MILLINOCKET (AP) – A 29-year-old welder who put together a pilot plant that turns discarded potatoes into ethanol is waiting to see if what started as a hobby could have commercial possibilities.

Chris Jandreau, who built or repaired reactors and boilers for the past decade, hit on the idea of using northern Maine’s stockpiles of unusable spuds as an energy source that can be mixed with smaller quantities of gasoline to produce fuel for motor vehicles.

Jandreau noted that farmers 50 miles to the north have tons of unwanted potatoes they are struggling to unload.

“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,” he said.

The 30-foot-tall plant and 300-gallon reactor that Jandreau, his father and friends designed and assembled at his family’s greenhouse outside Millinocket can now make 32 gallons of ethanol per ton of potato wastes or 83 gallons of ethanol per ton of wheat.

The first plant was put together with copper pipe, a 6-gallon beer keg, a water-fountain pond pump and some garden hose.

“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.”

The moment of truth came in March after the amateur chemists finally refined the formula for motor fuel and Jandreau poured it into his 1999 Plymouth sedan.

Aside from some sputtering, the engine turned over fine. Further modifications to the still and formula have since produced clean combustion, with just a slight water vapor, he said.

Now, the car sports a sign that reads, “This vehicle is powered by E-85 fuel,” a reference to its 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline fuel mixture.

Jandreau’s backyard tinkering caught the interest of Town Manager Eugene Conlogue and state Rep. Herbert Clark, D-East Millinocket, who are helping him search for grants to expand the plant. Clark also helped Jandreau get state permits.

“It is an extremely exciting idea for this area,” Conlogue said. “It’s an alternative fuel that the country needs, and in the federal budget there is money for dramatic increases in production.”

Jandreau, a maintenance worker and welder at the Georgia-Pacific wood-chipping facility in Houlton, has hired an engineer to study the feasibility of ethanol production in Maine and to help design a larger plant that eventually could provide 200 jobs.

Jandreau cautions that with the ethanol market dominated by huge, decades-old plants in the Midwestern farm belt, any such business in Maine would face an uphill battle. At present, the ethanol he makes is for his own use and he has no deals with local gas stations to distribute the fuel.

“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.”

Jandreau said he’s gotten enjoyment from putting the plant together and has no regrets if it never goes beyond what’s already in place.

“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.”

—

Information from: Bangor Daily News, http://www.bangornews.com