Turning wood waste into fuel for cars to reduce dependence on oil

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: Rural Georgia’s economic salvation materialised last Tuesday under a billowing white circus tent as politicians and businessmen extolled the renewable-fuel virtues of heretofore undesirable pine tree limbs.

Range Fuels Inc, one of the downstate's most significant industrial recruitment efforts, broke ground on an estimated $225 million factory that will turn wood waste into ethanol to fuel cars and trucks and, possibly, loosen US dependence on foreign oil.

The brainchild and financial beneficiary of dot-com billionaire Vinod Khosla, Range plans to produce 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol a year by the end of 2008. If successful—and technological doubts abound—Khosla’s factory promises to be the first commercially viable cellulosic ethanol factory in the US, if not the world.

Treutlen County is more than happy to be along for the ride. With little industry and much pine tree waste—it’s not dubbed the Million Pines City for nothing—Soperton could use the jobs.

“Forestry is one of our main industries. We're right in the middle of miles and miles and miles of forest,” said Hugh Beasley, a Treutlen County commissioner. “We’re hoping and praying that (cellulosic) works, not only for us but for the whole country.”

The nation’s biofuel belt has expanded with Georgia joining the Midwest in the nation’s alternative-fuel lexicon. Whereas the Midwest depends on ethanol made from corn, Georgia—with its 24 million acres of sustainable forests—will hitch its renewable-fuel wagon to pine trees.

Colorado-based Range hopes to eventually churn out 100 million gallons of ethanol a year. It will hire 70 people to work at the factory in an industrial park outside Soperton, about 155 miles southeast of Atlanta. Company officials said Range may build additional alt-fuel factories in Georgia.

“We need to declare a war on oil,” said Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems. “Corn ethanol started this war, (but) as the war escalates we need better weapons. Cellulosic ethanol is the weapon we need.”

US energy secretary Samuel Bodman, who attended the groundbreaking and steered $76 million in federal money Range’s way, said cellulosic ethanol has “more net energy than corn.” Yet corn ethanol is commercially viable and can be purchased at E-85 pumps across the country.

Ross Harding, a vice-president with the Herty Advanced Materials Development Centre in Savannah, Georgia, a state-funded development authority, said there are “drawbacks around the technical issues” involving cellulosic ethanol. Venture capitalist Khosla said, “We are confident it will work.”