Global Ethanol’s Illinois Project Hits Contractor Snag

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Privately held Global Ethanol’s (Queensland. Australia) Illinois project, Renewable Power of Wayne City, LLC (Blissfield, Michigan), has hit a snag on plans to construct a new fuel ethanol plant in Wayne City, Illinois. The venture has identified a site, received funding for the project, and attained state air permit approved in November. Things were looking good for an early December 2006 construction kick off until the design-build contractor came back with a price to build the plant that Global does not want to swallow.

With all the biofuel plants currently under construction in the U.S., approximately 93 facilities and counting, it’s getting hard to find raw materials such as stainless steel, equipment such as cranes, and contractors with biofuel plant construction experience such as Delta-T, Fagen, ICM, TIC and Lurgi to actually build plants.

Global decided to go outside the traditional ethanol plant builder box and brought in MECX (Saint Louis, Missouri) to bid on constructing the plant in hopes of getting ground work done and tank pads poured before weather conditions in the region become unfavorable for performing such activities. Now, at best, construction won’t start for another six months unless a contractor with ethanol plant construction experience comes into the fold.

The proposed $140 million plant will be built on a 74-acre site off Route 15 and County Road 500E in Wayne City, around 90 miles east of Saint Louis in Wayne County. Plans call for the creation of a nameplate 100 million-gallon per year plant that will process roughly 38 million bushels of locally grown corn into the renewable fuel.

With the snag, the plant is now scheduled to be complete by October or November of 2008, a delay that may kill the project all together.

Jay Brunson, Industrial Info’s VP of the Alternative Fuels Group adds, “Over half of all the corn grown in Illinois may be going towards fuel ethanol production by mid-2009. In 2004, the state’s corn crop production was just over 2 billion bushels, ranking second behind Iowa and the new numbers for the 2005 harvest do not come out till early 2007, and are expected to be even higher. There is still a lot of room for fuel ethanol production in Illinois.”

Currently, nine operational plants in the state produce 818 million gallons annually. The five plants currently under construction, and an additional 20 being tracked in pre-construction, could grow Illinois capacity for producing ethanol to over 2 billion gallons annually by late 2009.

Industrial Info's Production Database provides a comprehensive outline of all current development activities in the emerging synthetic fuels market. This database covers 123 ethanol plants currently in operation and 234 plants under development. It also covers fifteen operational biodiesel plants and 41 biodiesel plants under development.

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