A Florida company hoping to build the nation's largest biomass power plant says it is considering growing its controversial bamboo-like feedstock in Texas.

Innovative Energy Group of Florida (IEG), a Navarre-based subsidiary of Dubai's Innovative Energy Group, said it is encountering "significant challenges" obtaining up to 20,000 acres of suitable land in Florida to grow Arundo donax, also known as giant reed, according to company documents filed with the Florida Public Service Commission. Thus, IEG said it wants to give southern Texas' warm and wet climate a look.

"We have not given up on Florida," Robert "Schef" Wright, an attorney representing IEG, told Greenwire, "but we've had a hard time finding suitable land at a price that works."

IEG's preferred plan is to cultivate the reed in south-central Florida and turn the feedstock into synthetic oil using pyrolysis technology. An adjacent power plant would use the fuel to generate up to 130 megawatts for Progress Energy's fast-growing Florida service territory.

IEG is considering three undisclosed sites near Lake Okeechobee for the bioenergy complex. None of the tracts is amid the sprawling agricultural area that links Lake Okeechobee with the fragile southern Everglades, said Kevin Mills, a company vice president.

Several Florida botany and conservation groups oppose cultivating the reed, which IEG has branded "e-grass," because it has invaded wetlands in California and other Western states.

"This spread through floods in California," Mills said. "You're not going to have floods in a 20,000-acre area that's relatively flat."

In Texas, the perfect plot of land would be flat and near a coastal port-connected railroad or river, Wright said. IEG would convert the shredded reed into synthetic oil on site and ship it across the Gulf of Mexico by barge.

The company would likely build its Florida power plant somewhere between Tampa and Apalachicola, near Progress transmission lines, Wright said.

"We are looking at Plan A without giving up on Plan B," he emphasized.

But for either plan to work, IEG must convince state regulators that giant reed could be cultivated safely amid Hurricane Alley.

Testing on the horizon?

The Arundo that grows in North America doesn't produce a viable seed but spreads through underground roots and regenerative fragments. Even with marginal sun and soil, an Arundo root node as small as a cubic inch can grow into a plant up to 30 feet tall, scientists say.

Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services regulators have promised to study giant reed's invasive tendencies further if IEG requests a cultivation permit (Greenwire, Dec. 18).

If Florida deems Arundo a noxious weed, it would be ineligible for cultivation under any circumstances. The law in Texas is different.

According to the Texas Administrative Code, it is already illegal for anyone to sell, distribute or import Arundo and 29 other plants on the state's noxious and invasive plants list.

So in order to cultivate Arundo in Texas, IEG must send the state Department of Agriculture a detailed, written request for a permit. The agency has approved just two "experimental use" plantings of the reed since 2005, when the permit rule took effect, said spokeswoman Veronica Obregon.

She said it is too early to say whether IEG's proposed 20,000-acre farm complex would constitute more than an experimental use of giant reed.

"The company has not made its case to us, so I cannot answer that now," Obregon explained.

IEG would start cautiously if it were allowed to till the south Texas soil, Wright said.

The company would work with agronomy experts to test Arundo-control techniques on several plots of land initially, he said. IEG would try spraying herbicides, as well as tilling the earth several inches deep after a harvest to chop up regenerative nodes.

Just where the test- and commercial-scale sites would be, Wright wouldn't say.

"The ideal locations would be close to the Gulf Coast," he added. "The farther south, the better."