If rural Alabama sees growth in the coming decades, it may be thanks sustainable fuels being grown there today.

By Todd Keith
Photos by Jason Wallis

“This can absolutely be a renaissance time for rural areas in Alabama and the business of agriculture. But you have to create an infrastructure that can effectively deliver the energy source to the consumer. It is a chicken and egg thing.“
Larry Fillmer, Executive Director of Auburn University Natural Resources Management and Development Institute

In the deep, dark industrial recesses of an old abandoned lumber mill in Livingston, the future is being born. Maybe. Hopefully.

The irony of the location is as overwhelming as the rambling structure is large. Here at Gulf Coast Energy, a start-up manufacturer of renewable biofuels, their mission is quite simply to save the world from the dead-end path of fossil fuels. In June last year, the company, which was founded by two former Mercedes-Benz employees, Mark Warner and Scott Hazen, started building one of the country’s first ethanol plants fueled by wood scraps. Lonely piles of ground-up wood waste on the massive factory floor await the gasification process that will convert the molecules into the end product of ethanol, synthetic gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and other fuels. “We are a next generation bio-energy company,” begins CEO Mark Warner. “In a sense, we are starting up a whole new industry.”

That Alabama’s Black Belt should be ground zero for such an effort to make biodiesel and ethanol viable fuel sources in the state and beyond holds another layer of rich, bio-irony: the fecund source of Alabama’s fabulously rich cotton economy 150 years ago, today the Black Belt is one the poorest regions in the country. There are towns in this fertile belt across South Alabama with fewer residents today than in 1860.

That a domestic alternative energy industry could rise from such ashes holds numerous possibilities both for the state and country as a whole. This is either the great promise of a nascent Green Collar industry in Alabama or a frustrating, yet admirable attempt to take the state’s great timber and agricultural resources and fashion an industry focused on building upon rather than exploiting those natural resources.

AA (Alternative Fuels Anonymous)
The first step towards a solution is always admitting you have a problem. Alabama has a problem. Americans are the most oil-dependent citizens in the world, and here in Alabama we rank among the top five states in the percentage of personal income spent on driving: we spend around 20 percent of our income on cars and gas, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. These kinds of numbers don’t lie. Ninety-one percent of the U.S. population commutes to work by car, and U.S. vehicles consume 65 percent of the nation’s oil, according to the U.S. Departments of Transportation and Energy. Communities like Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, the Quad Cities, as well as Montgomery, the first U.S. city to initiate an electric street car system (1886), might wish they never disabled their public transport systems in the 1940s and 50s.

Dr. Dan Turner, professor of civil and environmental engineering at The University of Alabama College of Engineering would probably agree with the above statement. “We are spoiled in Alabama and in the U.S.,” he begins. “The number of miles driven in Alabama doubled in the past 20 years. Our citizens don’t understand: As long as fuel was artificially low, that was fine. After the oil embargo in the 1970s most of the rest of the world artificially raised the price of oil to decrease demand. What we’ve actually done in America since that time is to encourage one person per car.” Turner, who also directs the University Transportation Center for Alabama characterizes this predicament to an addiction. “We now are addicted to and base our lifestyle upon cheap oil,” he says. “We take for granted that we can live forever like this. We can not.”

Pat Byington, publisher of Bama Environmental News and former member of the Alabama Environmental Management Commission, sees progress and a bit of frustration in Alabama’s current energy climate. “We’re not behind in the research and pursuit of alternative fuels, what we’re way behind in is conservation,” asserts Byington. “In both Florida and North Carolina, for instance, these states are saying, ‘We’re going to conserve more.’ They’re being very aggressive on developing comprehensive energy plans. There was a recent bill advocating that 20 percent of our energy use comes from alternative energy in last year’s energy bill by 2020—and the majority our Alabama delegation voted against it.“

Coming Soon to a Pump Near You
What is Alabama’s energy portfolio made up of today? Coal takes the lead, followed by nuclear, natural gas, and coal, and little hydro. Where we are now is attempting to diversify our portfolio, exploring switchgrass, sugarcane, and other biofuels. The efforts of many Alabamians to arrive upon a means to provide domestic energy self-sufficiency are encouraging. In all honesty, it probably should be an event of epic proportions similar to that of the space race in the 1960s (that takes leadership from the top, yet another story). Instead, it is bit-by-bit process with communities and businesses taking the lead.

Hoover, the sixth-largest city in the state, runs a fleet of 189 flex fuel vehicles on 85 percent ethanol and 171 vehicles and equipment on B-20 biodiesel. Hoover’s municipal fleet management department also runs a program to collect used cooking oil from area restaurants to convert it to bio-diesel fuel for the fleet and other equipment, saving both money and running city vehicles on cleaner fuel. Gadsden recently instituted a similar waste-to-fuel program. In 2007, Auburn University was the first university in Alabama to convert it’s transit fleet of more than 40 buses from diesel fuel to bio-diesel, a cleaner burning alternative produced from domestic renewable sources. Alabama Power has experimented with co-firing Alabama-grown switchgrass and other biomass at its Gadsden steam plant.

For the state’s part, Governor Bob Riley has overseen the purchase of a fleet of 168 cars running on E-85 Ethanol and B20 Biodiesel, and Alabama, along with 10 other states, is in a private partnership with General Motors to develop more ethanol fueling stations. Agriculture and Industries Commissioner Ron Sparks along with Montgomery’s Mayor Bobby Bright recently began a partnership to convert used cooking grease (which clogs sewers) into bio-diesel fuel for the city’s fleet vehicles, as well as opened a Center for Alternative Fuels Biodiesel Production facility in the city last year. And there are similar localized efforts going on around the state.

One large coordinated national effort going on in Alabama is America’s first biofuel corridor along Interstate 65. Last fall a federal grant helped establish the corridor starting in Mobile and running through Tennessee, Kentucky, and culminating in Indiana. Locations in Huntsville/Decatur, Cullman, Birmingham, Montgomery, Evergreen/Greenville and Mobile now have clean burning alternative fuels such as E-85 Ethanol and B20 Biodiesel available at the gas pumps. “The state is one of the most progressive in this respect, with those vehicles in our motor pool on E-85,” Mark Bentley, Executive Director of the Alabama Clean Fuels Coalition, explains. “We are third in the nation in terms of E-85 and biodiesel usage. It’s remarkable.” And the progress continues with other communities around the state pursuing biofuel for all the economic and environmental reasons. The city of Vestavia, for instance, will be using bio-diesel in their school buses soon. But it is a chicken and egg thing: until the corridor was completed recently, Alabama had approximately 100,000 flex-fuel vehicles with few means to fuel them. As Bentley politely puts it, “The infrastructure is the opportunity.”

Larry Fillmer, Executive Director of the two-year old Natural Resources Management and Development Institute at Auburn University, knows one variant of that coming infrastructure will be local. “You have to create these bio products as close to the region where they are grown as possible,” he says. “You will see more and more small bio-processing industries staffed by technical people trained to run them.” Auburn’s new fractionation lab is a step in that direction, allowing the university to take biomass material, break it down, and work on the individual streams to discover what energy potential each holds. Similarly, a new gasification lab lets them take different feedstocks and gasify them under pressure to generate electricity or to make liquid fuels. “What people have to remind themselves is that we are still a natural resource-based economy,” Fillmer stresses. “We’ve made great strides attracting industry, but this could really take off and grow to reinvigorate our rural communities.”

One such operation is Dixie Pellets, the world’s largest wood pellet production plant in Selma. A project of New Gas Concepts, whose engineering arm is located in Birmingham, Dixie Pellets expects to expand to four more pellet-producing plants by the end of 2009. “The wood pellets are a coal replacement,” explains New Gas Concepts President Evan Bates. “It is much cleaner than coal. Taking 10 percent wood pellets reduces the two components of acid rain: sulfur and nitrogen oxides by 30 percent and 20 percent respectively. As long as it is from sustainable harvest trees it’s carbon neutral as well.”

Currently about a dozen plants in Europe are co-firing wood pellets along with coal, and Dixie Pellets is happy to ship two million tons a year. And there are signs that this process might someday begin here, too, as both Alabama Power and Georgia Power have expressed interest in the pellets, according to Bates. But until there is legislation that makes it easier for utilities in the United States to purchase the pellets–—which are 20 percent more expensive than coal—polite interest may be as far as it goes. “It’s technically illegal for power companies to not use the least expensive resource,” Bates says. “Their hands are tied until legislation regulates carbon in some way.” If this makes the United States and our energy policy seem like that of a second-world power as we ship off our natural resources for the benefit of other more advanced nations, it’s probably because it is.

Back to the Future
Anyone doubting the promise of alternative fuels in Alabama is missing the point: there is no alternative other than to pursue alternatives to the death-lock dependency the country has on foreign oil. And while wood waste biofuels don’t require farmland (that could otherwise be used for food) like corn-based ethanol does, at the moment, the wasteful and polluting processes of traditional fossil fuels are still cheaper than most of the alternatives being pursued. Most players agree that what we’re exploring now are stop-gap, intermediate measures on the road to weaning ourselves from a hopefully soon-to-be outdated energy source (oil) that wastes more energy exploring, extracting, and shipping it that we gain from it.

But that pursuit is well worth the effort. Warner estimates that his gasification process is 500 percent more efficient than the gasoline process—and it realizes an 80 percent reduction on greenhouse gases versus petroleum. “In the state of Alabama, there is enough wood waste to fuel the state’s needs—and then some,” Warner says as he watches an employee shovel wood into his demonstration plant. “Where we are now is the logistics issue.”

In Atmore, for instance, Governor Riley recently visited a remote sugar cane test plot of 100 acres in late October 2008. Depending on both the quality and the quantity of the sugarcane, it could become jet fuel for the Air Force, meaning Amyris Company would likely construct a $500 million plant somewhere near Atmore, according to Amyris CEO John Milo. Auburn University and the Alabama Cooperative Extension System manage the plot and results from the testing should be available in Fall 2009. It is exciting for a number of reasons.

While the aviation industry produces about one-ninth the carbon dioxide as motor vehicles, most of that goes into the upper atmosphere and likely has a greater impact on global warming. Another reason is the potential biofuels hold for quality, high-paying jobs for rural Alabama communities. The Black Belt may never be what it was—but the potential for improvement certainly is exciting. The 10 or so gasification plants that Warner envisions will be spread out across Alabama and the South, all within 50 to 75 miles of the supply of wood scraps for maximum efficiency. “People are afraid of change, but what if that change were as easy as going to the same gas filling stations except we use renewable fuels instead?” Warner asks. The phrase “Eat, Live, Buy Locally” suddenly has entirely new connotations.

It is reminiscent of that great scene in the Michalel J. Fox movieBack to the Future where the mad scientist, Doc Brown, gasses up his time-traveling DeLorean with the at-hand waste from his own consumption: garbage and banana peels. The future may not be here, but it is within sight.

Alabama’s Energy Portfolio:
Nuclear 23%
Hydro: 7%
Natural Gas: 10%
Coal: 57%
Other 4%

Sidebar: Dril , Baby Dril?
With Congressman Artur Davis recently coming out in support of offshore drilling for gas and oil, the 27-year ban on offshore drilling continues to shift in the face of gas price fluctuation. Back in the 1980s, natural gas rigs began popping up on Alabama’s shores, and today, nearly 50 offshore wells have pumped $3.4 billion in royalties for the Alabama Trust Fund since it began in 1986. Considering that the $534 million a year average for the last five years that natural gas and oil have added to state coffers (29% of Alabama’s General Fund appropriation), there’s no doubt that natural gas has a prominent role to play in the coming energy decisions.

And we have it in abundance: Alabama ranks among the top 15 producers in natural gas.It is the cleanest burning fossil fuel and consists primarily of methane. It comes from offshore and coalbed methane wells. And since heating homes and making electricity from natural gas emits 30% less carbon dioxide than petroleum and about 45% less that burning coal, the allure is clear, despite the obvious aesthetic concerns many beachfront communities rightly express over wells dotting the horizon.

Energen Corporation’s Alagasco, the state’s largest natural gas utility, serves 450,000 customers in Alabama and stresses natural gas’ green benefits. “What we have here in Alabama is a 50% reduction in your carbon footprint when you use natural gas taking account of the site vs. source debate when you look at what energy source you use in your home,“ explains Susan Delenne, a spokesperson for Alagasco.

Amendment One, which passed last November, now allows the state to dip into the fund to plug budget holes such as education shortfalls. Natural gas may not be an alternative fuel, but as the Alabama and the nation as a whole begins investigating a shift away from fossil fuels, natural gas is one of the alternatives for now.