Ethanol Expert Proposes 'Sweet Solution'

KTIV - NBC - Siouxland

Posted: Sep 18, 2008 07:19 PM CDT

When you drive down the road you see a lot of corn and beans in the fields but researchers at Dordt have been growing sorghum in some of their fields all in the hope of producing a few gallons of ethanol. But, their research isn't for large production, it's meant for farmers to use on a smaller scale.

"We're looking for sort of a niche ethanol production model and the niche would be sort of the thirty to fifty acre farm which a farmer would harvest that much sweet sorghum and produce 12,000 to 16,000 gallons of ethanol in a year,a small operation," Associate Professor of Engineering at Dordt College Dr. Ethan Breu said.

Breu says its still not known how farmers would exactly use that ethanol, but he says sweet sorghum is used as more of a juicing crop, meaning the juice from the stalks is brought in, not the seeds. That's what the ethanol is made from.

How cost effective is this kind of ethanol? There's no price tag yet. But it does have it's benefits.

"The biggest difference between sweet sorghum ethanol and corn ethanol is you skip one of the cooking processes or the enzyme process that you need, to make ethanol from corn," Breu said. "It's a simpler process, you can go directly into the fermentation process using sweet sorghum juice.

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