Going with the Grain
Cooperative Approach gets Ethanol Plant Up and Running
Rising above the cornfields near Boyceville
on a brisk fall day, the stack at Western Wisconsin Energy trails
a plume of steam. The cotton ball-white streamer means the plant
below is busy, turning out what other practitioners of this
art sometimes refer to as “corn squeezin’s,”
at the enviable rate of about 80 gallons per minute. Across
a year, that number works out to 42 million gallons of ethanol,
destined to lose every bit of its entertainment value to a denaturing
dose of gasoline before leaving the plant on its journey to
American motorists’ fuel tanks.
Western Wisconsin Energy (WWE) is neither the
first ethanol plant proposed in Dunn County nor was it built
without controversy. A few years ago, efforts to site a similar
plant on the edge of Menomonie were defeated by local opposition.
There are those who believe the Boyceville plant succeeded where
the first attempt failed because WWE was organized as a cooperative
and the Menomonie project was not.
Patience Pays
Jim Hathaway is one of those who believe the
co-op approach was a factor in winning community acceptance
of the WWE facility. He’s also a believer in the benefits
to be derived by the local economy.
“I think this will be a tremendous boon
to the area,” says Hathaway, president of the Dunn County
Economic Development Commission as well as general manager and
CEO of Menomonie-based Dunn Energy Cooperative. The organizers
of WWE, Hathaway adds, “have to be the most patient people
in the world to have gone through what they did to get this
built.” Minutes later, as a walking tour of the plant
begins, Hathaway explains the meaning of what the organizers
had “gone through.”
They had to have respectful answers for project
opponents claiming the steam plume—perhaps a hundred feet
above ground and stretching about the same distance laterally—would
cause pilots to become disoriented and crash on approaching
or departing the Boyceville airport three miles away.
They had to respond to worries about noise
levels, which, in reality, make conversation difficult within
the plant but quickly diminish a few yards outside.
And they had to answer concerns that the fermenting
operation would pollute the air with offensive odors.
The aroma of yeast becomes apparent as we
near the plant on foot; it’s not exactly the same as bread
rising but not terribly dissimilar. Hathaway laughs, “That
was one of the big issues, how bad it was going to stink.”
The Kernel of an Idea
The creation of Western Wisconsin Energy was
first discussed in the summer of 2001 among farmers who had
been meeting for several years as a grain-marketing club. One
member, Paul Harrison, said the failure of the Menomonie project
combined with the club’s grain-marketing experiences “got
us thinking about value-added.”
Enthusiasm was evident at an exploratory meeting
that drew about 75 area farmers, and in December 2001 WWE incorporated
as a cooperative.
The original 530 members raised $14.5 million
to get the $60 million project off the ground. Shares were sold
based on commitments to deliver corn to the cooperative or take
away the spent corn, known in the trade as “distiller’s
grain.” Governance is by an eight-member board divided
by districts and serving staggered, three-year terms. The ratio
of members to directors is roughly 80–1.
Now president and CEO, Harrison credits board
members for advancing their idea along the rocky road to fruition,
noting that they “always strived to do the project well,
in a way that’s very sellable, so people look at it and
say that’s a project worth getting involved with.”
Meeting as a board every week for two years, “they respected
each other’s opinion even if it was 180 degrees from theirs,”
Harrison adds.
He also credits former State Representative
and Agriculture Secretary LaVerne Ausman of Elk Mound, who served
as executive director of the co-op during its developmental
stages and exercised his personal contacts and persuasive powers
to bring people on board.
“LaVerne knows 75 percent of the people
in Wisconsin,” Harrison says. “Our success is significantly
due to who he is and what he is.”
All of which is a nice way of saying none
of this was easy. The arguments recounted by Jim Hathaway had
to be addressed and re-addressed over a period of years. In
addition, the plant’s energy efficiency was disputed:
Opponents claimed it would take more energy to produce the ethanol
than it would yield as a finished product. Opponents also predicted
a negative impact on property values. Paul Harrison says that’s
since been refuted by real estate advertisements describing
local properties as “near the ethanol plant.”
Not surprisingly, extended wrangling before
government bodies preceded construction. The local Board of
Adjustments granted a special zoning exemption and project opponents
appealed the decision. Changing its approach, the cooperative
decided to seek industrial zoning instead of the exemption.
The moment of decision came at a meeting of
the Dunn County board in June 2005. An overflow crowd of area
residents appeared and co-op leaders obtained permission to
make a show of support. They read no speeches, staged no protests,
but a long line of citizens holding signs in favor of the project
quietly walked single file through the board room and back out
again. With broader enthusiasm for WWE than some might have
suspected, supervisors voted 29–0 to rezone 125 acres
as industrial.
The Daily Grind
WWE started grinding corn September 6, 2006,
and had ethanol in storage three days later.
Harrison dismisses the idea that the distillation
process is a net energy loser. “Not true,” he says.
“In older plants, you can get 1.3 Btu [British Thermal
Units] out of the ethanol for every one Btu used in producing
it. This plant gets 1.6 Btu out for every one Btu in and may
get to an efficiency as high as two to one.”
During a fall visit, the plant was operating
at better than anticipated efficiency, turning out an annualized
production of about 42 million gallons, two million more than
its rated capacity.
A key element of early planning was to make
sure enough corn would be available to support this production.
It turned out not to be a problem. A 10-county feasibility study
determined that after the needs of major area corn consumers
(poultry producers at Barron and Arcadia and other significant
users and exit points within a 60-mile radius of Boyceville)
were met, there should still be 40 million bushels available
to meet the plant’s 15-million bushel annual requirement.
“Instead of shipping this down the [Mississippi]
river, why not use it locally?” Harrison asks.
But early operations proved an exception to
the anticipated rule. With local harvests curtailed by drought,
corn was being purchased outside the area. Even so, according
to General Manager Steve Christensen, this fall saw deliveries
of 80–100 truckloads of corn per day in addition to that
brought from greater distances by rail.
The manufacturing process begins in a facility
where corn is unloaded and distiller’s grain is loaded
for removal. Attached to this and looming about two stories
high is a filtration structure called a “baghouse,”
capturing the dust from loading operations. “We wanted
to be good neighbors,” Christensen explains, pointing
out that the plant uses the best available control technology—or
BACT in state and federal regulatory jargon—to keep its
emissions clean.
After distillation, the corn still has uses.
Much of the distiller’s grain is shipped out by rail to
feedlots across the Midwest. Harrison registers the mild complaint
that railroad cars tend not to show up “as fast as we
had hoped,” but he also notes the potential of using more
spent grain within the region. There might be enough cattle
to use all of it in the 10-county area surrounding the plant,
he says.
Part of it is already being used locally as
cattle feed at the Five-Star Dairy near Elk Mound. There, methane
produced in a manure digester fuels an on-farm generator pumping
about 750 kilowatts of electricity into the Dairyland Power
Cooperative system. The byproduct of one renewable energy operation
helps run another.
Similar efficiencies are realized inside the
plant itself. Christensen points out that while natural gas
is the basic heat source for grain-drying and distillation,
the process yields methane and that gas is collected and used
for fuel as well.
A side benefit is enhanced electric reliability
for the area. Because of the WWE plant’s power requirement—estimated
at 30–35 million kilowatt-hours annually—Dunn Energy
has invested about half a million dollars in distribution system
improvements and Dairyland has installed a dedicated substation
on the premises. That substation strengthens the grid by providing
an additional path to support power demand if severe weather
or some other mishap should bring down a line or knock out another
substation, Christensen says.
Complex Chemistry
WWE relies on an employee roster of 37 people,
recruited mainly from local communities and earning at least
$14 per hour plus full benefits. Working four shifts daily,
they keep distillation going 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Thanks to computers, electronic controls,
and sensors, it takes only four people to run the basic process.
Other employees include an environmental health and safety technician,
lab technicians, and a plant manager. A separate office facility
a hundred yards away houses management personnel and staff including
a marketer, corn buyer, and chief financial officer.
“Everybody is cross-trained so if someone
is sick, they can fill in,” Harrison says.
The biggest customer for WWE’s output
is the Murphy Oil Company refinery at Duluth, Minnesota, about
120 miles north. Much of the product makes a longer trip, to
refineries as far away as Missouri and Arizona.
To ensure a steady supply of ethanol to these
clients, enough corn is kept on hand to run the plant for eight
to 10 days. Planned additional storage will extend corn reserves
to a 30-day supply.
Inside the WWE plant, the chemistry isn’t
overly complicated. Yeast and warm water convert corn into a
fermentable mash that is boiled to extract and collect the resulting
alcohol. Outside the plant, the chemistry of matching project
with community was considerably more complex, as confirmed by
the failure at Menomonie and the five years of toil between
concept and construction at Boyceville.
But as Jim Hathaway observes, the cooperative
approach seems to have served the participants well. “To
me,” he says, “that’s the biggest success
story—that they persevered.”
—Dave Hoopman
