Potential Investors Look At Ethanol Site

“A picture’s worth a thousand words.”

A train trip to the proposed Ethanol Plant site in Indian Orchard Saturday, was to allow prospective investors to see the 91-acre property up close and personal. The property is located behind Kost Tire and Muffler on Route 6, east of Honesdale, on the opposite side of the Lackawaxen River. Dave Williams, Media Director for the Wayne-Pike County Farm Bureau, which holds an option-to-buy on the William Pykus property, said they were hoping to secure $100,000 to complete necessary bridge and highway entrance studies, before proceeding further with the plan. At the end of the day, Williams said he’d secured seven investors, each contributing $10,000, leaving the need for only three additional investors. As of Monday, another investor was on board for an additional $10,000. Asked who the investors were, Williams said they wouldn’t want to be identified just yet.  Williams says the first round of investors is promised one percent of the total ownership.

Williams says a 30 to 40 foot-wide bridge, needed to access the site from Route 6, could cost between $3 and $6 million. “We don’t have a problem with that because basically ...every dollar we put into that bridge, we can get a lot of it back. Because of being an avenue, entrance to a business park like that, we will get federal money as well as state money to help us,” he said.

The total project cost is $145 million. Williams says he’s not worried about the money, that they’ve already been approached by a financial investor willing to front $10 million of the project’s cost. Williams says once the bridge is in place, hopefully started this fall and completed by next spring, the value of their land will double, building equity to make borrowing easier, he said. Along with the ethanol plant, Williams says they’ll have a pellet mill and CO2 plant. “There’s so many different uses for CO2 (used for making soda, beer, etc.), that would give us between $6.5 and 9 million a year profit alone. The DDG’s which is distiller’s grain would give us between $8 and $12 million profit a year,” he said. “For every three bushels of corn that you put into an ethanol plant, two bushels automatically comes back as a high-grade feed which is called distillers grain,” Williams said. “It averages out about 30 percent to 34 percent protein,” he said. Farmers are able to mix that with a supplement to bring that protein level down to 18 to 20 percent so it can be used to feed dairy cows, he said.

Renewable Energy Park
 Williams says he’d like to see the Ethanol Plant be part of a Renewable Energy Park. “What I would like to see is some small businesses come in there, like ...manufacturers of  windmills, manufacturers of solar energy panels,” he said. “It’d be the only energy-type park, probably in the East,” he said.

As a farmer with a care for the land, Williams says they want to keep the property environmentally sound. “Keep the atmosphere pleasant,” he said. “We don’t want it to look like a factory site. We want it to look green,” he said.

Williams says the ethanol plant could be up and running by 2010. “We’re taking our time for a reason because technology is changing so quick,” he said. He said they’ll take the time to reevaluate their plans and that the future might hold an ethanol/ cellulosic plant. “There might be some new technology out there that we might switch over to. For instance, if cellulosic is in play and we can make money at it (using cellulosic plant material rather than corn) ...we will go 100 percent cellulosic. Cellulosic is made out of everything from switchgrass to wood by-products. In other words, agricultural scraps,” he said.

“One of our goals is to get more into switch grass. And the reason for that is because ...with a lot of switch grass being grown in Wayne County, Pike County, Susquehanna County, it would alleviate a great deal of our flood problems ...It has such a deep root and it’s so thick that it creates a barrier for sediment. And sediment getting into any kind of a waterway contaminates it,” Williams said.

Ethanol is a, “clean burning, renewable, domestically produced product made from fermented agricultural products such as corn. Ethanol contains oxygen, which helps gasoline burn cleaner and more efficiently. When used in vehicles, ethanol reduces all types of emissions including carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming,” says a brochure by the American Coalition for Ethanol.

Williams said the government recently decided, “to go 20 percent ethanol across the United States (20 percent ethanol added to fuel). And in about the next five to 12 years, you’re going to see that implemented. That’s a lot of ethanol,” Williams said.