Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Pilot plant making ethanol from corn cobs in S.D.

A new program is testing the viability of using corn cobs to make ethanol. "A pilot-scale facility located at Scotland, S.D., has become the first such plant to produce ethanol from corn cobs," writes Dave Russell of Brownfield. The POET company has set up the pilot facility and says the process has run smoothly and that corn cobs are an excellent source of biomass for ethanol production. (Flickr photo by Dragonseye)

POET CEO Jeff Broin claims there are other benefits to using cobs. "Because they are being grown today, they don’t require farmers to grow a new crop," said Broin. "And there are lots of them, enough to produce 5 billion gallons of ethanol every year, that’s 5 billion gallons of ethanol that can come from what is a waste product today." Broin says a full-scale facility should be operational by 2011. (Read more)

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