Why Some Alcohol Plants Are Not Making Alcohol.


There may be another reason why the alcohol factory decided to not try to make or sell any of the alcohol that they could have made. I have a son-in-law in farming up in the thumb area of Michigan and the price of corn has more than doubled in the last year. When speaking with him, I learned that the capacity for farmers all over the United States to make enough corn to satisfy the cattle feed lots, plus the milk cows (which is why the price of milk has doubled in the last few months) plus the fermentation plants planning to make ethanol by fermenting corn is not enough. They cannot satisfy all the new and old markets for corn. The price of corn has more than doubled and I think that is why the Bangor plant has decided that the corn feedstock for the Bangor alcohol plant is too expensive to make any profit. My guess is that the Bangor plant is waiting for changes that will allow them to use a feed stock other than corn.
There are three sources of raw material that can be used to make alcohol from a fermentation (corn, wheat, rye, ) process or to make a substitute for diesel or heating fuel. The first source is the corn that the Bangor plant planned on using as the raw material, but now the price of corn is too high.
The second source of substitute diesel or heating fuel is the high temperature, high pressure, processing of the tons and tons of turkey or chicken guts left after processing for the meat market. This second process is not a fermentation process and the Bangor plant cannot use this process because the plant was designed to use only fermented corn (or other grains) as a feed stock. The high pressure, high temperature process product is an oil, very light, and nearly the same as heating or diesel oil made from crude oil. This second process is much more forgiving as to the type of feedstock that such a plant can handle. There have been reports of using ground up old automobile tires as a feed stock for the high temperature, high-pressure process and it works very well. However, the product is not suitable for use in making automobile gasoline.
The third source of raw material that can be used to make alcohol suitable for mixing with gasoline to make a fuel for cars is the nearly unlimited supply of cellulose. Cellulose is the corn stalk, not the corn itself. Cows and other ruminants eat grass, corn stalks (silage), plus a large list of cellulose containing plants. Cow’s stomachs have several processes going on beside just a fermentation process. The several cows’ stomachs use a combination of sugar (obtained from the enzyme process in a different stomach of the cow) fermentation, plus enzymatic breakdown of cellulose to form substances that can be fermented to alcohol. The supply of raw material cellulose is unlimited so that the price of the feed stock for a factory plant making alcohol from cellulose does not have to worry about a rise in price of the cellulose feedstock.
The factory in Bangor realized that using cellulose as a raw material would result in an alcohol product that could be sold at a much lower price than the Bangor alcohol made from corn. The design of a factory to make alcohol from cellulose has been finished and there are now operating companies that can make ethanol from cellulose that is suitable for mixing with gasoline for automobile fuel. There is a company named Logen that has learned to use cellulose to make alcohol. The Logen Company is privately owned, so there is no stock that can be bought on the stock market. However, the Logen Company will probably license their process to other companies that will build factories to use cellulose to make alcohol. I am watching the market news to try and find when the Logen company licenses the cellulose process to other companies and maybe that company will have stock to sell in the stock market. I hope!!
AMERICAN73