Burley Ethanol Plant
The ethanol story that never goes away and that may be a good thing. Hey dairy producers, I don’t want to get you mad at me by suggesting ethanol plants should be using all your corn and driving up feed costs so that ethanol can be produced. Because it isn’t quite that simple. First of all we’ve been telling the story for months that cellulosic ethanol is a technology that relies on useless biomass materials like cheatgrass and wood chips to produce fuel. But now Vice President Paul Koehler of Pacific Ethanol reports that the plant in Burley has a court approved plan to reopen the 60-million gallon per year plant at the first of the year. Does that mean corn produced ethanol? John Crocket of the Idaho Department of Energy says yes but that doesn’t necessarily have a negative impact on dairymen: I tell people that every week we have hundreds of train loads of distiller dry grain coming in from the Midwest ethanol plants to feed our dairies. Our niche here in Idaho, David, is we don’t have to dry that distiller’s grain, we can feed that to the cows wet, and that is a huge cost advantage in both capital cost and operation cost.”
