BOSTON While the bloom has gone off the corn-based ethanol rose due to the food-or-fuel debate following a run-up in corn prices, a local biotech company is developing a clean and efficient way to produce ethanol from the cellulose in wood chips and grasses rather than from the starch in corn.

“We are using microbiology and biochemistry,” said Bruce A. Jamerson, CEO of Mascoma Corp., in a recent interview. “It’s advanced biotechnology working at the gene level.”

Mascoma has developed a proprietary method of producing cellulosic ethanol using enzymes developed at the company’s laboratories in New Lebanon, N.H.

The resulting sugars are then fermented with the genetically engineered bacteria by the astonishing name of thermoanaerobacterium saccharolyticum, which produces “ethanol with unprecedented efficiency,” according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and reported by www.sciencenow.science

mag.org.

The process produces two products — about two-thirds ethanol and the rest lignin, or core fiber, which can also be used as a fuel in pellet form, Jamerson said.

“I love this idea — I feel very passionate about it and the employees feel very passionate about it,” he said. “It’s a low-carbon, low-cost fuel.”

In general, he said, making ethanol “produces 50 percent of the carbon footprint compared to gasoline,” partly because the plants used to make ethanol absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during their growth and sequester the carbon in biomass and the soil.

In addition, when burned, ethanol produces some 50 percent less smog compared to gasoline, according to autos.yahoo.com.

Moreover, Jamerson cited a number of advantages of producing cellulosic ethanol from wood and grasses compared with starch ethanol from corn. For a start, cellulosic ethanol is not produced from a food source, he said.

An additional efficiency of cellulosic ethanol is the wood and grasses need less cultivation than corn. Cultivation of such crops as corn involve more diesel-powered farm vehicles and fertilizers, which drive up the carbon footprint.

Indeed, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley “concluded that using ethanol made from corn instead of gasoline would lead to a moderate 13 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions … (using) cellulosic ethanol … could result in 88 percent less greenhouse gas emissions,” according to yahoo.autos.com.

“It’s carbon neutral,” Jamerson said of cellulosic ethanol, adding that one of the scientists working on the project had told him, “If we do this right, it’s carbon positive.”

On the downside, ethanol from either source is more expensive to manufacture than gasoline and contains less energy.

Jamerson, a 57-year-old Michigan native, is a graduate of the MIT Sloan School of Management and a veteran of Wall Street and alternative-fuel production companies. Formerly with Credit Suisse (which took over First Boston), he moved to the West Coast as vice president of U.S. Natural Resources, an affiliate of investment firm Kravis, Kohlberg, Roberts & Co., and subsequently started his own investment firm before joining ethanol producer VeraSun Energy in South Dakota.

While there, he was hired to run Mascoma by famed West Coast venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who had invested in the fledgling company.

“I asked my family if they wanted to move to Boston and my kids said Yes! because of the Boston Red Sox, and my wife said Yes! because she has family here,” he said.

Jamerson said he met with Mascoma founders, Dartmouth University professor Lee Lynd and University of California, Riverside, (and formerly a Dartmouth) professor Charlie Wyman. He said he remembers visiting Wyman at his holiday cottage on Mascoma Lake, N.H., and together coming up with the name of the new company.

Jamerson said Mascoma was formed in 2005, “but really got going in 2006.” He officially joined in 2006 when it had 28 employees.

“Now we have 115,” he said, adding that about half of the 80 scientists on the company’s payroll have Ph.D.s.

Part of Jamerson’s job is soliciting investors. General Motors has signed a deal and Mascoma recently named Dr. Andreas Lippert, GM’s director of Global Energy Systems, to its Scientific Advisory Board.

Marathon Oil has also signed up with the company and Jamerson said he is “talking to others from the oil and chemical as well as consumer products and packaging industries.”

He said part of the appeal to potential investors was the “feel-good factor.”

“People want it,” he said, noting that some have said to him, “I want to invest in you because I believe in what you are doing. It’s absolutely mainstream, absolutely.”

He said the company has a 200,000 gallon-a-day cellulosic ethanol demonstration plant in Rome, N.Y., that will come online in December, and is building a 40-million gallon-a-day plant in northern Michigan that is expected to go online in 2011.

He said Marathon had pledged to buy the ethanol from the Michigan plant.

“We’ll take every gallon,” he said Marathon told the company. “We’ll buy it from you at market price.”

Jamerson also cited the economic and carbon footprint advantage of building small manufacturing plants close to both the biomass raw material and to the potential market for the ethanol.

He said it was a local market compared with crude oil, which has to be shipped from the Mideast and West Africa to Houston to be refined and then transported through pipelines to such end markets as Boston, for example.

Instead, he said, the biomass feedstock could be 50 miles from the plant and the market within a 100-mile radius.

Jamerson said he expects some form of cap and trade legislation to be passed in the near future and to become a major force driving the develop-

ment of alternative energy.

Under such a cap and trade system, the government sets limits, or caps, on the amount of pollution a company can emit. If it emits more, it can trade pollution credits with companies that emit less. Such a system provides economic incentives to curb pollution.

Jamerson said cap and trade legislation was recently defeated in the U.S. Senate, but he remains optimistic that it is just a matter of time before it is passed.

“Cap and trade is a driver of our business,” he said. “It’s the best way to allocate carbon limits, the free market system. It’s part of the trend that we are in, a trend that has legs.”

At the same time, he said ethanol was one of a number of different alternative fuels that would lead to energy security by cutting back on oil consumption and the pollution caused by its combustion, citing electric cars, gas-hybrid cars, ethanol-gasoline hybrid cars and clean-diesel cars.

“There are different pathways,” he said. “Multiple shots on goal.”

For more information, go to www.mascoma.com.

pelsworth@projo.com