RAEFORD, N.C. -- The nation’s energy future could be growing in a farm field in Hoke County, about 90 miles from Raleigh.

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113 private investors, with help from the federal government, the state and the county, broke ground today for the state’s first plant producing ethanol from corn.  The $100 million facility would be one of the first on the east coast.

 

“We are going to make 75 million gallons of ethanol from corn initially,” said Greg Carlisle, an investor with Clean Burn Fuels LLC. “But we hope to eventually make it from all sorts of cellulosic materials, things like corn stalks, switch grass, the scrap wood from lumbering operations. “

 

Nationwide there are so many corn based ethanol plans that corn is in short supply, there’s a glut of ethanol, and investors are pulling out because they can’t make money.

 

But investors in the Hoke County plant say the facilities capacity to make ethanol from other products is the key to its success.

 

That’s why the state is backing research into all form of ethanol production.

 

“We’re concentrating more on agribusiness than ever before,” said Bruce Andrews, director of the North Carolina Department of Commerce. “I’ve been here 30 years and never saw the concentration on agribusiness like we have right now.”

 

The plant will employ about 100 people and production begins in 2009.