Farmers show keen interest in harvesting cobs
Jean Caspers-Simmet
Date Modified: 11/19/2009 10:36 AM
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Agri News staff writer
EMMETSBURG, Iowa -- Cellulosic ethanol is a reality and POET will produce it at its Project LIBERTY plant at Emmetsburg by 2011.
"We're making cellulosic ethanol today, and we're making it in a manner that is going to be profitable," said POET CEO Jeff Broin, as he showed slides of POET's pilot-cellulosic plant in Scotland, S.D., at last week's Project LIBERTY field day at Emmetsburg. "Two years ago, I would have told you that making cellulosic ethanol was a long shot, but today we've made enough progress that this process is a reality."
Broin urged Emmetsburg farmers to sign contracts to deliver cobs to the plant.
"We need you to deliver the biomass," Broin said. "You are an integral part of the process. The sooner we get everyone in Emmetsburg collecting cobs, the sooner we'll have this plant operating."
Broin cautioned that opportunities are limited and not everyone will get the chance to sell corn cobs to POET.
"Let us know of your interest, and we'll get the details hammered out later," he said.
"From a field in northwest Iowa we are seeing for ourselves that cellulosic ethanol is here, it is viable and it is helping transform renewable fuels as we have known them," said Iowa Lt. Governor Patty Judge. "This will help keep Iowa at the forefront of renewable fuels and help usher in the next generation of biofuels."
Iowa has invested $14.7 million through the Iowa Power Fund and $5.25 million through the Iowa Department of Economic Development in Project LIBERTY, the 25 million-gallon cellulosic ethanol plant that POET is building in Emmetsburg.
Last week's field day, was historic, said Wesley Clark, a retired four-star general and co-chairman of the ethanol lobbying group Growth Energy.
"We're here at the start of the first commercial-scale cellulosic ethanol plant in America," Clark said. "This is critical to American's national security. We're going from first-generation biofuels with corn to second-generation biofuels made with corn cobs. We can significantly reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources, strengthen our national security and make it much less likely in the future that our sons, daughters and grandchildren will be sent overseas to fight a war in some part of the world just because we got oil from there."
Clark said farmers need to tell the powers in Washington that the EPA must change the ethanol blend limit from E10 to E15. If EPA won't do it, then farmers must ask Congress for a law.