Farmer Co-op Central Illinois Energy Begins Fuel Ethanol Plant Construction

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Farmer owned, Central Illinois Energy Cooperative (Canton, Illinois) has begun construction on the state of Illinois' eleventh ethanol plant in Buckheart Township, near Canton, this month.

The $65 million fuel ethanol plant is being constructed by ethanol plant builder Lurgi PSI Incorporated (Memphis, Tennessee) utilizing ICM (Colwich, Kansas) process design technology. Some 11 million bushels of the cooperative farmer member corn will be turned into 30 million gallons of fuel ethanol annually. 96,000 tons of distillers dried grains and C02 gas will be generated, collected and sold as plant by products.

Central Illinois plant will also feature a waste coal fired cogeneration facility that will provide process steam for plant systems and five megawatts of electricity to power the facility.

Construction is scheduled to be completed by June of 2004 and after two months of start-up time, should be fully operational by August just in time for the new corn crop harvest.

This plant is the third ethanol facility that is currently under construction following Southern Illinois University pilot scale facility in Edwardsville and Lincoln Land Agri Energy's 40 million gallon per year plant in Robinson.

Illinois has eight existing ethanol plants capable of producing 775 million gallons per year of ethanol. Three other plants in the state are in the early development stage.