Harlan Anderson

The future of cellulosic ethanol – biofuel made from forages – has been reported as having great potential in the next 10 or so years. But not everyone thinks it’s viable.

“I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance in hell,” says Harlan Anderson, an outspoken hay grower from Cokato, MN. “It’s more efficient to make an ethanol product out of cellulose than out of grain,” he admits. “But the problem is that such a large volume of forage is needed and the logistics are so difficult. The cost of harvesting and transporting and dealing with it gets cost-prohibitive.”

Anderson, a progressive businessman and agriculture advocate, calls biofuel a “fad” that researchers are obliged to follow if they want funding.

History, he says, proves his point. He was excited about a 1996 Minnesota project to burn alfalfa stems for electricity. “I thought it was a good idea because I was looking for a market for my bad hay,” Anderson says. But then he learned the electric company would pay only $16/ton for the hay. That didn’t cover the cost of hauling it to the plant, he says.

The reason the idea was being researched, he says a university expert told him, was because there were dollars available. “They don’t give me money to do research on feeding alfalfa to animals, but there’s more money than I can spend if I’m willing to do research to burn it,” Anderson says he was told.

“And it goes back to the same thing with ethanol,” the hay grower adds. “I was really excited about it in the early 80s; I always maintained that the mash coming off it was very good feed. So I got a hold of some college friends and did some research. We came to the conclusion that it was not sustainable.

“Then the government came in and had to hitch its pony to an agricultural cart to try to turn the ag crisis around and happened to pick ethanol to throw money at. Even though the thing is not sustainable, with enough money it’s a fad and it’s here today. Although it may not be here much longer,” he says.

He says our priorities in regard to the energy crisis are messed up. “We really need to focus on saving fuel. We don’t need to justify fuel for the soccer moms to haul their fat little kids down to the soccer game; the kids can ride their bicycles like the rest of us did.

“I believe that history will show all this effort on renewable fuels will go down as a very bad thing because it took our focus off of saving fuel. We did a better job of that in the late 1970s. This illusion that we are going to ‘bio’ our way out of this energy thing, continue to drive our Suburbans and get our fuel back to $1/gal, has taken the focus away from the fact that we probably don’t need those Suburbans. We should look for ways to make our houses and our industry more efficient.

“The real benefit to alternative fuels is if we can find something that is a problem, like these big landfills. If they can truly generate methane gas and electricity, that’s positive. We need to make energy out of something that’s a problem. We can’t afford to raise the stuff to make energy.”