Adding More Value to Ethanol
New ethanol plant technology will be tested in Iowa. Renessen, LLC - the biotechnology company offspring produced from a mating between Cargill and Monsanto – has announced plans for a pilot plant in Eddyville that “has the potential to increase the profitability of corn growers, ethanol producers, and swine and poultry producers.” According to a company release, the plant will test a unique technology system in which new biotech corn hybrids with increased energy and nutrient levels will be combined with a novel dry corn separation technique designed for ethanol facilities.
By applying a novel processing technology with a high-nutrient corn specially adapted for the process, the system would allow a standard dry-grind ethanol plant to produce several products on site, including: corn oil for food and biodiesel; a nutrient-rich feed ingredient for use in swine and poultry production; a more easily fermentable ethanol medium; an enhanced form of distiller dried grains with solubles (DDGS), the standard cattle feed co-product of today’s ethanol dry milling process.
The new production process is expected to be more profitable because the nutrient-rich feed ingredient, the corn oil, and the enhanced DDGS produced in this new process all have potentially greater value than today’s traditional dry-grind ethanol co-products.
Link to the full release.
2 Comments »
Gary Dikkers
Cindy,
The ethanol industry needs to improve technology not only at the ethanol plant, but also at the industrial corn growing operations in the Midwest.
The truth is that modern corn growing with its fantastic yields is neither sustainable nor renewable, but instead is utterly dependent upon the application of massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizers made from natural gas — and more and more of that fertilizer is made from foreign natural gas and imported into the U.S.
My grandfather ran a corn farm where he rotated crops and used manure from his dairy cows for fertilizer. His operation was sustainable and could be considered renewable, but he also achieved corn yields of only about 40-50 bushels per acre.
Today’s industrial corn farmers can achieve yields of 140-160 bushels, BUT they can only do that by applying nitrogen fertilizers. By no stretch of anyone’s imagination can modern corn farming be called “renewable.” In fact, the only renewable corn farms in the country today are those run by the Amish (or those who farm as the Amish do) but unfortunately, the yield on those farms cannot match that of the industrial farms.
The unfortunate truth is that industrial, corn-based ethanol is not a “renewable” fuel and is only possible because of nitrogen fertilizers.
The weak link of the entire corn-based ethanol industry is nitrogen fertilizer, because the domestic supply of natural gas is outstripping demand, just as has already happened with oil. And that weak link means corn ethanol cannot be our liquid fuel of the future — at least not as long as corn farming itself is unsustainable and unrenewable.
Cindy
Definition time -
re·new·a·ble adj. Relating to or being a commodity or resource, such as solar energy or firewood, that is inexhaustible or replaceable by new growth
This is simply a matter of semantics and we are not going to agree here – so let’s just leave it at that. I say it is renewable because we can make more – you just don’t seem to like that word. So, replace it with biofuel or alternative fuel – whatever you like better.
As for the argument that producing fuel from crops consumes more energy than it yields. I like the quote from the Fortune article on that issue – “On this topic of endless Internet bickering, the Energy Department recently reported, “In terms of key energy and environmental benefits, cornstarch ethanol comes out clearly ahead of petroleum-based fuels, and tomorrow’s cellulosic-based ethanol would do even better.” I would like to let that be the last word on the matter.
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