Across the hall from scribbling students in the Seamans Center is a room filled with gauges, gas tanks, and warning signs. In these crowded quarters, experiments are underway to help reduce the use of coal in the UI Power Plant by “gasifying” seed corn and soybeans.

The seed corn and soybeans are stored in familiar-looking Tupperware bins, but they may not be immediately recognizable to some corn-fed Iowans. As if impersonating crayons, the corn is bright red and the soybeans royal blue.

“We don’t really want to eat corn anymore,” said UI graduate student James Ulstad, his gloved hands in the fluorescent soybean container.

The color is due to pesticides and fungicides surrounding the seeds, which helps them germinate in farmers’ fields.

“The coating is toxic, full of pesticides,” Ulstad said. “It has to be stored as a toxic waste.”

In the experiment, the seeds are placed under high heat in an environment without oxygen. The heat causes the material to break down into gases, which the researchers capture and study. The use of high heat or a long burn process permits them to reduce the toxic chemicals to harmless ones.

But because of the toxicity of the coating, plant officials are using caution before putting the seeds in the boilers, said Ferman Milster, an associate director of utilities and energy management for UI Facilities Management.

“I want some qualitative data in my hands that says we aren’t going to produce pollutants,” he said.

Iowa already has two plants that utilize these seeds: one in Muscatine and one in Cedar Rapids.

According to a report by the Iowa Energy Center, the Cedar Rapids plant had problems with “slag,” or the clogging of the boilers with ash. Keeping such challenges in mind, Milster said the implementation of seeds at the UI would include studying these plants.

Iowa produces some of the largest quantities of biofuels, said UI Assistant Professor Albert Ratner.

Any driver on the Interstate 80 can attest to the preponderance of corn and soybeans — according to the Department of Agriculture, Iowa is the nation’s leading producer of both. Because of the availability of material, biomass is an appealing alternative to coal.

“Companies such as Pioneer make about 14 billion bushels of seed corn a year,” Ratner said. “Ten percent is left over, so across the country you have a lot of material just sitting there.”

The UI Power Plant uses oat hulls in addition to traditional coal. But officials hope that seed corn and soybeans can be incorporated as well.

The incorporation of these seeds is part of officials’ larger goal to wean the boilers off of fossil fuels, Milster said.

Sometime this fall, officials plan to run a test burn of wood chips, and following a successful experiment, the plant would run a test burn of the seeds. If the tests go well, wood chips and seeds could replace some of the coal used in one of the boilers.

“Our vision is to get off coal,” Milster said. “We need to say it loud and clear.”