With corn no longer the darling of the biofuels set, curious minds are looking far and wide for something else — anything — to turn into ethanol, including switchgrass, sorghum and seaweed.

In Otero County, it could be cattails.

At least that’s the vision of Peggy Korth, president of Sustainable Technology Systems Inc. and the author of two books on biofuels, The Alamogordo Daily News reported Thursday. Korth asked the Otero County Commission on Wednesday to have her company study the feasibility of using cattails to make ethanol at a plant in Alamogordo.

Commissioners said they would mull it over.

Cattails, the tall, thin wetland plants with the distinctive furry tops, are high in the sugars and starches necessary to make ethanol, Korth told the commission. The plants could yield more than 1,000 gallons of fuel per acre every year, she said, though she also said no one has used cattails yet to make commercial volumes of ethanol.

While Korth apparently didn’t propose any particular size for the facility, she said a 5 million-gallon plant might take up about two acres of land. Responding to commissioners’ concerns about water use, she said cattails do well in foul water and suggested the city could grow them using municipal wastewater.

Biofuels are a booming business in the United States, with production growing nearly 50 percent in the last year alone — from 529 million gallons in May 2007 to almost 800 million gallons in May 2008, according to statistics from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. There’s still a long way to go, however, before producers meet the goal set by Congress in the Energy Security and Independence Act of 2007, which calls for 36 billion gallons of ethanol yearly by 2022.

Ethanol can be used in place of gasoline, to varying degrees. Most cars can run on gasoline that contains 10 percent ethanol, but newer vehicles with special engines can use gas with as much as 85 percent ethanol.

But where to get the ethanol remains a question. The use of food crops or of land that could be used for food production has come under fire, turning researchers’ attention to other potential sources. In Las Cruces, a company is looking into algae. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory and elsewhere think a type of fungus could be the key to unlocking vast quantities of ethanol from other types of plant material. Some say household waste taken directly out of the landfill will yield ethanol.

Korth told the Otero County Commission that cattails and even the much-maligned salt cedar could be used to make ethanol in places like Alamogordo. "Now more than ever we need to align local resources for self-sufficiency, and we can," she told the panel.