Summer isn't the best time to visit Louisiana, but somehow I found myself in the deep South just as things started to get really toasty. Straight off the plane in Lafayette I picked up a rental car and headed down country roads past crawfish restaurants and long stretches of agricultural fields. I soon reached the gates of Verenium, a cellulosic ethanol plant in Jennings, where engineers darted between air-conditioned buildings to avoid the sweltering heat.

After merging a San Diego-based enzyme company, Diversa, and a Massachusetts-based cellulosic ethanol firm, Celunol, Verenium began to work on producing the fuel from sugarcane bagasse, the leftover product of sugar production. With hopes of delivering cost-competitive ethanol by 2011, Verenium is now operating a demonstration-scale plant and plans to break ground on a larger facility next year. Matt Musial, operations manager for the demonstration plant, says that cellulosic ethanol will help to circumvent competition between food and fuel.

"We have the ability to use waste products of other things, and in many ways that keeps us out of the food chain," says Musial.

Verenium is looking at additional locations in the southeastern US, including Florida, Texas, and Louisiana. The company will also be selling its enzyme technology, and it's already licensed the information to plants in Japan and Thailand. Like other cellulosic ventures, it has attracted big money, with BP announcing plans to invest $90 million to speed the arrival of cellulosic ethanol to US markets.

"It's been important to have research money going into cellulosic ethanol at the most basic level, but it's also been essential to have some of these private venture capitalists putting money into it to commercialize it quickly," says Bill Moomaw, Professor of International Environmental Policy at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Somerville, Massachusetts. Moomaw served on the International Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Prize with Al Gore. "I don't think I've seen many technologies that have gone from bench research concept, almost to commercialization in such a short period of time," he says.

The rush to produce more ethanol more quickly is rooted in legislation as well as economics. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandated the integration of biofuels, both ethanol and biodiesel, into the US fuel stream with specific deadlines, revising the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS). With a requirement of 9 billion gallons of ethanol by 2008, the RFS sets the goal of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, including 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol, according to the Washington, DC-based Renewable Fuels Association.

Alternative energy is a key element in the presidential election - Barack Obama has pledged to spend $150 billion over 10 years on renewables, while McCain has said he supports $5,000 tax breaks for zero-emissions vehicles and carbon reductions through a cap-and-trade system. If enacted, the candidates' lofty proposals will help reach the established targets, but the financial crisis is likely to be a game-changer for government spending and it will take time for the effect on alternative energy to become clear.

But for now, firms like Verenium are seeking supportive partnerships and working to ready their technology for the market.

Verenium's many-step process of extracting fuel from agricultural waste occurs in a warehouse-like structure in Jennings, where the brown, mulchy bagasse is fed into the plant on a conveyor belt. First it enters the hydrolyser, which subjects the material to high temperatures and a low concentration of acid. Large presses separate solids from liquids, which are fermented separately, then recombined and passed through two distillation columns. In the first, the materials are brought to a concentration of about 35% ethanol. The second distillation column brings the ethanol concentration to about 95%, followed by a molecular sieve process to bring the mixture to 99% ethanol. In the last step, the liquid is denatured and becomes fuel-grade ethanol.

Verenium is certainly not alone in the race toward a cellulosic solution, with other companies exploring a variety of fuel stocks. Of the major players, Canada's Iogen, which also uses agricultural waste material and is partnered with Royal Dutch Shell, is seen as a frontrunner. Another example is Range Fuels, in the US state of Georgia, which works with the wood leftover from timber harvesting.

Unlike these corporations, for environmentalists, the question is not whether cellulosic ethanol will be a financially viable alternative to fossil fuels – instead, they are asking what kind of impact a greater demand for organic matter will have on farming and forestry. Experts like Eric Davidson, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, say using a true agricultural waste product is a great idea, but that there are risks in the future if additional cultivation is not managed properly. Expanding production could encroach on marginal land currently serving as wildlife habitat, increase fertilizer use and push out other food crops. In the case of wood, Davidson sees additional demand on forests to be a wild card in the future of land management.

"If we can use other sources where we're not competing directly with food crops – we can use sources of carbon that come from trees, come from shrubs, grasses that grow in places that aren't prime agricultural land - then that could potentially be very beneficial," Davidson says. "But we have to look at what the consequences of those are. How will that affect forest management, things like that. We need to address all of those questions."

A short drive away from Verenium, the Judice family farm in Abbeville, La., is a case in point. Joe Judice, a sixth-generation sugar and soybean farmer, showed me through the long rows of sugarcane, shielding his eyes from the leafy tendrils of the plants.

Judice has a head for numbers, and he's interested in finding another source of income from his crop. After entering an agreement with Verenium, the farm sent 12,000 tons of bagasse to the ethanol plant in 2007, and Judice estimated they would send 10,000 this year.

"We have extra bagasse that has always been a problem for us to get rid of," Judice said of the local sugar mill cooperative. "But now, with people like Verenium interested in turning this into ethanol, one dry ton of bagasse [equals] 100 gallons of ethanol. And we might have 50,000 excess tons of bagasse a year that we've just got to get rid of -- dump it in a hole. Makes no sense."

But as ideal as it sounds to use a waste product to produce clean energy, Verenium is also exploring the use of crops grown specifically for energy production. In addition to regular sugarcane, the Judice family is cultivating energy cane, a cross between commercial and wild varieties of the plant. Unlike cane grown for sugar, which is about an inch in diameter, its moist interior dripping with sugar water when cut, energy cane is taller, thinner and more fibrous. Fast-growing and full with densely grown stalks, the energy cane crop was expected to reach up to 15 feet high before harvest. Joe Judice says it's so strong it can grow on tougher soils where the sweeter variety of the plant won't grow, but this supports Davidson's worry that land use will be expanded into areas zoned for agriculture but not currently in use.

As he searched for the perfect soil sample to show me, I felt a sharp pain and found a fire ant between the knuckles of my right hand. After brushing another one off my ankle, I was ready to get out of the cane field.

Unfortunately, farmers like Judice can't leave when the going gets tough. He says sugar prices aren't keeping pace with his costs, and he needs to find another way to keep his farm going. Ethanol has given him hope.

"We've expanded, we cover more acres, but the law of diminishing returns kicks in," Judice said. "I mean if we can't find a way to add value to what we do, we're history. And it would be a sad day for me to see this industry die while I'm still in it."



About the Author
Kimberly N. Chase is a freelance journalist specializing in environmental features for print and television. She graduated in 2005 from Stanford's MA program in journalism and worked as a crime reporter in California before spending two years in Mexico City. She is now enjoying working on some of the same issues stateside.