Friday, Oct 31, 2008 Posted on Thu, Oct. 30, 2008

The Macon Telegraph

By S. Heather Duncan

In the modern era, cane sorghum has waned from a commercial crop to a quaint family tradition in Georgia. But that could change if sorghum turns out to be a viable feedstock for making ethanol or biodiesel. Several Middle Georgia companies are exploring the possibility of making cleaner-burning fuel out of sorghum and other nontraditional feedstocks.

In Reynolds, cousins looking for a way to relaunch an old family farm have started a business called McClune Industries that is developing equipment for making ethanol from sorghum cane. Their sorghum harvester could be pulled behind a tractor, reaping and juicing the tall stalks in one step.

Five thousand to 7,000 gallons of resulting juice could be kept on a farm in an enclosed "bladder" until a portable distiller visits to convert the juice to ethanol for later pickup by distributors, explained Chief Financial Officer Kimble Oliver. The distiller could be owned by a local businessman or shared by a co-op of farmers, said his cousin and company CEO Rick Hill.

The dried stalks left after the cane is juiced could be burned to provide heat energy for the distillation, said Lee McClune, the company's physicist who developed the technology.

Farmers could use the fuel to run their equipment and make a profit from the remainder, Oliver said.

"The farmer could do the process totally on the farm," said Oliver, whose family also runs the water slide at High Falls in Monroe County. "They'll have all the control of this."

McClune Industries has been working with Fort Valley State University to figure out which sorghum varieties provide the best yield and balance of sugars, said Mark Latimore, interim dean of the university's College of Agriculture.

Late last week, McClune Industries harvested six acres of sorghum cane planted at the university's experimental farm. Farmers and politicians were invited to check out the process, from harvest through adding the enzymes to distilling the cane juice into ethanol.

Roger Thompson of Hawkinsville, who has been farming all his life, attended the demonstration and said he likes the versatility of sorghum and its ability to withstand drought conditions.

"I think its a good thing," Thompson said. "You can probably grow two crops per year. It will take dry weather a lot better than any other corn or any other crop. And if it gets dry the stuff will come back and do pretty good."

"Now if it does what they say it does, it is a very good piece of equipment and it's worth its weight in gold," Miltee Manning of Fort Valley said as he watched the demonstration.

"It sounds good because we have an energy crisis here, and anything we could do here for ourself to cut down on the price of fuel or gas or whatever we use, it's a benefit to the people," said Manning, who grew up farming but no longer grows row crops.

Eventually, McClune Industries aims to produce 20 to 30 harvesters a month at the former Bibb Manufacturing plant the company bought in Reynolds, Hill said. The price tag would probably be $75,000 each, McClune said. (He said sugar cane harvesters, which don't squeeze out the juice, often cost closer to $400,000 each.)

"My goal is not to make a few Wall Street guys rich, but to work with young farmers," McClune said.

PAULOWNIA TREE ALSO DRAWING ATTENTION

A model was on display at the Southeast Regional Biofuels Conference in August and the Sunbelt Agricultural Expo in Moultrie earlier this month. Hill, who is known for developing the Big Peach Antique Mall and the Oakview Golf and Country Club, said McClune Industries already has taken some pre-orders for the harvesters and is now designing a cane de-header and de-leafer.

The company still is honing aspects of the refining process related to distillation and pickup of the fuel for distribution. McClune Industries will have to work with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on licensing to run the ethanol distilleries, because basically the technology uses the same fermentation methods used to make alcohol, Oliver and Hill said.

Latimore said Fort Valley State will plant more test plots of sweet sorghum for McClune Industries next year, in addition to conducting research with other companies on unusual biofuel feedstocks.

For example, Nirmal Joshee, an assistant professor of plant science, has been studying the growth rate of a Chinese tree called paulownia.

The World Paulownia Institute is using the information to develop a factory in Tifton that will make ethanol from the tree, he said. He said the plant, planned to produce about 25 million gallons of ethanol a day, will probably be the first in the world to use paulownia as its primary feedstock.

Joshee said the trees reach maturity in just five or six years, faster even than pines. After four years of research on test plots at Fort Valley, Joshee plans to start refining test batches of ethanol made from paulownia in December.

In Soperton, Range Fuels is another company conducting research into the viability of growing sweet sorghum, as well as switchgrass, in the South for making biofuel.

Partnering with California-based Ceres Inc., the company planted several five-acre test plots on its land last spring.

Range Fuels is building a refinery that will make biodiesel from woody materials, and its primary feedstock for the foreseeable future will be wood chips, said CEO Mitch Manditch.

But he said the company wants to keep on the cutting edge in case other crops eventually turn out to be more efficient because they transport more easily and generate more energy.

Manditch said the company hopes to learn how switchgrass and sorghum cane grow in the Southeast, what their harvest cycles and yields are like, and what soil and climate conditions are best.

A century ago, a Georgia farmer might have been able to answer some of those questions about cane sorghum, back when syrup was made with the aid of mules running a press. But much of that practical knowledge has died off.

Manditch said that so far, sorghum looks more promising in the Southeast than switchgrass.

Manditch emphasized that "we will stick to our knitting" and concentrate on wood chips as a primary feedstock.

"A lot of these other crops would take hundreds of thousands of acres to run a plant our size," he said.

But the refinery, expected to begin operations in a little more than a year, is being designed so it could eventually switch easily back and forth between wood and other feedstocks such as grasses or stalks.

Reporter Liz Fabian contributed to this article.