RUMFORD – Government start-up money is being sought to build a plant in western Maine that makes oil from trees. They don’t have to be special trees: They can be twisty, gnarled, scrap or dead, and Maine has plenty of them.

The proposal has drawn the attention of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Congress is being asked to approve a $2.8 million request to move a Rumford demonstration project forward, and the Maine Legislature has advanced $65,000 to put a proposal together.

The pyrolysis process involves heating finely ground wood and bark up to 450 degrees Celsius in an oxygen-free environment until it thermally cracks, in effect reducing it to its most elemental parts before it formed the tree.

What results is a complex chemical soup called pyrolysis oil, similar to home heating oil. Chemicals can be extracted to make hydrogen, pharmaceuticals, food ingredients, cosmetics, detergents and plastics.

Envisioned in Maine is a pyrolysis reaction unit, a hydrogen extraction unit and sometime later, a small refinery.

Scott Christiansen, executive director of the project, said the plan fits into western Maine’s natural resources-based economic and employment scenario.

“We have a few things in abundance: snow in the wintertime, air, land, water, trees, space,” said Christiansen.

He compared the list of what’s abundant in Maine to what the nation would need in 10 or 20 years, and came up with energy. That led to the notion of turning trees into renewable energy.

Christiansen and council president Joe Derouche flew to NREL, in Golden, Colo., at the end of 2001 to gather information on a device to convert wood pellets to gas for home heating.

While there, researchers handed Christiansen and Derouche a small piece of plastic and told them it was made “out of a tree we melted” using new technology. It all clicked.

The men flew to Washington, D.C., to lobby Maine’s congressional delegation for funding to support a project. They were told that before any money is handed out, they’d have to offer a technically perfect pyrolysis proposal.

An analysis by Ken Laustsen of the Maine Forest Service found 400,000 tons of wood could be taken from Oxford County annually for pyrolysis, in addition to what’s already being harvested, without endangering the resource.

A full-sized plant would use 500 tons of wood a day, 182,500 tons a year. One ton of dry wood makes about 150 gallons of oil. So one plant could make 650,000 barrels of oil.

“That’s just one plant; there’s nothing to say another one couldn’t be five miles away,” said Christiansen.

A successful venture could create hundreds of jobs.