Life on the Ethanol-Guzzling Prairie

[jpak]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/weekinreview/11egan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

THE quilt of winter brown that covers the high plateau makes this area look particularly depressing on a February afternoon. But the still-life can be deceptive.

Later this year, a Canadian company, Iogen, will announce whether Idaho will get what could be the first large-scale commercial plant in the United States to produce fuel from straw. Not ethanol made from corn, as refineries in more than a hundred mostly small towns are now doing, but ethanol made from the native prairie grass, corn stalks, field waste and wood chips.

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What is happening here is a vision that many in rural America see as their salvation: high-performance moonshine from amber fields of grain, and a “grass station” in every town. It may be a chimera. It may drain precious water from the arid plains and produce less energy that it uses.

But it has the undeniable power of an idea in ascendancy.

In part this is because the ethanol economy, as it grows before our eyes, is looking less like a taxpayer-financed Big Plan dominated by a single agribusiness corporation and more like something that might bring fresh jobs and local control back to farm country.

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