The proposed Frontier Renewable Resources ethanol plant will be located east of Kincheloe on a 355- acre piece of property along Gaines Highway. Representatives from the company said the facility will be set back a distance off the road, and construction could start as early as next summer. (Photograph courtesy of Frontier Renewable Resources) The first production-sized cellulosic ethanol plant in the world is coming closer to opening in Kinross Charter Township. Construction is slated to begin in the summer of 2010 and take 18 to 20 months, which predicts an opening date for the plant sometime in 2012.

The plant is being planned by Frontier Renewable Resources, a joint venture of Mascoma Corpor - ation, based in Massach usetts, and J.M. Longyear, a forest products company and owner of 76,500 acres of forest land in the Upper Peninsula.

The date shovels hit the ground hinges on rezoning of the 355-acre parcel east of Kincheloe on Gaines Highway, project financing coming through in time for construction, and approval of air quality permits that are under review by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the company told The St. Ignace News Monday, July 13.

Kinross Charter Township will hold a public hearing and the board will rule on the rezoning of the parcel, although dates have net yet been set for either of those meetings.

Deputy Township Supervisor Dorothy Johnson said that, although some residents have expressed concerns over the smell and traffic that may result from the plant, she expects the rezoning to pass the board.

"I don't really foresee any problems with that," Mrs. Johnson said. "One of the reasons they chose this property was to minimize the smell issue."

None of these three barriers will stop the project completely, although they may slow it down, said Alan Belcher, the senior vice president of operations for Mascoma Corporation.

The proposed plant will draw timber from forests within a 150- mile radius of Kinross, using the logging industry and infrastructure already in place in the region.

The Kinross site was chosen because of the combination of rail, road, and power access, together with the wide availability of hardwoods in the region and the logging industry in place to supply the plant.

"We felt it's a great place to get it started," Mr. Belcher said. He also said that former employees of the wood pulp industry in Michigan would have skills that would fit well into positions at the new plant.

Trees cut for use at the plant will be removed through sustainable forest management, which means the forest will grow back quicker than it is harvested.

New Full-time, Construction,

and Indirect Jobs Expected

Frontier Renewable Resources expects the plant to create 50 new full-time jobs, an unknown number of additional general labor jobs, and hundreds of supplementary jobs in the logging, transportation, and related industries. Construction of the facility will also create between 150 and 200 temporary construction jobs, the company estimates.

Mr. Belcher said both directly and indirectly, the facility could create around 700 jobs in the region.

The project has committed to looking at Michigan companies and workers first for material and equipment fabrication, construction work, and a labor force, Mr. Belcher said.

"Any work we do will be sourced first in Michigan," he said. Some specialty materials and equipment will need to be brought in from other areas like Europe, he said.

The 50-or-so core jobs that will be created by the new plant will range from control and heavy equipment operators to log unloaders and administrative and general labor jobs.

Government Creates Seed Money

for Projects

The project will be funded through a combination of government grants, investment funds, and bank loans guaranteed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

DOE provided a grant of $26 million and the state chipped in $23.5 million through the Centers of Energy Excellence Program created by the Michigan Economic Development Corporation.

The combination of a desire to wean the country off foreign oil and to create a more environmentally sustainable economy for future generations are prodding state and local governments to push technologies like this forward, said Kevin Korpi, president of Acuitas, a government relations company working alongside Mascoma on the Frontier project.

"Government has realized that this is an absolute necessity," Mr. Korpi said. This realization, he said, has resulted in governments creating seed money like the grants secured by Frontier, and offering loan guarantees, like the project has received through the DOE, to convince banks to issue loans needed for start-up costs to new ventures like this one.

Innovative Process More Green,

Efficient, Profitable

Mascoma's research and development team are perfecting a system the company has developed to convert bio-mass to ethanol using a simpler, more economical, and more efficient method than used in the past.

Instead of a multi-step process of hydrolysis and fermentation to turn wood pulp into sugars and eventually ethanol, the new plant will use Mascoma's patented Consolidated Bio-processing technology, in which genetically-engineered microorganisms will be introduced to the bio-mass and turn it directly into ethanol.

The difference between the proposed plant and a plant producing fuel from non-cellulosic material like corn starch is both economic and environmental sustainability, Mr. Belcher said..

Since no land must be cleared or crops planted to harvest trees, and because the process Mascoma has developed uses less electric and heat energy than many other ethanol plants, the energy the plant creates via the ethanol fuel ends up being about 5.5 times what it expends in the process. Conversely, most corn ethanol plants create only 1.5 times the energy in fuel as what they eat up to create the fuel.

Mr. Belcher said this translates to a smaller carbon footprint left on the world as well as a more efficient and, eventually, more profitable enterprise.

Corn ethanol releases 50% less greenhouse gasses when burned than gasoline, and cellulosic ethanol releases 95% less emissions than gasoline, polluting the air at a much slower rate.

To further save energy, Frontier is also exploring the addition of a cogenerative power plant to the facility which would burn lignin, a wood pulp by-product, to power the plant. That would reduce the amount of fossil fuels consumed by the process in the gas tanks of tree harvesters and log trucks.

Trees harvested for conversion to ethanol at the new plant will be harvested selectively, instead of clear-cut, and the amount harvested will be less than the surplus of hardwoods in the area.

Less than one million tons will be taken yearly from an area within 150 miles of Kinross, with a 1.5 million ton hardwood surplus every year. This one million tons makes up about 0.2% of the 573-million-tons of live biomass in the supply area.

A surplus of wood is calculated by estimating the amount of new growth each year and subtracting from it the amount of wood lost to harvesting and tree mortality. Ray Miller, a forester from the U.P. Tree Improvement Center in Escanaba, said that about 35% of surpluses are harvested annually, on average, in Michigan. In heavily logged areas, Mr. Miller said, this percentage is much higher, although most timber harvesters are encouraged by consumer demand to do so responsibly and sustainably.

Studies are underway to cut waste in the project and to learn how similar projects could grow in the future.

A collaborative effort between the Michigan State University Tree Improvement Center in Escanaba and Michigan Technological University is working with Frontier to assess the forest resources within the 150-mile circle around Kinross, as well as to determine how to most efficiently structure the organization to get from trees to ethanol with minimal waste.

The scientists from the two university programs are also partnering with the Michigan Economic Development Corporation to similarly analyze the bio-mass to the energy supply chain across the state, so data is available for future enterprises who wish to start similar projects.

Since the Kinross plant will be the first of its kind, Frontier plans to start it at only one-quarter of its capacity, which will produce 20 million gallons of ethanol annually. Eventually, Mr. Belcher said, they plan to step up production to 80 million gallons annually, and would consider expanding the facility further past that point, as well.

"We have enough land to expand on the 355 acres," he said. If successful, he said this facility may open doors to more expansion in the region.

"There is the opportunity to build quite a few more plants in the U.P. and elsewhere in the Great Lakes basin," Mr. Belcher said.