On a recent sunny afternoon, school children climbed off the bus in the working-class neighborhood that bumps up against the site of the proposed plant. Local residents battled its developer for 15 months, trying to prevent construction.

"We're worried about the water and the pollution. You don't want to run the risk of having your children exposed to this if you have an opportunity to do something about it," said Wendy Schneider, a working mother with two small children and a new home that will overlook the ethanol plant.

The stories are familiar. Whether it's Rockford, Illinois, or Grinnell, Iowa, or Fayetteville, North Carolina, agribusiness and small towns are colliding as today's rush to produce green fuels threatens to drown out citizen protests.

"We are seeing a huge amount of investment in ethanol without having all these matters addressed in terms of the economics, the energy demand and the emission output," said Henry Henderson, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's office in Chicago.

"NRDC supports biofuels to get out of our addiction to oils," he said. "But if we don't do it right, this will be a net loss of limited capital going to investments that aren't sustainable."

Industrial agriculture and residential communities have clashed noisily before, as when subdivisions have spread out into areas where odors and pollution concerns from big hog farms have sparked confrontations over zoning and land rights.

But rarely has there been such a gold rush for any farm product as for corn-based ethanol, a fuel long belittled by the fuel industry -- but now, thanks to President George W. Bush, suddenly targeted as the magic bullet for the US energy crisis.

GREENBACKS VERSUS GREENS?

As oil prices shot above US$50 a barrel two years ago, Congress passed legislation requiring ethanol use to increase to 7.5 billion gallons by 2012, up from 5.6 billion gallons in 2006. Oil imports and global warming were reasons cited.

But Bush, in his State of the Union address in January, jolted oil companies, farmers, environmentalists -- and consumers -- by calling for 35 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2017 to cut US gasoline use by 20 percent.

Now, the 116 corn-based ethanol plants currently on line in the United States stand to be joined by another 81 ethanol refineries under construction. Eight more are expanding, adding overall more than 6 billion gallons of ethanol production capacity when complete.

Farmers and their Congressional lobbyists have been delighted, seeing corn prices double even as they plant every acre they can lay their hands on. Oil refiners, needing ethanol to replace the cancer-causing additive MTBE, are positive.

But environmentalists have been raising a red flag at the juggernaut, and painting it green.

They cited the plants as polluters themselves in the US government's decision last month to allow corn milling plants that make ethanol for fuel to put out up to 250 tons of polluting emissions a year, more than double the current limit.

"We are concerned that some of these distilleries' environmental impacts have not been appropriately thought about," said Mark Muller, director of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis.

By far the biggest worry is ethanol production's drain on water. Ethanol plants use anywhere from 3.5 to 6.0 gallons of water to produce 1.0 gallon of ethanol, according to a 2006 study by the Institute of Minnesota plants. The Renewable Fuels Association, the top booster of ethanol, says only 3.0 gallons are needed.