RUTLAND, Vt. (AP) – The Rutland Redevelopment Authority is planning a feasibility study to see if the city could host a plant to make ethanol out of grass or wood chips.

Thomas Macaulay, a former state senator who is executive director of the Authority, said he envisions a project that would defeat some of the problems critics see with making the gasoline substitute from corn.

In a column appearing in the Sunday Rutland Herald , Macaulay said corn has been criticized as the feedstock for ethanol because ethanol production has cut into U.S. corn supplies, driving up prices both for food products and for feed used with livestock.

Macaulay said the Authority will study using grasses such as switchgrass or elephant grass as the source fuel for an ethanol-making process.

“Grasses are perennials, so that annual planting and regular fertilization is not required,” he wrote. “A corn-based ethanol plant in Vermont would produce unacceptable level of farm runoff into Lake Champlain, and therefore is not being considered as a feedstock in Rutland.”

If grasses don’t work, he added, the “feedstock could be raw wood or waste material from wood product and paper manufacturers.”

Production of ethanol from corn also is criticized for using too much energy, negating much of the energy gained from the new fuel, Macaulay noted. He would get around this by making heat needed for manufacturing ethanol from wind-powered electricity, or using waste heat from some other manufacturing process.

He said he hoped the Authority could share the results of its feasibility study with companies in the ethanol industry, “so that as soon as this process is proven to be economically viable at a commercial scale, a Rutland site will be ready for construction.”