ROCK FALLS – A company has found a new way to make energy from corn, and plans to create that energy locally.

BioPro, a renewable energy company based in Minnesota, plans to build a 25-megawatt biomass energy plant in the industrial park.

The company has developed a process that would create energy from corn stover, the leaves and stalks left after corn is harvested.

The plant will open in 2011 and employ 20 to 25 full-time employees and 40 part-time employees at the 3- to 5-acre plant, company President Phil Tollefson said during a formal announcement Wednesday.

The company plans to use the corn stover to produce energy that is cleaner and more efficient for power generation than fossil fuels, Tollefson said.

Tollefson, 60, of Portland, Ore., would not disclose the project’s total cost. Construction will begin in summer 2010 and last 12 to 18 months. Tollefson said there could be 100 to 200 construction jobs created by the project.

This would be the first plant of its kind to use corn stover to create energy, Tollefson said.

The company will work with farmers and collect all the corn stover itself.

“As we know, there’s a fair amount of corn in this part of the country,” Tollefson said.

To produce 25 megawatts an hour, the company will use 175,000 tons of corn stover a year.

The plant would be able to provide electricity for 19,000 to 20,000 homes.

The power that is produced will be sold to the PJM market, a regional transmission organization that supplies electricity in Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and the District of Columbia.

BioPro is a 4-year-old company with five employees based in Spicer, Minn. This would be the company’s first energy plant. It has been developing the process and system at the University of Utah and the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota.

Betty Steinert, director of the Whiteside County Enterprise Zone, helped bring the company to the area.

“In these hard economic development times, it’s especially nice to be able to report something positive,” Steinert said.

Paul Farral, a 40-year-old Prophetstown farmer, helped the company try out some of its equipment for harvesting the stock.

“All in all, everything went well,” Farral said. “They did everything they said they were going to do. I think it’s going to be a good thing for the area.”

About Corn Stover and the process

Corn stover is the stalks and leaves left over after harvesting the corn. Usually, stover is shredded and farmers try to put as much of its organic material back into the soil.

Without being too specific about the proprietary information, company President Phil Tollefson described the process Wednesday at BioPro's announcement.

The company will heat corn stalks to produce steam to run a turbine that connects to a generator. The waste from the plant would be fertilizer, which farmers could use.

"It's a win-win all the way around, a full recycled system," Tollefson said. "There's no environmentally hazardous material any of us will be looking at."