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MILLINOCKET – Chris Jandreau is not the kind of guy who collects balls of string or keeps his basement stockpiled with junk, but he hates waste. And living in Millinocket about 50 miles south of potato-growing country, he sees waste.
Literally tons of it.
“It varies from each farm. Every place I’ve been to, it’s varied from 3 tons to 150 tons of potatoes,” Jandreau said Monday. “You get everything from cull potatoes to rotten potatoes to pick-out potatoes. Some have holes in them, some are sprouting, some are last year’s potatoes, and farmers are looking to get rid of these potatoes, bury them, throw them away. Anything they can do to get rid of them.”
The 29-year-old welder also has a lot of experience working on reactors and boilers. For the last 10 years, he has helped build or repair reactors that make biodiesel fuel, women’s cosmetics, hairspray and cooking oil in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Oklahoma.
All of this, and Jandreau’s natural inquisitiveness, eventually prompted a thought – why not use the area’s enormous farm waste products to make ethanol?
That was in January.
Today, Jandreau operates a 30-foot-tall pilot plant and 300-gallon reactor that uses potatoes, wheat, corn and other farm-waste products to create 160- to 200-proof ethanol fuel. The plant at his family’s Iron Bridge Road greenhouse just outside town produces 83 gallons of ethanol per ton of wheat and 32 gallons of ethanol per ton of waste potatoes, he said.
He mixes his ethanol with gasoline on the premises and uses the product to power his 1999 Plymouth sedan. A sign on the car reads, “This vehicle is powered by E-85 fuel,” in reference to its 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline fuel mixture.
Like any backyard tinkerer, his journey from naked thought to finished product is dotted with missteps and near-disasters, but it has been intriguing enough to draw the attention of Town Manager Eugene Conlogue and Rep. Herbert E. Clark, D-Millinocket.
Conlogue and Clark are helping Jandreau search for grants that would help him more than double the size of his plant. Jandreau has hired an engineer to study the feasibility of ethanol production in Maine and to help design a larger plant, one that eventually could employ 200 or more people.
Clark also helped Jandreau get state permits.
“It is an extremely exciting idea for this area,” Conlogue said Monday. “It’s an alternative fuel that the country needs, and in the federal budget there is money for dramatic increases in production.”
But Jandreau doesn’t want people thinking that an ethanol plant is anything close to a done deal. With huge ethanol plants existing for decades in the nation’s Midwestern farm belt, any such business faces an arduous uphill battle in Maine, he said.
“I don’t want to give anybody any false sense of hope or anything,” Jandreau said. “In Millinocket, people really want jobs, and I don’t want to misrepresent that there’s a big company or big jobs coming to town or anything like that.”
Many basic steps haven’t yet been taken, and very large questions remain unanswered, Jandreau said. The ethanol he makes is for his own use. He doesn’t yet sell it and has no deals with local gas stations to distribute it, though he would like to pursue that.
Nor does Jandreau, a maintenance worker and welder at the Georgia-Pacific wood-chipping facility in Houlton, have any real idea if ethanol production is truly economically feasible in Maine. That’s what the engineer and study will help determine, he said. If he were paid for his work and had to buy the farm wastes farmers give him, production probably would cost him money.
“This was a hobby, and everybody’s turned it into a business thing,” Jandreau said. “I have more fun with it, experimenting with it and making my own fuel.”
The experimentation followed a great deal of Internet research Jandreau did with his father, Gary Jandreau. About 20 friends, including Chris Manzo, Mark Bishop, Benny Fitzgerald, Tom Plourde and Dennis Moscone, helped design and build the basic reactor, among other things.
Created in January, the first plant used copper pipe, a 6-gallon beer keg, a water-fountain pond pump and some garden hose, Jandreau said.
“The recipe to make the alcohol was the hardest part,” Jandreau said. “We have been messing with it and messing with it to produce a high-quality alcohol. I had two sips of it, and it ain’t nothing you really want to drink. It’s rugged, and it’s illegal as hell, too, if you make it for drinking.”
It wasn’t until Feb. 10 or so that the amateur chemists hit upon a formula that might work as a fuel, and a month after that before Jandreau had the guts to try pouring it into his Plymouth. Images of himself getting blown all over Penobscot County forced Jandreau to seek liquid gallantry before he turned the key, he said.
“I had to get drunk to try it, to be honest,” he said. “I didn’t dare not to. I thought it was going to burn up the vehicle or break something.”
Yet aside from some sputtering, the car’s engine turned over fine. Modifications to the still and formula have since produced clean combustion – no smoke or odor, just a slight water vapor, he said.
Still, Jandreau’s hopes of turning his ethanol production plant into a big business are grounded by their origins.
“When this started out for me, it was as a hobby and it’s growing slowly for me,” he said. “If something happens with it, it happens. If not, no big deal.”
Conlogue is more optimistic.
“Chris has high energy, a solid idea, and he has put that idea to use in the pilot plant that he has constructed and in the vehicle that he is using,” Conlogue said. “So he obviously understands the process of making ethanol, because he’s doing it, and he understands the economics of it, because he is working with potential investors. Those are all very critical pieces for an entrepreneur who is going to be successful.”
Jandreau promised to stick with it.
“I’m still fascinated by the idea of turning waste into fuel,” he said.
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