HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- Pennsylvania is close to getting its first ethanol plant and could become the nation's largest producer of soy-based fuel additives within a year, the state's environmental protection chief said Friday.
Efforts to attract such businesses are part of Gov. Ed Rendell's wider directive to find alternatives to the hundreds of millions of gallons of transportation fuel from Persian Gulf oil that is used in Pennsylvania each year.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, Rendell's environmental protection secretary, Kathleen A. McGinty, said a ``very substantial'' company is close to announcing a large ethanol plant to be built in central Pennsylvania.
``We are very close, I would say probably two, at the most three, months away from a massive ethanol plant being announced,'' McGinty said during the interview in her Harrisburg office.
She would not name the company, but said it is possible the plant would be the largest east of the Mississippi River and could be built within a year. She pegged the cost at around ``a couple hundred million dollars.''
At first, the plant would ferment ethanol from corn, she said. But plans for the plant involve eventually using crop waste or dead forest timber to produce cellulosic ethanol, which is far more energy-efficient to produce.
Demand for ethanol is surging as a way to make gasoline burn cleaner while also cutting down on the greenhouse gases -- which are blamed for global warming -- that come from tailpipe exhaust.
McGinty also said planned facilities to make soy-based fuel additives, called biodiesel, would make Pennsylvania home to 40 million gallons of annual production. That compares to 75 million gallons produced nationally last year, a number that the Missouri-based National Biodiesel Board believes could double this year.
``It's not a stretch to say within 12 months we could be the leading state in the country in the production of soy-based fuels,'' McGinty said.
Soy-blended fuels are credited with burning cleaner and more efficiently in diesel engines, and are used by school districts, mass transit agencies, manufacturers and government agencies.
The state has one biodiesel producer up and running -- Keystone BioFuels in suburban Harrisburg. The company expects to make 1 million to 2 million gallons of biodiesel this year and has plans to expand.
A one-time top environmental adviser to former President Clinton, McGinty's name has occasionally surfaced as a potential future candidate for governor or U.S. Senate. She dismissed such talk Friday, saying she must suffer politics to be in public service.
``Politics is something I do not enjoy even a little bit, not a little bit,'' the Philadelphia native said.
Since joining the Rendell administration in 2003, McGinty has rankled the power industry and Republican legislators by calling for tougher automobile emission standards in Pennsylvania and tougher-than-federal regulations on mercury emissions from power plants.
She said, however, that she believes the public increasingly will be demanding ``clean, affordable and reliable'' energy sources, despite resistance from some quarters.
``What we're seeing with $3-a-gallon gasoline is the economic harm that we suffer for our failure to move to clean, more diversified energy sources,'' McGinty said.
Finding alternatives to Persian Gulf oil within a decade, as per Rendell's directive, would mean replacing 900 million gallons of transportation fuel, McGinty said.
One key to reaching that goal will be opening coal-to-gas plants, such as a $612 million project that is proposed for Schuylkill County and waiting for federal loan guarantees, McGinty said.
Photo: a former Miller brewery in Fulton, New York is also being converted into an ethanol plant. (AP)
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