RICHARDTON - The lunchroom at Red Trail Energy, a new industrial presence in Richardton, smells like a college dorm.

In T-shirts, jeans and lace-up boots, the guys heating up a no-vegetable-or-fruit-in-sight lunch of frozen pizza and chicken strips look like college dorm guys in hard hats.

Except for food choices, they're past those days.

Now, they're young workers in the youngest industry in the state.

The operators - average age 25 - are running a $100 million plant that distills golden kernels of No. 2 corn into ethanol, 50 million clear gallons of the fuel additive every year.

Most of them, young as they are, are graduates of plant process programs in North Dakota and are already experienced hands from ethanol projects out of state, mainly Minnesota.

Red Trail Energy, which went on line in January, was the trail back home for half of the 41 workers at the plant. They keep it running 24/7/365.

Coming home is not always so simple. Some expatriates wait decades for the right opportunity to come down the road.

By contrast, the way to make ethanol is fairly simple: Raw corn in, fuel out.

Between the in and out is the process - corn ground into flour, mixed with water and enzymes, heated to 225 degrees, cooled, fermented in tanks with yeast, nitrogen and glucose to 18 percent alcohol and finally distilled to 200 proof ethanol.

Excess water is cooled and recycled and the corn mush is dried into tortilla-smelling golden flakes and sold as distillers grain to livestock producers.

Semis rumble in and out all day, bringing in corn and hauling out the livestock feed product. Richardton rocks and then it rolls. The ethanol gets loaded into railroad tankers and shipped primarily to West Coast markets down the BNSF Railway.

Red Trail is one of only three ethanol plants in the country that use coal as a fuel source. The sub bituminous coal comes by rail from Montana, though the plant started up using North Dakota lignite. Some problems with conveying and combusting the clayey lignite will have to be solved before it's used again, said Ed Thomas, plant manager.

Thomas, 28, said he's used to the "you look awful young to be running this outfit" eyebrow lift he gets from plant visitors.

Truth is, though, he fits the industry profile - young, educated, a knack for mechanics and completely at home putting that knowledge to work making ethanol.

"It's a good fit," he said. It's what he plans to do for a career.

He said the plant is starting to turn a slight profit and investors could see dividend payments this year.

Mick Miller, 29, left an ethanol consulting group in Minnesota to be general manager at Red Trail Energy.

He loves the ethanol industry, and the job was a way for him and his young family to come back home.

"We love the Missouri River. You can't beat Bismarck-Mandan in the summertime," he said.

It was something along those lines that Miller and others hoped to hear when they interviewed potential employees from among the 300 applicants who wanted to work at the plant.

"We were after people who wanted to explain to us that they wanted to be in North Dakota," Miller said. "North Dakota natives came at us a lot."

Jean Butterfield - Richardton High School class of '82 - was among them.

She and her husband, Bill, lived in Phoenix for a decade and then moved to Fort Worth, Texas. She was a pharmacy chemist; he was a golf instructor and stay-at-home dad.

She applied at Red Trail more than a year ago and said if she was offered the job, it was a "done deal."

By the time they hit Nebraska, they could smell the good clean air of the Great Plains.

It's been a year since they returned to live on her family farmstead north of Richardton, with kids, horses, cows and dogs.

She manages the lab from which operators come and go all day with samples from tanks and valves around the plant that need testing for microbe and other counts. She grins when she looks at the operators, fresh-faced, most young enough to be her own kids - and she's young herself.

"It's been a good year," she said. "It's kind of nice to throw on a pair of jeans and go to work."

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@;westriv.com.)