A Missouri-based energy company has launched a biomass division expected to create up to 27-hundred new jobs through next-generation, farmer-grown, renewable energy.

MFA Oil – in partnership with Texas-based Aloterra Energy - has created MFA Oil Biomass after several years of researching numerous energy crops. More than 200 farmers have committed to growing miscanthus, a perennial crop, for conversion first into energy pellets for power generation and then other energy products, such as ethanol.  Three geographical areas have been chosen for the project:  central Missouri, southwest Missouri and northeast Arkansas.

Jared Wilmes is MFA’s Biomass project coordinator.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about this in the past but there’s never been a company that’s really been able to aggregate everything together to work with the farmer, to work with the end-user and to kind of make it all work from the logistical standpoint,” Wilmes tells Brownfield.

The end users include farmers themselves for on-farm energy use, power companies, the University of Missouri’s biomass boiler, and the city of Columbia which has a self-imposed 15 percent renewable energy mandate.

But the project is built on the USDA’s BCAP incentive program that pays farmers to establish biomass crops. House Republicans have greatly reduced BCAP funding in their budget proposal but it remains alive in President Obama’s budget. MFA says they’ll know in two weeks if their designated areas are selected. Either way, MFA says they’re moving forward because there is growing demand and a growing need for biomass energy.

MFA president Jerry Taylor says the goal is to produce cellulosic ethanol – which the federal renewable fuels standard, the RFS2 calls for – and a variety of energy products from miscanthus.  He says the BCAP program is meant to help farmers meet the growing demands and its part of the need to break the nation’s dependency on foreign oil.  And, then, there’s the climate debate.

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