Emerald plans four 100m gallon/year ethanol plants

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(automatically updated/inserted from The Big Biofuels Blog)


Emerald Renewable Energy plans to develop four 100 m gallon/year ethanol plants in the Midwestern United States. The newly formed company is considering several potential sites in the Cornbelt.

The firm is a wholly owned private subsidiary of Cargill and will be taking advantage of the firm's existing infrastructure
Scott Portnoy, Cargill corporate vice president with responsibility for its Biofuels and byproducts businesses says:

"Emerald Renewable Energy will have access to Cargill's world-class expertise in trading, sourcing corn, plant construction and operations, risk management and bulk commodity transportation”

It is interesting to see a large integrated player such as this emerge from Cargill. They are going to be going for economies of scale...

Each plant will use nearly 40 million bushels corn/year (about 1m tonne/year) annually and produce 100 million gallons/ethanol (about 37m litres) and over 300,000 tons of dry distillers grains for animal feed each year.

Cargill adds

The plant sites being considered include greenfield locations as well as co-locations with Cargill grain elevators and other utility infrastructure providers. The plants are expected to create about 40 jobs per location.

The plants will not be close to the largest markets for gasoline, but they will be pretty big, and are could be close to rail heads. This could make transporting the ethanol they will produce across the states easier and more efficient than trucking the stuff. Of course pipelines would be better, but the capital involved would be pretty steep.

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