Work to secure multiple permits for a trash-to-ethanol plant on 240 acres north of Schneider now can begin.

The Town Council voted to annex the proposed biorefinery's footprint Thursday night, ending months of negotiation.

"We were defining the details of the annexation," said Earl H. Powers, owner of Powers Energy One of Indiana LLC. "Right now, providing we have all the permits in hand, we're hopeful of breaking ground Sept. 15, 2010."

Powers said the sooner he can start building the Schneider plant, the better. He said he hopes to have it up and running 60 days prior to July 30, 2013, -- making the company eligible for about $57 million from the U.S. Department of Treasury as a green energy incentive. These incentives were set aside as part of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The company needed to have the land before it could begin the permitting process, according to state law.

The trash-to-ethanol plant will be one of the first commercial plants of its kind in the country to be built, let alone permitted, Powers said. The plant will gasify trash and feed the gas to bacteria, which would feed off the gas and produce ethanol as a byproduct.

"I think it's going to be a fantastic thing for the town and county," said Richard Wright, former Schneider Town Council president and current council member. "It will bring jobs to the community and income to the town, and that's the best news we can get in this economy right now."

The town is expected to receive a minimum of $50,000 per year out of the deal, Wright said, and its residents will get a first crack at some of the new jobs.

The facility needs to be permitted by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau before the plant's construction can begin, according to those agencies.

Because the plant will produce ethanol, a type of alcohol, the facility needs to be permitted -- even though the 200-proof alcohol would be too strong to drink, Powers said. The permit process for facilities that produce ethanol for fuel "is far less complex than say a permit for beverage alcohol," said Art Resnick, director of public and media affairs for the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.

"They typically take between a month and a half to three months," Resnick said. "It can depend on the complexity of the operation, backlog in processing, etc.," Resnick said.

The plant also will need a solid waste permit, said Bruce Palin, IDEM's assistant commissioner of the office of land quality. Representatives from Powers Energy of America started talking with IDEM more than a year ago, he said, though the agency has not received any permit applications.

Palin said that is not uncommon.

"That's not surprising to me," Palin said. "There's a lot of things that go into siting these kinds of facilities and making sure you get all the proper support and local permits and approvals lined up as well. And so, particularly something like this that's unique, you never know what kind of other challenges you might encounter in the process."

Depending on how many changes go into an application before a permit is issued, Palin said a company could end up with added costs in order to abide by the final standards.

"It could have an impact in terms of what the final design of the thing looks like, so you wouldn't want to construct anything before you have the final permit," Palin said.

He said the permit process for the trash-to-ethanol plant will be just like other facilities that are evaluated on a technical, case-by-case basis.

Powers said he met with IDEM representatives for almost three hours in early March.

"We did meet with IDEM, and we had a real nice session with the regulatory authority and the IDEM's people that was there," said Powers, adding he was given pamphlets for the permits.

The air permit alone could take four months to approve, he said.

Powers owns one of the technology licenses managed by INEOS Bio, a multibillion-dollar chemical company. INEOS Bio has submitted a Florida permit application for a plant it plans to have running by late 2011, according to a company news release.

To speed up the Indiana permit process, Powers said his company plans to follow IDEM representatives' advice on submitting an approved Florida application along with its application to IDEM.

Powers said the Lake County plant will produce 160 million gallons a year when running at full capacity. The Florida facility is designed to produce 8 million gallons of ethanol each year, according to Florida state documents.

INEOS Bio applied for the permit at the beginning of February, said Trina Vielhauer, chief of Florida's bureau of air regulation.

The Florida plant will be licensed to handle vegetative and wood material, according its Florida application, and it later will experiment with municipal solid waste. The Lake County plant would be handling such waste from the first day of operation.

Earlier this month the Florida Department of Environmental Protection sent INEOS Bio a letter asking for more details on its estimated air emissions to take into account the "experimental basis" on which it will process trash.

Once the information is in, Vielhauer said the agency has 90 days to decide whether to issue a permit. If still more information is needed, she said, the company can reapply.

Vielhauer said it is a common wrong impression that these types of facilities do not release any harmful emissions into the environment.

"That's something that we hear, a misconception we hear a lot from some of these new technologies," she said. "There are actually air emissions from this process, that's why they need to get an air construction permit."

Vielhauer said the Florida plant is under the federal pollution emission threshold of 100 tons of any one pollutant per year. If it breached that number, she said the permit process would be more stringent, requiring additional air modeling and technology reviews.

Among other contaminants, the plant is estimated to emit about 91 tons of nitrogen oxides, 90 tons of sulfur dioxides and 16 tons of hazardous air pollutants each year, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Management. Nitrogen oxides contribute to ozone pollution and sulfur dioxides are best known for causing acid rain.

But Vielhauer said the expected pollution outputs are nothing compared with facilities that burn coal.

"If you're looking at a large, traditional coal-powered plant, their emissions can be in the thousands of tons," she said.

Facilities such as the Florida plant and Powers' plant are greener in that regard, Vielhauer said. Both will run off of steam generated by turning vegetation and waste into gas.