BusinessTN

Back in May of last year, Doug Mizell, co-founder of Agro*Gas Industries in Cleveland, Tenn., attended Governor Bredesen's conference on alternative fuels at Montgomery Bell Park. Mizell and partner Tom Monahan had just formed Agro*Gas and wanted to see how they stacked up with the fuel industry producers across the state.

Agro*Gas approaches ethanol making in a discernibly different way than anyone else. Their emphasis is on the use of what they call "zero value feedstock," meaning making ethanol out of things that have no intrinsic value. That includes agro-waste products, industrial waste streams and cellulosic feedstock--stuff as strange as grass clippings, and yes, even kudzu. According to Mizell, there are over 7 millions acres of kudzu growing wild (and a foot per day) across the South that are of no use to anyone. Agro*Gas not only has a use for the South's most pernicious weed, it has a name for it and the ethanol product it leads to--Kudzunol.

"That's kind of the hook we use to get people's attention," Mizell admits.

How was Agro*Gas's innovative approach received at the conference?

"Virtually everybody there was following lemming-like to the marching drum of corn and soybean," Mizell says. "We told them at the time, 'Guys, you're putting all your money on something that's a commodity and as soon as the market can manipulate it, it will manipulate it and you're not going to be able to buy your feedstock to stabilize prices. They are going to be tremendously erratic, and you are doing yourself a disservice.'"

Mizell says that at that time his warnings fell largely on deaf ears. "We came out of that conference looking like the mad scientists," he sums up. "About the only people that were on board with us at the time were Gov. Bredesen's people who were looking at switchgrass. We felt like that was truly probably our only ally in the conference."

Time has borne out that Mizell wasn't so "mad" after all. The corn- and soy-based ethanol industry has been delivered a significant black eye in the past year as the diversion of massive amounts of corn into the ethanol space wreaked havoc on corn prices, effecting livestock owners, food manufacturers, consumers--even international aid groups watching U.S. charitable food giving shrink.

Thus all the current momentum for Agro*Gas and Kudzunol.

"Everybody's coming around to the fact that if the industry is going to survive, it's going to have to go to cellulosic," Mizell says. "It can't continue bucking the market and trying to buy corn at $8 a bushel and make $3 a gallon ethanol out of it. It's impractical and is not going to happen as long as there is greed in the market and they are trying to make fuel out of commodities. We're on the other side of that pendulum swing."

Presently, the pendulum swing could yield economic benefits for Tennessee sooner, rather than later. Agro*Gas is looking seriously at a 161-acre location in McMinn County on which to build a production facility.

So, beyond kudzu, what other "zero value feedstock" could power Mizell's idea? Because of contracts pending, Mizell won't divulge much in terms of what he means other than to say that "the food industry and beverage industry throw away a great deal of products in their waste streams that we can recapture and make fuel from."

He's also staying quiet about technological aspects of his proposed operation until he gets some licensing agreements in place and some process patents working. "Our lawyers tell us that's going to be a little while," he reports. "So we're ongoing trying to entice investment, telling people what we're doing to the degree we can."

As such, Agro*Gas remains in the embryonic stage. But it could grow up and grow big soon enough.