Advertisement
He lent his ear to investors wanting to buyout his land to build an ethanol plant — then promptly turned them down. Not because of the money; Smith said “no” for his community. He thought about the noise, the smell, the sounds that come with a large ethanol plant. He thought about the dairy farmers on his route, his neighbors, his kids.
 |
Eyota resident Tina Sass, left, signs a petition against ethanol plant annexation as Olmstead County Concerned Citizens' Tom Dornack watches June 4 in Eyota. Sass had many reasons to oppose the building of an ethanol plant near Eyota, including the affects on local well water. "We have enough water issues as it is," she said. "It would be taking good water." (Photo by Andrew Link/Winona Daily News) |
“Everybody’s rubber-stamping these ethanol plants,” Smith said. “I don’t care if I don’t got a friend in this whole world, but I stand up for what I think is right.”
Smith is one of the many Eyota residents mired in a two-year debate over a controversial ethanol plant proposed by several Winona-area businessmen and the MinnErgy company, who want to build a 52-million-gallons-a-year facility one mile west of Eyota. Deep divisions have formed in the town of 1,800, pitting those who see the corn-based fuel as a bust against those who see it as an economic boom for the sleepy bedroom community overshadowed by Rochester, Minn., and surrounded by cornfields.
The divisions are taking their toll on the community and its leaders. The voices weigh heavy on the mayor’s conscience, so much so he’s lost sleep.
“It detracts away from my normal lifestyle and many other commitments I have, including my wife and family,” Eyota Mayor Wes Bussell said. “(There’s) so much burden thinking through this proposal that my body is in pain, coffee seems to have more acid than normal and that occasional good old can of beer or chocolate candy bar does not even taste good.”
Bussell and four council members are charged with annexing the 325-acre site for the ethanol plant into the city or kicking the proposal to Eyota Township and Olmsted County. No matter what the council decides, Bussell said half the town will not be happy.
Economic fuel
Named after an Indian word meaning superior, the small southeastern Minnesota community of Eyota is the highest point in Olmsted County, where three major watersheds form.
Settlers started staking out the prime farm land in 1854 near an ever-flowing spring that feeds Bear Creek. Eyota’s streets and downtown district were formed around farmland, a rail yard and a large hotel. The Winona & St. Peter Railroad made the city depot a busy hub for business travelers and locally raised cattle and grain trade.
That liveliness is long gone. Nowadays, a steady hum of commuter traffic heads to nearby Rochester and Winona.
An ethanol plant could play an enormous role in bringing that hum back to Eyota, said Steve Gronseth, the city’s Economic Development Authority director.
Eyota has little or no commercial businesses, and its commuting residents drive to Rochester for groceries and retail shopping, Gronseth said.
Bob Pennington, Eyota Township supervisor and MinnErgy board member, recently shut down his local hardware store because of slow sales.
Manufacturing and industrial developers, who could attract secondary businesses, say they would come to town if Eyota had an ethanol plant, Pennington said. That could mean extra tax revenue — about 40 well-paying jobs from just the ethanol plant — and a way to put Eyota back on the map.
Dan Arnold, president of Winona-based machine manufacturer DCM Tech, and Minnesota City, Minn., cattle farmer Ron Scherbring, first proposed building a $100 million ethanol plant in the area in 2006. MinnErgy now has 37 broad-based regional investors, including All American Co-op.
Because of increasing demand for ethanol, a ready supply of local corn and the Highway 14 and Dakota, Minnesota and Eastern rail shipping corridors, Scherbring said further research identified Eyota as the perfect location.
“In those communities with ethanol plants, you see growth where there was no economic growth,” Scherbring said. “In those towns, you see an inspiration within that community. That’s what built America.”
The proposed ethanol plant would initially take in 19.5 million corn bushels and produce 52.25 million gallons of fuel and more than 153,500 tons of distiller’s grain a year. The products would be transported by rail and truck in an estimated 186 vehicles a day.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources have given the ethanol project a green light in a recently released Environmental Assessment Worksheet, which studied air emissions, water usage, water discharge and sensitive natural habitat.
Planners postponed an initial April construction date when residents demanded more research on the project.
An initial April construction date was postponed when residents’ concerns elicited extra research. It’s been moved to MinnErgy is concentrating on the first step of an informational process, but if there were legitimate issues, MinnErgy would quit, Scherbring said.
“Ethanol is the only thing we have right now that is proven to get us going in the right direction,” said Scherbring, a 20-year farmer. “We have all this infrastructure to take this little kernel of corn and it’s so unique all we have to do is bust it open and use what’s inside.”
A bad rap
The very nature of converting a critical agricultural crop into liquid fuel has created a stigma around proposed ethanol facilities. The corn-based fuel has been championed as an alternative-energy source since Samuel Morey developed an engine that ran on ethanol and turpentine in 1826. But recent high food prices and shortages in the developing world have raised doubts about a bourgeoning American ethanol industry.
“News media wants to sell papers, create controversy, write news about bad things,” Pennington said. “Ethanol as an industry is getting a bad rap.”
Ethanol gets blamed for causing food shortages across the world and the rising cost of food in America, but it’s really the fault of skyrocketing oil prices, many agriculture experts and ethanol proponents say.
“We fed more to the world. How in the heck are we starving people?” questioned Randall Doyal, Renewable Fuels Association board member and manager of a farmer-owned ethanol plant in Claremont, Minn. “It’s not because of inadequate supply, it’s because of politics and ruthless people.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture cites that ethanol production accounts for 3 percent of the 40 percent increase in world food prices this past year. Last year’s corn harvest had record numbers for exports and livestock feed, according to USDA statistics.
Of the 85 million acres of field corn harvest last year, 42 percent went to livestock, 22 percent for ethanol production, 17 percent for exports, 9 percent for direct human consumption and 10 percent for carryover.
Market conditions and government policy has fueled ethanol’s fire.
An expanding ethanol industry produced about 5.6 billion gallons of ethanol in 2007, up nearly a billion gallons from 2005, according to USDA reports.
Minnesota’s 17 operating ethanol facilities have a production capacity of 675 million gallons per year, according to the MPCA. Four facilities are under construction, which will boost the state’s annual ethanol production capacity above 1 billion gallons this year. There are 11 other proposed facilities, including Eyota’s.
Since gas prices influence ethanol prices, windfall profits can be made in the growing industry.
Oil companies receive a 45-cent “blender’s credit” per gallon, and a 54-cent import tax per gallon protects the country’s ethanol supply from Brazil, the world’s largest ethanol producer.
Ethanol, an octane booster and fuel additive, bumps gasoline from 84 octane to 87 and up. The nation’s gas suppliers used to use more harmful blending alternatives, such as MTBE and lead, which created toxic air problems heavily reported in the 1980s.
Gov. Tim Pawlenty, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and many other Minnesota politicians have signed onto ethanol’s promise to reduce reliance on foreign oil.
Some see ethanol as the first step toward energy independence and a path to more productive renewable fuels such as cellulosic ethanol, a biofuel produced from wood and non-edible plants.
“Corn ethanol is only part of the solution to the country’s energy needs,” Arnold said. “Cellulosic ethanol technology may be commercially viable in five to 10 years and will produce substantial volumes of ethanol.”
Unmet expectations
Despite ethanol’s positives, residents opposed to the ethanol plant say they don’t have to be a pork or dairy farmer suffering from high feed prices to see ethanol’s impact.
Jan Blevins, co-chair of a citizen’s advisory group called Olmsted County Concerned Citizens, or OC3, said the proposed plant represents larger social and environmental implications of feeding into the global demand for the corn-based fuel.
OC3 worries about plumes of carcinogens from an ethanol plant. The group is concerned the pristine Jordan aquifer beneath the proposed plant will be dried up. The plant is expected to draw 297 million gallons from the Jordan aquifer a year, or 564 gallons per minute. The city of Rochester uses 5.1 billion gallons a year, said Jim Sehl, a DNR groundwater specialist working on the proposal.
About 600 locals — a third of the town — have signed a petition opposing the plant, Blevins said.
“I think what we’re mostly concerned about is the environmental impact this type of industry might have on the community as a whole,” Blevins said. “When you look at the whole big picture, (ethanol) isn’t a very green energy source.”
Residents voiced many concerns at an MPCA meeting June 19 over air emissions, truck traffic, possible spills, water contamination and water usage of the aquifer.
Though the Eyota ethanol plant meets MPCA and Minnesota DNR guidelines on air emissions and water usage, opponents said the environmental assessment worksheet didn’t meet their expectations.
In hopes of deflecting MinnErgy from Eyota, OC3 has garnered a lawyer, former MPCA hydrologist Paul Wotzka, and geologist and president of the Minnesota Trout Association, Jeffrey Broberg, to fight the proposal.
Broberg said the rate of groundwater depletion would be too much for old glacial melt water that sustains the Whitewater, Zumbro and Root rivers’ watersheds.
“It recovers and replaces itself through recharge at a very slow rate,” Broberg said. “We shouldn’t be taking from an area that feeds trout streams. They should be using tail waters and not headwaters.”
Broberg cited water depletion issues with other Minnesota ethanol plants in the Twin Cities and Granite Falls, where the ethanol plant there drained its aquifer by half in one year.
The ethanol industry uses about four gallons of water to make a gallon of ethanol, while it takes about 40 gallons to process a barrel’s worth — 42 gallons — of gasoline, Broberg said.
Most of Minnesota’s ethanol plants rely on municipal or well water. Broberg questions who has the right to water: the ethanol plant or a community’s residents. Minnesota has a water law that protects water users from interference, but it doesn’t prevent mitigation, Broberg said.
He also points to what he calls a less-than-stellar track record for Minnesota’s existing ethanol plants. In 2005, five of Minnesota’s then-16 ethanol plants paid fines for air and water pollution equipment violations, he said.
Both Broberg and Wotzka say the region’s permeable karst geography — with sinkholes and large cracks and crevasses — make deeper groundwater contamination more possible when a large water user such as an ethanol plant could suck from upper aquifers known to be polluted.
When the MPCA did its eight-day water usage tests in April 2007, it determined the water supply was sufficient, but Wotzka questions why water quality and dye tests weren’t run.
Opponents also say the ethanol plant would change farming practices for the worse in the community. An ethanol plant would lock farmers into planting fewer crops such as hay and more row crops like corn, which require heavy tilling and more fertilizer, nitrogen and other herbicides and pesticides, Wotzka said.
Land conservation has become the poor cousin of commodity prices with the surge in demand for corn-based ethanol, he said.
Ethanol future
The MPCA’s environmental assessment worksheet is open for public comment until Aug. 1. The agency will decide at that time if a further, more in-depth environmental study will be necessary. Meanwhile, an ad-hoc committee established by the city is reviewing the EAW. And MinnErgy is holding meetings to attract investors.
The debate over big ethanol will continue to rage in sleepy Eyota, where some people hope for a new way of life and others like Smith, who wouldn’t sell his property to developers, cling to the one they already have.
“I’m not a city folk, and I like to walk outside and take a leak if I want to,” Smith said. “I like my town, my kids go to school here. You rich people from Winona, put it in your town.”
Contact reporter Amber Dulek at amber.dulek@lee.net or (507) 453-3513.
