On October 14, 2008, ground was broken in the Niles Ferry Industrial Park in Vonore (Monroe County) for a $40.7 million pilot-scale biorefinery and state-of-the-art research and development facility for cellulosic ethanol. The project was funded with the lion’s share of Tennessee’s $70 million investment in the Tennessee Biofuels Initiative. Mascoma Corp., a Boston firm, was to partner with Genera Energy, a new corporation established by UT. The two were to jointly develop and share the technology in an effort centered on the demonstration refinery in Vonore.
A year later, Mascoma had dropped out of the project and was replaced with DuPont Danisco, which had already been using corncobs (corn stover) to make ethanol. Genera officials decided to start the biorefinery using corn stover, rather than switchgrass, since Genera officials said that the two were chemically similar. Meanwhile, the production capacity at the refinery was slashed from 5 million gallons to 250,000 gallons. State legislators threatened to cancel funding for the project because of the changes but ultimately decided to move the project forward. DuPont Danisco Cellulosic Ethanol made a substantial contribution to the partnership to construct the high-tech facility. It began pilot-scale production in 2009 using corn stover. Dupont announced plans to build a commercial refinery—in Iowa—that would use corn stover.
Genera Energy accumulated, over a five-year span, some fifty thousand pounds of baled switchgrass, for which it paid farmers more than $2 million ($50 a ton). At the conclusion of the state’s five-year funding, Dupont had tested its proprietary process for using corn stover as biomass, and switchgrass had not been significantly utilized in the pilot plant.