Reynolds, Indiana doesn't look like the town of the future. But the little Midwestern town has one thing going for it. Hog manure. Lots of it. Until last year, that didn't seem like a plus for the town where hogs outnumber people 3 to 1. But then the state government got the idea to turn the town's biggest problem into its biggest asset. The result? BioTown, USA.

"The goal is to create a new use for the manure that's surrounding the town—as a biofuel," Deborah Abbott of the state agriculture department told INtake magazine. Enough biofuel, in fact, to make the town energy self-sufficient within two years.

For starters, the town's residents are buying and leasing cars and trucks capable of running on ethanol, thanks to a special offer from General Motors. By year's end, the town's only gas station should be selling E85, a mix of 85% ethanol and 15% conventional petroleum.

The ethanol they'll be fueling up on comes from corn, and next year the town hopes to install power-generating equipment to run their homes and businesses by burning gas made from local manure. Local soybean crops could also contribute to the town's energy self-sufficiency through biodiesel production.

BioTown, USA is proving that corn and soybeans aren't just for feeding cattle anymore. In fact, there's a good chance your car's running in part on corn-based ethanol already, and many municipal and corporate fleets run on soy-based biodiesel. And with gasoline prices skyrocketing, the race is on to pump up production of these biofuels and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But what are ethanol and biodeiesel? Where do they come from, and how do they work? Are they really the fuels of the future, and are they really cleaner than petroleum-based fuels?

Ethanol and biodiesel are biofuels, fuels derived from living organisms or their by-products (like hog manure). For automobiles, there are currently two main biofuels—ethanol and biodiesel. Ethanol is simply another word for alcohol, the same stuff that's in your piña colada. For cars, it's typically mixed with gasoline to create gasohol. Almost all the 16 billion liters per year of ethanol produced in the U.S. comes from corn. That's good news when it comes to breaking our dependency on foreign oil, since we don't have to import corn from the Middle East, but the fact is we couldn't produce enough ethanol to satisfy our current gluttony for auto fuel if we planted the whole country with corn.

Some critics fear the ethanol boom will lead to a shortage of corn for food, and that its production just masks the use of fossil fuels since mechanized farming techniques requires large amounts of petroleum-based fuels. But ethanol is in fact produced from agricultural residue (corn stover) rather than the edible portion of the plant. It can also be made from the 100 million tons of animal waste produced every year in the U.S.

Because it comes from living organisms, ethanol is renewable and biodegradable. And it offers dramatic environmental improvements over gasoline. A fuel mix of just ten percent ethanol blended with gas (called E10 and available at many filling stations in the Midwest) can reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter by up to 30%. The Canadian government estimates that, "If 35 percent of gasoline in Canada contained ten percent ethanol, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced by 2 million tons, which is the equivalent of removing more than 400,000 vehicles from the road."

Like ethanol, biodiesel is renewable, biodegradable, and greener and cleaner than gasoline. But while corn is the primary raw material for ethanol in the U.S., it's soybeans that provide the oil to make biodiesel. Biodiesel offers an important alternative to petroleum-based diesel fuel, good news for the environment since diesel engines are responsible for half the air pollution in the U.S.

While soybean production for biodiesel raises concerns similar to those over ethanol, they're both coming on strong. Biofuel plants are sprouting up all over the Midwest faster than a spring soybean crop, and as University of California Professor of Energy & Society Daniel Kammen suggested in a recent New York Times article, "I think you can really see ethanol comprising 25 to 30 percent of gasoline consumption within 10 years."

Environmentalists should take comfort in knowing that no one is talking about replacing gasoline with biofuels, since farming plants for biofuel production on that scale would pose a significant environmental hazard. Rather, biofuels are seen as a transition to even more environmentally friendly alternatives. But in the meantime, they're much greener than gasoline. So much greener that down the road from Reynoldsville at the Indy 500 next year, cars will be running on 100% ethanol. Right about that same time, BioTown, USA should be achieving energy independence thanks to an abundance of hog manure, corn, and soybeans. Sure beats chasing after oil.

Photo: United States House of Representatives