Illinois River Energy Breaks Ground on Illinois' 11th Ethanol Plant

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Researched by Industrialinfo.com (Industrial Information Resources, Incorporated; Houston, Texas). Farmer cooperative owned ethanol venture, Illinois River Energy L.L.C. (Morris, Illinois), has broken ground on a new 50 million gallon per year fuel ethanol plant located in Rochelle, Illinois.

As first reported by Industrialinfo.com back in August of 2002, the company will construct a dry grind plant that will chew up some 18 million bushels of locally grown corn to produce the renewable fuel. This plant will also produce 150,000 tons of distillers dried grains and capture the off gases from the fermentation process to produce C02 gas for sale to the merchant market.

The group selected ICM (Colwich, Kansas) as the technology and process design provider with construction services being provided by Fagen Incorporated (Granite Falls, Minnesota).

Official groundbreaking for this estimated $65 million project took place on November 18th and the plant is scheduled to be fully operational by October or November of next year, just in time for the new corn harvest.

A group of 53 farmers from across northern Illinois came together to form Illinois River Energy L.L.C. The company held an initial public offering of its Class A and Class B stocks to gain the equity to build the plant. The project has been underdevelopment since July of 2002.

Illinois is currently home to ten operational ethanol plants capable of producing about 815 million gallons of fuel annually. Other projects include Central Illinois Energy (Canton, Illinois), which is expected to begin construction soon on a 30 million gallon per year plant in Canton, Illinois as well as six other plants are in various stages of early development in the state.

Currently, sixteen plants are under construction in the country that will bring an estimated 780 million gallons annually to the industry once completed.

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