Paper 3

One day a little girl named Lizzie was sitting in the family car looking out the window. She was going to vacation to visit her grandmother who lived on the beach in Florida. Lizzie was ten years old and she had made the long drive every summer since before she could remember. From her home in Minnesota it would take days to reach Grandma. She, her brothers and sisters, and her parents had all squeezed into their station wagon for the long journey.

Sitting in the far back seat in the car, Lizzie became very bored. She watched the lines on the road as they went whizzing by her. She watched as they passed field after field, farm after farm, the only time they ever stopped was to eat or to put gas in the car. She wondered just how many times they had been to the gas station over just ten years of her life. They had been on the road since very early in the morning and Lizzie was still tired from waking up so early. She was sick of seeing the same old thing over and over again.

“Why is all this even here?” she said to herself. “No one could ever use all of this stuff! There must be tons of it! What can you even do with an ear of corn, anyway?”

With her head on the window, Lizzie closed her heavy eyelids. She heard the hum of the car more loudly now. The sound was louder than her parents talking about the beach, her brother tapping on the seat, even her sisters arguing in front of her. She wondered if she would ever want to see another ear of corn again.

Suddenly Lizzie jerked her head up. She had fallen asleep. Where was she again? She felt wind blowing through her hair. She felt itchy blades of grass brush across her leg.

“What?” she said puzzled. “Where am I?” She looked around. No longer was she sitting in the back seat of her parents’ old car. She was instead lying in a small patch of grass on the side of the road. She had no idea how she got there. The last place Lizzie wanted to be was lost in the middle of nowhere! “Why do I have to be in the middle of these stupid corn fields!” she said aloud.

“What do you have against corn?” a stranger said in the distance. It was a warm, friendly, voice coming from inside the corn field. A man walked out of the stalks of corn, brushing his red flannel shirt off and wiping his hands on his old faded blue jeans. “My name’s Joe, ma’am,” he said as he outstretched his hand to Lizzie, “and this here is my corn field.”

“I’m Lizzie, and I just don’t know why there is so much of it!” she exclaimed as she shook his hand. “More importantly I’m afraid I’ve lost my family, I simply must find them!” She looked up at him and saw that he had a warm smile on his face.

“Very well, Lizzie. I would be glad to help you get back to your family.” He proclaimed. “My farm is just up the road. We can use the telephone there. We better get a move on if we want to get back before dark.” Joe started walking along the road and Lizzie followed alongside, walking and talking with her new friend.

As they walked, Joe talked about himself. “I’ve been a farmer here in Iowa all my life. My father was a farmer and his father was a farmer, too. Lately though being a farmer has turned into something different. For years corn has been used as food for people and animals. Now there are some very new and interesting things that can be done with corn these days.”

“Like what?” Lizzie asked, curiously.

“Well, I guess I still grow the corn the way I learned how to from my dad, only now people want to use the corn to make these new biofuels. They can run cars on them now, just as good as on regular gasoline.”

“How in the heck do they make gasoline from corn?” Lizzie interrupted.

He put his hands in his pockets and shrugged, “Not gasoline. It’s a new biofuel called ethanol. It works just like regular gasoline, only it’s made from my own corn that I grow here. Say! We’re passing by an ethanol plant on the way home, if you like I could give you a tour,” he said. “I think it is actually is pretty exciting, but it shouldn’t take very long at all.”

“Well, ok. But we mustn’t take too long because I need to get a hold of my family,” Lizzie asserted, “still, this could be fun and I might learn something new.”

The pair walked along the road until they came to a small sign that read: “Bob’s Biofuels”. A small factory looking building was at the end of a small driveway. Half water tower half farm silo it looked almost brand new. “That’s my friend Bob’s new ethanol plant. I send him my corn after I harvest it. About ten days later he will have gallons and gallons of clean burning ethanol. Oh! Here’s Bob now” he shouted.

Bob was a kind looking, short man in a white lab coat and was wearing safety glasses. He came happily out of the door of what looked like the small office of the plant.

“Bob, this is Lizzie. She somehow got lost out here and I’m helping find her folks. Lizzie, meet Bob.” he chirped.

“Pleased to meet you, Bob.” Lizzie said “But exactly how can you do this? And why did people come up with this crazy idea?”

“Well it’s not too terribly complicated, let me show you around!” he bellowed. He took the pair through a set of double doors. They entered into a very tall room with several very big tanks. In the far corner there was what seemed to be a loading dock. Just then a truck backed into the window of the loading dock and began dumping corn onto a conveyor belt that whisked the corn off to other parts of the factory. “Ethanol is made from corn kernels, so we buy as much as we can from farmers like Joe, here” Bob said, “and we run it through a process called fermentation, which is the same process that is used to make things like wine or bread.”

“So people have known how to do this for a long time?” Lizzie asked.

“That’s right, for a very long time, Lizzie.”

“Then why is ethanol such a new thing?” she asked.

He replied, “We are starting to understand some very bad things about gasoline. It is becoming harder and harder to find and people have started fighting over it instead of share it. When we use it in our cars it makes bad pollutants that hurt the plants and animals in our environment, even us, too. It turns out that by using ethanol we will be doing the environment, and ourselves a favor. And we can all breathe a little cleaner air!”

He pointed to a big machine that the corn was being sent into. It was a very loud machine and Lizzie wondered why it was so noisy. “Our on site mill here grinds the corn into a powder and then we introduce water and enzymes. The corn is then broken up by enzymes into sugars. The enzyme we use is called ethanol dehydrogenase. It just grabs the sugars and changes them into alcohol. You know, like the sugar in candy.”

“That’s all you need to make ethanol, lots of sugar?” Lizzie asked.

“Well, mostly. Then we add yeast to the mix which begins the fermentation process. About 50 hours of fermentation are required until a solution called ‘beer’ forms. The beer is composed of stillage, a solid slush of the process and a large amount of liquid ethanol. The beer is distilled to evaporate the alcohol from the stillage, resulting in an ethanol that can be made into the ethanol that can be used by cars. Sadly, this creates a large amount of carbon dioxide, unfortunately. But we’ve now managed to start selling that carbon dioxide to companies who need it, so it goes to good use!”

They kept walking around the plant and Bob kept on talking about how great ethanol was for the environment and how it would help people to travel cheaper and faster. “It will revolutionize they way we think about how to use an ear of corn!” he said happily. The group walked past the largest piece of machinery. “This is the fermenter, where the enzyme ethanol dehydrogenase breaks down the sugars and turns them into the ethanol that we want… Lizzie, are you all right!?” he cried.

“I’m fine, Bob, why do you ask is every thing…” Lizzie said. But she knew something was wrong. The room stated to spin and the big machines in the room started to get bigger and bigger. Lizzie saw the floor coming faster and faster at her, SHE WAS SHRINKING!! Terrified she started running around in circles, but she fell into the fermenter! She couldn’t see Bob or Joe anymore, and things around her seemed to be getting bigger and bigger. She got so small that she was almost the same size as a corn kernel. She kept getting smaller, until she was the size of a molecule, just a few atoms across!

As she looked around at this new world, it was a mess of things bumping into each other. Each molecule she saw had its own unique shape and she could start to make out different kinds that Bob had been talking about. She saw the long sugars that came from the corn kernels. She saw how occasionally a blob shaped molecule would use a hook to grab onto the sugar, and changed its shape.

“That must be what an ethanol molecule looks like!” Lizzie said to herself. “Which means that the blob with the hook must be that ethanol dehydrogenase enzyme that Bob was telling me about! That’s how ethanol gets made!” She said.

“You’re right, Lizzie” she thought she heard a voice say. But she wasn’t sure. Lizzie realized again that she was lost, only now she was stuck inside an ethanol plant. She started to get a little scared. She closed her eyes and clasped her hands tightly together. This can’t be happening! She thought.

Before Lizzie could realize what had happened she found herself looking at a small gas station. There was an old station wagon parked out front with a familiar man filling up the gas tank. She looked closer at the small car and saw it was her car! In the back seat she saw a girl leaning, no, sleeping up against the window! Was it her sister? No, it was herself!

Just then Lizzie awoke and sat up straight. She was still sitting in the back seat of her parent’s station wagon. She was still sitting right next to her little brother. She must have fallen asleep somewhere during the journey! It must have been a dream! Had everything she had seen been a dream? Did she really go to an ethanol plant and meet Joe and Bob?

“Well I guess we’ll get some food soon.” Lizzie’s mom said to the whole family. “I think we’ll have to try some of this Iowa corn we keep seeing. What else could it be good for besides eating, anyway?”

“I think I know what else an ear of corn can be used for, Mom,” Lizzie said, “and it is better for us to use than gasoline” she exclaimed, “and better for the environment, too.”

THE END