Green Plains Energy to Take 740 Million Gallons of Ethanol Capacity Offline for Annual Maintenance

Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Green Plains Renewable Energy Incorporated (NASDAQ:GPRE) (Omaha, Nebraska) is planning maintenance shutdowns over the next two months that will bring some 740 million gallons of fuel ethanol offline over the period.

The downtimes, which are scheduled for late August through September, are to ready the plants to run hard when the harvest begins in the fall. The downtime is expected to reduce Great Plains' ethanol output by 10% to 20%.

Ethanol plants usually perform maintenance shutdowns in the October/December time frame. It was not clear which of the nine plants will go down first, and normal downtime usually lasts three to five days, depending on in-house and outside contractor availability; costs run from $300,000 to $500,000, depending on the size of the plant.

GPE's largest plants are in Bluffton, Indiana, and Obion, Tennessee, each with nameplate capacities of 120 million gallons per year. Two other large plants are in Central City, Nebraska, and Lakota, Iowa, each of which produces 100 million gallons per year.

The company's additional plants are located in Shenandoah (65 million gallons per year) and Superior, Iowa (60 million gallons per year); Ord, Nebraska (55 million gallons per year); Riga, Michigan (60 million gallons per year); and Fergus Falls, Minnesota (60 million gallons per year).

GPE also acquired an existing 50 million-gallon-per-year plant in Atkinson, Nebraska, that is undergoing a retrofit to produce corn oil. It is expected to be producing by the fourth quarter of 2013.

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