Dr. Mark Stowers, Vice President of Research & Development for POET, was on Capitol Hill earlier this week to provide expert testimony to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality. Dr. Stowers briefed the committee on our cellulosic plans at a hearing titled The Renewable Fuels Standard: Issues, Implementation, and Opportunities.
Posted here is Dr. Stowers' testimony from POET TV. You can also watch the entire committee hearing or download the written version of Dr. Stowers' testimony. For more information on our cellulosic ethanol project, visit projectliberty.com.
As promised in the last post, the speeches from the grand opening ceremony of POET Biorefining - Alexandria have been posted to POET TV. You can also watch them here:
In addition, Jeff Swiatek of the Indianapolis Star wrote a story about our company and the opening of the plant. It's worth the read.
As mentioned in the previous post, we announced a partnership with the City of Sioux Falls Regional Landfill yesterday that we would be using their landfill gas to power our ethanol plant. The speeches from that press conference are now on POET TV and can also be viewed here:
If you'd like the text version of Jeff Lautt's speech, you can find it here. Photos from the event will soon be available on our flickr page.
It's campaign season and politicians across the country are showing their support for the ethanol industry. One example is Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose latest TV commercial features POET Biorefining - Portland, our ethanol production facility near Portland, Ind. Greg Noble, the General Manager of that facility is at the :07 mark of the commercial touring the plant with Governor Daniels:
The South Dakota Ethanol Producers put together a video called "Fields of Promise." The video talks about the positive impact that ethanol production has on the state. I uploaded it to POET TV and embedded it here for your viewing pleasure.
Last November, POET announced that an expansion of our Chancellor, S.D. ethanol production facility would include a solid waste fuel boiler. The biomass boiler will replace more than half of the expanded plant's natural gas usage. Last night, a local TV station covered the announcement in more depth. A transcript is available on their web site, but I've posted the piece here:
Recently, we celebrated the grand opening of POET Biorefining - Leipsic, a 60 million gallon ethanol production facility in Northwest Ohio. A crowd of over 3,000 people attended the event and the line for tours of the plant stretched outside the door of the grains building. The crowd heard some excellent speeches from that you can see on POET TV. We've also posted them here:
MinnPost.com was at POET Biorefining - Glenville East late last year to film some video of plant employees for a series this week on ethanol. The first story, which includes a nice side-bar piece on the origins of POET, can be found here. With their permission, we posted the video to POET TV and here:
The video features plant general manager Rick Mummert and Quality Manager Josh Karaus talking about the plant and how they make ethanol. POET Biorefining - Glenville East produces 42 million gallons of ethanol per year from 16 million bushels of corn. Construction will start soon on POET Biorefining - Glenville West, a 60 million gallon ethanol production facility that will be located just across the street from the existing facility.
For those unfamiliar with MinnPost.com, they are an online, non-profit news source that launched in November. PRWeek has the details.
Environmental Defense produced a video last year called Cap. Trade. Grow. The video advocates a cap and trade system for carbon emissions in the United States. It goes into detail about the downside to America's addiction to oil and features some companies that are part of the solution. POET CEO Jeff Broin is interviewed regarding our cellulosic ethanol project. The 10-minute video has been posted to our favorites section on POET TV and can be watched here:
There was significant broadcast coverage of the Energy Bill news conference we participated in with U.S. Senator John Thune, including the local affiliates of all three major TV networks. The ABC affiliate KELO piece can be found on their web site or viewed here:
KDLT, the NBC affiliate, posted a very brief recap of the event here. To launch the video, click here (link expires soon).
Peter Shinn of the Brownfield Network also attended the event. He posted a three-minute story on their web site, which you can listen to here:
For the latest print stories, visit the news page on our web site.
We brought the video camera to Chancellor for the announcement of the solid waste fuel boiler last week and just got around to posting the speeches. The videos of four speakers can be found here. Representing the corporate office of POET is James Moe, COO of POET Design & Construction and POET Plant Management:
There was also an interesting blog post on the announcement from After Gutenberg. The post focuses on the improvement to the Chancellor plant's EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) and the kudos from a prominent blogger are appreciated. The installation of a solid waste fuel boiler would certainly improve the EROEI, but it also reveals the flaw in using that measure to judge energy production. While many critics of ethanol are basing their calculations on a snapshot, and often that snapshot was taken years ago, the production of ethanol from corn is relentlessly improving its efficiency. Critics often fail to factor in the incremental increases in efficiency or the big increases like a solid waste fuel boiler.
If all megajoules (MJ) were equal, then energy markets would reflect that fact. But the energy markets do no such thing. At current prices, an MJ (or Btu) of natural gas is worth about 3.5 times an MJ of coal, and an MJ of petroleum is worth more than five times an MJ of coal. An MJ of electricity is worth about 12 times an MJ of the coal raw material from which electricity is frequently generated. Clearly, all MJ are not created equal.
The other curious part of this debate is that opponents of ethanol never talk about the net energy balance of other liquid transportation fuels, like gasoline. Again according to Dale, gasoline is a net energy loss of 18 percent and ethanol is a gain of 27 percent. Who has the net energy problem?
Yesterday, I was at POET Biorefining - Chancellor, an ethanol production facility located about 30 miles from POET's corporate headquarters in Sioux Falls, S.D. We were there to announce the installation of a solid waste fuel boiler that will replace half of the expanded plant's natural gas usage with power from burning waste wood. The installation is part of an expansion that will double the plant's ethanol production capacity to 100 million gallons per year.
(waste wood that will be used as a power source at POET Biorefining - Chancellor).
There was a substantial amount of press coverage and we'll post links to all on our web site, but I thought I'd mention a few here. Two local TV news stations attended the event and posted the video coverage on their web sites: KSFY and KTIV. The story was also picked up by Biopact, a biofuels blog that I've been reading for years. There are photos of the speakers on Flickr and speeches will be posted on POET TV soon.
As promised in the previous post, we've got some pictures and video from Cob Harvest Media Day. First of all, the speeches are posted on POET TV. Here's POET CEO Jeff Broin kicking off the event:
As you can hear from the video, it was a typical South Dakota windy day. Also, pictures from the event can be found on flickr and Grainnet.
Tomorrow at 4:00 p.m. Central
Time, POET will be featured on the Weather Channel’s special series, Forecast
Earth. The program will focus on the economic impact that the POET ethanol production facility near Coon Rapids, Iowa has had on the rural town. As a preview, they've posted a video of Martha Stout, Lab Manager at the facility, explaining how ethanol is made. Larry Ward, VP of Project Development for POET, was interviewed for the Forecast Earth special in the administration building of the Coon Rapids plant.
Ethanol's high profile partnership with the Indy Racing League has shown much of the country that ethanol is a high-performance fuel. POET is a proud sponsor of the #17 Ethanol car. But the IRL aren't the only racers using ethanol. KELO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Sioux Falls ran a piece on local racers who are using E85. Here's the video:
I uploaded a new video to POET TV today and thought I'd share it here as well. U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley spoke at the grand opening ceremony for POET Biorefining - Corning, an ethanol production facility located near Corning, Iowa. In this clip, Senator Grassley outlines all the ways that ethanol benefits America.
Today, we mark the official launch of POET TV. We will be using YouTube to upload coverage of our events, interviews with our people and anything else that gives you a deeper understanding of our company. For starters, we've uploaded a few videos from the ground breaking ceremony for our production facility in Fostoria, Ohio. The video posted here is of Dwayne Siekman, the Executive Director of the Ohio Corn Growers.
Our focus for POET TV is not high production values or fancy bells and whistles. We want to use POET TV as another vehicle to bring you the latest news and information about POET, the largest producer of biofuels in the world. If you'd like to subscribe to the video feed from YouTube, I've added an RSS feed link on the sidebar of this blog.
