Midwest Ag Facility Helps Bring Ag Products to Market

Yanhong Zhang is the interim director and research director at the National Corn to Ethanol Research Center. The NCERC was first envisioned in the 1990s by the National Corn Growers Association, which saw the potential of corn as the foundation for a biofuel economy, turning corn flour into ethanol.

“They saw the need to build a R&D unit to help development of this industry. So through the 1996 Farmdale, we got $14 million with the help from Senator Dick Durbin and Congressman John Shimkus, and we also got $7 million from Illinois D CEO. With the $21 million we built this pilot facility on the campus of SIUE is mostly helping to validate new technologies developer through startup company or big company or universities and to we validate and optimize those technologies so they can take it to the industry. And because of NCERC, we actually done a lot of those work in the past over 20 years.

In addition to validating other companies new technology ideas and SERC also develops their own technologies, additional biofuels and other corn based products.