Osage BioEnergy to Open Largest Barley Ethanol Plant in U.S.
Editor’s Note: this is a guest post by Adam Shake
Osage BioEnergy announced that it will break ground next month on its Appomattox Bio Energy plant, a 65 Mgy (Million Gallons per Year) barley ethanol plant that will be the largest in the US, using barley as a feedstock.
Barley is a winter crop that can be double cropped with soybeans, and produces a high quality meal in addition to fuel ethanol.
The Appomattox Bio Energy (ABE) facility is projected to use regionally grown barley as the primary raw material. Why Barley? Barley is a moderate to high yield winter crop and can be grown in double crop systems with other food crops such as soybeans.
In an attempt to possibly allay “food for fuel” critics, Osage BioEnergy plans on using a 3-in-one approach:
- Cash crops for farmers
- Animal Feedstock and
- fuel for cars
The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has issued the Air Quality Permit for the ABE facility and supports the facility start-up for the second quarter of 2010, which coincides with the barley harvest.
Groundbreaking for the facility is scheduled for Friday, October 3, 2008.
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Sources: Osage BioEnergy and BioFuels Digest
Image Credit: Wikipedia
Barley should be made into beer.
Beer is essentially undistilled ethanol.
Fuel ethanol is anhydrous ethanol, i.e. without water. Something quite different from both destilled spirits and beer.
Some other crops that should be considered are sugar cane, sugaer beets and Jerusalem artichokes. The latter grows like a weed here in Texas, in fact, some farmers and ranchers can’t get rid of it. It also has the highest yield of ethanol of the group. These crops are also great candidates for the cellulosic process.
All of these far outstrip corn in gallons of ethanol per acre and are not primary food sources, so the corn can go to feed livestock and starving Ethernopians, or to make taco shells and booze.