Imagine a town where people do not rely on gasoline anymore. They produce fuel for vehicle themselves; they produce electricity without burning coal and all these are done by their own production. This is true not only in fiction but also in reality. Reynolds, Indiana became the first town to rely entirely on biofuels and got the name “BioTown USA.”
Ryan West is Director of Legislative Affairs and Policy at the Indiana Ddepartment of Agriculture and is in charge of the BioTown USA project at Reynolds. He spoke about the implementation and prospects of biorenewable resources in Indiana on Tuesday, February 27. The title of West’s talk was "Turning Challenges into Opportunities," and covered Indiana’s growing ethanol production.
As the world is under the threat global warming, reducing the usage of petroleum and switching to alternative sources of energy are the best ways to cut the emission of greenhouse gases. Among the various alternative sources of energy, ethanol and biodiesel are suitable for Indiana, the fifth largest state in terms of corn production.
Ethanol is produced by processing, fermenting, and distilling corn and biodiesel is produced by processing soybeans. The idea of ethanol as fuel started in the 1970s when the US was struggling with the energy crisis. Brazil currently produces and consumes the largest amount of ethanol in the world.
Ethanol is much easier and costs much less to produce than gasoline but due to the corrosive nature of alcohol it is harder to transport than gasoline.
The BioTown project officially started in Reynolds on September 13, 2005.
“We selected Reynolds because of the easy access to infrastructures, the town size, and proximity to livestock,” West said.
Reynolds is a small town in northwest Indiana with a population 550. It has three substations, two main highways, and it is near to I-65, three railways, and a natural gas pipeline. Additionally, it was close to livestock, Purdue University, and is surrounded by agricultural land.
“We are also getting more than expected support from the community,” West added. “In this short period they have already bought 150 cars fueled by ethanol.”
"We want to use waste streams and municipal waste to produce electricity and fuel," West said.
The plan is to use animal waste, municipal waste, corn stalk waste, and other materials to manufacture methane, high-value fertilizer, biogas, heat/steam, and bio oil.
There are more ethanol and biodiesel plants currently under construction in other towns of Indiana.
“The 12 new ethanol and four new biodiesel plants will create 620 new jobs for the people in Indiana,” West said. “This will be same as putting $29.5 million dollars into the pocket of local farmers.”
The United States Department of Agriculture has set an expectation that the country would be producing 15 billion gallons of ethanol a year by 2010. President Bush said in his last State of the Union address that the U.S. should be producing 35 billion gallons a year by 2017.
In his concluding remarks, West said ethanol is an emerging new alternative source of energy. There has been much progress to increase its efficiency, which is now about 65 percent compared to gasoline’s 87 percent, but this is not enough. As the production of corn cannot be increasing due to the constant land, newer and advanced technology should be developed to increase the efficiency.
“In my view, ethanol is only a mid range solution in the search of greener fuel and it is acting as a transition to the search of cleaner fuel,” West said.
The talk was sponsored and organized jointly by the Experience Indiana Grant and the Department of Chemistry.