First Commercial-Scale Ethanol Plant in Georgia Up and Running

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Sugar Land, Texas)--Cooperative-owned First United Ethanol LLC (Camilla, Georgia) and subsidiary Southwest Georgia Ethanol LLC (Pelham, Georgia) have begun fuel-ethanol production at the first commercial-scale ethanol plant in the state of Georgia. Construction of the plant started in May of 2007. (See January 8, 2007, article - First United Ethanol Starts Construction on Georgia's First Commercial-Scale Fuel Ethanol Plant.) The plant held their official first grind on October 10, and batches of ethanol are now flowing from the plant.

The estimated $132 million plant will have a nameplate capacity of 100 million gallons per year of fuel ethanol and will process some 36 million bushels of corn annually into the renewable fuel. The corn will come from local Georgia farms, but the company will have to import corn from other states to meet the large plant's appetite for corn. The plant has been dubbed the largest biofuel plant in the Southeast.

Fagen Incorporated (Granite Falls, Minnesota) and ICM Incorporated (Colwich, Kansas) jointly designed and built the plant. Construction took 17 months to complete.

The first major load of corn, some 300,000 bushels, arrived by train on September 21. In total, the plant has 1.2 million bushels of corn stored in silos. First United will market their own distillers dried grains to the abundance of livestock and poultry companies in Georgia, and the ethanol will be marketed by Eco-Energy Incorporated (Franklin, Tennessee).

Two additional ethanol plants are under construction in Georgia, and another five are in various stages of pre-construction development.

Industrial Info's Ethanol Database provides a comprehensive outline of all current development activities in the emerging alternative fuels market. This database covers 177 ethanol plants in operation and 530 plants under development. It also covers 145 operational biodiesel plants and 245 biodiesel plants under development.

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