Foundation Hopes to Help Oklahoma ‘Switch’ From Oil to Grass

Rural Oklahoma may soon be coming full circle. Forty years after production in the state’s once-booming oil fields

began declining, the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation is exploring a way to literally grow the state’s return to the fuel business.

Instead of pumping petroleum from deep underground, farmers in the region hope to raise plants in their fields that could then be converted to liquid fuel for cars and trucks.

The plant is switch grass, and the fuel is called cellulosic ethanol.

In the past, Noble, an agricultural-research organization in Ardmore, Okla., that was founded in 1945 by a wealthy oilman, focused on supporting plant-science research that could bolster the livestock industry, says the foundation’s vice president, Steven Rhines. “This is a new direction for us.”

The foundation’s concentration on breeding switch grass for use in gas tanks instead of as cattle feed began a year ago, after Ceres Inc., a for-profit biotechnology firm in Thousand Oaks, Calif., contacted the charity about working together to develop new varieties of the hardy, fast-growing grass.

The cellulosic ethanol this native grass produces could be an evolutionary step in the country’s efforts to replace fossil fuels with those that are both renewable and cleaner burning, the foundation believes.

Benefits Over Ethanol

The United States now produces some 4.5 billion gallons of ethanol, a fuel made largely from the starch in corn kernels, which is converted to sugar, fermented, and distilled into an alcohol.

Ethanol is blended with gasoline and sold at an increasing number of filling stations across the country. Still, the country burns some 140 billion gallons of gasoline each year, so ethanol is not yet having a huge effect in the fuel market.

Expanding production of this form of homegrown fuel is problematic. More than 10 percent of the nation’s corn currently goes to make ethanol, and increasing this amount would bring it into increased competition with the corn crop needed for food production.

“No one, not even the corn industry, argues that corn ethanol is the way that we will make a big dent in our oil addiction,” says Nathanael Greene, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in New York. “Corn is limited technically and economically.”

Cellulosic ethanol, while chemically the same as the corn-based variety, is made from the whole plant, not just the grain. New technology developments now allow “bio-refineries” to unlock fermentable sugars in any and all plant matter: leaves, stems, and roots.

This process yields more ethanol per acre than that made purely from grains and doesn’t require the use of traditional food crops. Switch grass, which in a single season can grow to be more than eight feet high, is emerging as a possible dedicated “energy crop,” a plant that can be grown on marginal farmland specifically for making fuel.

“Increasing the plant’s gross yield is what is really critical to this emerging industry,” says Mr. Rhines, describing Noble’s initial efforts at selectively breeding switch grass to make the plant leafier and denser so as to increase its per-acre productivity.

Later breeding efforts will strive to increase the already hardy plants’ drought resistance and perhaps even modify its cell structure so that it is easier to refine into ethanol.

The foundation cannot say how much of its $24-million annual operating budget is going specifically to switch-grass breeding, though 12 of its 80 scientists on staff now work exclusively with the plant.

A $1.4-million U.S. Department of Agriculture grant and an undisclosed amount of corporate giving have helped finance Noble’s switch-grass work. And in June, the organization was awarded a bioenergy research grant from the Department of Energy that will provide $9-million over the next five years.

Aiming for 2009

Its corporate partner, Ceres, will largely be responsible for taking any successful new switch-grass strains to market. The goal is to make improved switch-grass varieties available by 2009. Ceres hopes to profit from the new strains, but a licensing agreement it has with the Noble foundation could benefit the nonprofit organization as well.

“The foundation works a lot like a university in the sense that we will issue a license to the underlying technology so that there is a revenue stream that comes back to the institution based on success of marketing and commercialization,” Mr. Rhines says.

It is still likely to be several years before cellulosic ethanol begins to emerge from the shadows of the widely produced corn version. The process of refining cellulosic ethanol is complex, costly, and still difficult to perform in bulk. Mr. Rhines acknowledges that the first large-scale refineries probably will use agricultural waste, including wood chips from the lumber industry and corn stover and wheat straw, which are the plant materials left over after harvesting corn and wheat.

“We see, as this begins to progress, a real hunger for the dedicated energy crops like switch grass emerging,” Mr. Rhines says.

Farmers’ Role

If such a hunger does develop, there will need to be farmers ready to take the plunge and move into this new type of farming. Analyzing the practicalities of growing switch grass as an energy crop is the work of the foundation’s agriculture-consulting and education service, which assists farmers in 47 counties surrounding Ardmore.

“Using dedicated energy crops is not an industry yet, so one of our projects is to understand the economics of it,” Mr. Rhines says. “At the end of the day, if the economics are there, then the farmer and rancher will make a decision based on revenue and potential profit.”

Mr. Rhines notes that it is somewhat ironic that his organization might now have a hand in moving the country away from oil.

Lloyd Noble, who founded the foundation in his father’s name in 1945, made his fortune in the oil business. He left the foundation the bulk of his estate when he died in 1950 — an endowment now worth nearly $1-billion. But then, Noble was a forward-thinking oilman, says Mr. Rhines.

“He was a true believer that the land was going to be needed long after the oil and gas had been depleted,” Mr. Rhines says of Noble. “We’re just beginning to look at the impact of reallocating to domestic agriculture some of the import dollars that we currently use as a nation to bring oil into the country. We see this as truly following the spirit of what he wanted for this organization.”