himself as "just a dumb old farmer" who's not afraid to ask an obvious question: Why grow corn for 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 can replace corn in making ethanol.

The Oklahoma Bioenergy Center project is designed to find out whether laboratory experiments using switchgrass to make 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.

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. It can be grown on marginal land, doesn't require as much water and, most important, isn't used for food, so it wouldn't drive up grocery prices.

"There are a lot of really nice characteristics 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.

It will be years before cellulosic biofuels -- such as switchgrass-based ethanol -- are produced at the same levels as corn-based ethanol, Simmons said. But 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.

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.

Researchers have intensified their work looking into other ethanol ingredients, including cellulosic alternatives such as switchgrass, wood chips and even garbage.

Oklahoma's energy secretary, David Fleischaker, said using switchgrass made sense, especially because rising food costs had "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.