One challenge to commercializing cellulosic ethanol that is often overlooked is convincing enough people to grow and/or harvest your feedstock of choice. POET’s work to clear that hurdle will continue this week.
POET CEO Jeff Broin this Thursday will be at the National Association of Farm Broadcasting’s Trade Talk in Kansas City. He’ll be packing as many interviews as he can into a time slot of 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.
To illustrate the challenge in feedstock logistics, POET’s $80 million award from the Department of Energy (which recently got an additional $20 million boost) comes with the requirement that we process 700 tons of biomass (corn cobs, in our case) per day. That means we’ll need about 400,000 acres of cobs harvested in the area surrounding our Emmetsburg, Iowa plant.
Cob harvesting is going to be a huge opportunity for farmers to get additional income with zero new acres going into production. We’ve made a lot of progress in attracting farmer interest in the Emmetsburg area through events such as Project LIBERTY Field Day last week. But we also realize those efforts must be replicated across the Corn Belt in order to expand the technology to other POET plants as well as other interested ethanol producers.
The more we can get farmers familiar with the coming revolution in agriculture, the easier that process will be.
Farmers watch the latest cob harvesting equipment in action Nov. 3 at Project LIBERTY Field Day in Emmetsburg, Iowa.
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