New Alcohol Plant

[Made in the USA]

Rural Kansans eager, anxious about impact on their lives, communities

By Tim Vandenack

The Hutchinson News


As the morning game of cards evolves at Wright Senior Center, the talk this day turns to ethanol and a proposal to build a plant just east of the Ford County town.


"Good for the town, good for the community," opines Philip Lutz, a retired farmer, alluding to the newcomers an ethanol plant is likely to draw. "If I were younger, I'd probably put in a restaurant."

Tiny Wright, about five miles east of Dodge City, counts a grain elevator, beauty shop and insurance agent.

David Milford, taking a break from the game of five-point pitch, adds, "If we get an ethanol plant, we're progressing."

Ready or not, ethanol - which is taking the nation by storm - is coming to southwest Kansas. The region already has a pair of plants that make the corn- and milo-based fuel additive, two more are being built and developers have announced plans for six others.

That's cause for elation among many. Out-migration has been the bane of most of southwestern Kansas and the emergence of a new industry offers a means of re-energizing the zone, diversifying the economy and bringing in jobs.

Construction is under way in Hayne on a plant that can handle 110 million gallons per year - which would be the state's biggest.

"I'm just real excited," said Colleen Towns, economic development director for nearby Liberal. "There are 50 to 56 good-paying jobs that are coming to our community plus everything else."

Gene Pflughoft, head of the Grant County Economic Development Corp., speaks of places like southwest Kansas becoming energy meccas. A Los Angeles-based energy firm is planning to build a combination ethanol-biodiesel plant near Ulysses, the county seat there.

"All of a sudden, everybody's thinking renewable fuels, we can grow our own fuel," he said. "Some of us have the vision out here of becoming the Saudi Arabia of the United States."

Still, amid all the go-go optimism - southwest Kansas is tops in the state in terms of plant proposals - some, while supportive of the industry, are counseling caution.

"It just seems to me the thing's busted loose and it's gone a little bit overboard now," said Gary Baker, a county commissioner in Stevens County, where another plant proposal is in the works. "I think there's going to be a correction here."

Others probe deeper, wondering if arid southwest Kansas, with its dryland crops and declining underground aquifer, is the best place for ethanol plants. Such facilities require a steady supply of water, as does their main input: corn.

"In my estimation we ought to be pursuing those businesses that don't use the water, that don't promote water usage," said Tim Slattery, a Wright resident who questions the proposal to build a facility there. "If you're going to build ethanol plants, build them where they got corn."

Outside the corn-belt

The traditional ethanol plant model calls for construction of the facilities where corn is located. Look at a U.S. map indicating the location of ethanol plants and much of the corn-belt - Iowa, southern Minnesota, northern Illinois, eastern South Dakota and eastern Nebraska - is a sea of dots.

However, as interest in ethanol rises - spurred by a desire to stem dependence on foreign oil, federal mandates and declining use of the MTBE additive - would-be plant developers are looking further afield. MTBE boosts octane levels and reduces pollution levels as gasoline is burned, but gas producers have increasingly turned to ethanol because of concerns about groundwater contamination caused by the substance.

Southwest Kansas and adjacent areas like the Texas Panhandle are particularly attractive because of the millions of cattle that populate the zone. A byproduct in ethanol production is distillers grain, the protein-rich remnants of the corn and milo used to make the fuel additive, and with so many cattle, it can be cheaply shipped for use in the area as feed.

In places like Iowa, by contrast, distillers grain must be dried in natural gas-fired driers so it doesn't spoil en route to cattle centers, incurring extra cost.

"The nice thing is with all the animals out here you can sell (distillers grain) wet," Pflughoft said. "So that saves a lot of cost for ethanol plants in this part of the country."

The upshot is ongoing ethanol plant construction near Hayne and just outside Garden City and proposals for six more in southwest Kansas alone. That's hardly enough to dethrone the corn-belt as ethanol capital, but it's making boosters around here pretty happy.

A plant will employ anywhere from 33 to 55 people, depending on its capacity, with average annual wages of around $40,000. That can mean $2 million more in income in communities, give or take, not to mention growth by existing businesses and development of new ones.

"It's just going to be a real shot in the arm for our entire region," Towns said.

Then there's the boost caused by construction of the plants, which can cost $100 million to $200 million, and the added value to the local tax base once they're complete.

Kevin Wagner, a banker and member of the Haskell County Economic Development Advisory Committee, says a proposal there would boost the county's overall valuation by perhaps 25 percent. Though tax abatements would likely keep at least a portion of the facility off the rolls for a time, the property taxes eventually paid on such a structure could help lower the burden on individual homeowners.

'$5, $6, $7 corn'

Through it all, Baker, among others, suspects not all proposals - some of them stalled because ethanol plant builders are too busy with other projects - will see the light of day. He also warns of hikes in the price of corn brought on by ethanol demand. That could adversely affect beef producers who need the commodity to fatten their animals and even cause the price of the fuel to rise above market value.

"It's easy to get greedy in these sorts of situations," Baker said. "I don't think we need, for instance, $5, $6, $7 corn. It would kill off everything we've got going."

Scott White, an energy expert at the Kansas Geological Survey at the University of Kansas, notes that southwest Kansas, with all its cattle, is a net importer of grain. With some of the grain used by southwest Kansas ethanol producers likely to come from Nebraska, then, and that state experiencing an ethanol boom of its own, he pauses to reflect.

"I wonder if it's sustainable in the long term," he said.

More pointed are the critics who worry about ethanol's impact to the Ogallala Aquifer, the ever-declining mass of underground water that supplies the zone.

"Everybody has the idea that the aquifer underneath us is inexhaustible, but it's not inexhaustible," said Bonnie Atwell, a Hayne resident who had questioned the wisdom of the ethanol plant plans there when they were debated last summer. "If it runs out, this is going to be the great American desert because we have no other source of water."

Slattery, the Wright resident, fears that with the rising price of corn brought on by ethanol production, more and more southwest Kansas farmers will plant the crop, exacerbating the water situation that much more.

"I can understand progress has to be made," notes Atwell, who's quick to acknowledge the positive growth an ethanol plant could bring. "But you have to be careful. I feel (the ethanol plant) will make or break Hayne, only time will tell."

[Made in the USA]

Link on water rights for alcohol plant proposed for West of Bucklin.


Garden City Telegram Online

[lurker]

Too bad these al-kee-haul plants can't retain some of the flood water.

[Made in the USA]

They couldn't use it anyway without purification.

[lurker]

Hemp is the most practical biomass for conversion into alcohol and this couple 'put pot' in their tank (what we all should be doing).

They forgot to convert it first.