MARION, Ohio — POET Biorefining-Marion recently broke ground to expand its production capacity from 70 million gallons of ethanol a year to 150 million. Local farmer Anthony Bush said it’s excellent news for him.

 

“We also expanded the corn demand here at the plant from 24 million bushels to 150 million bushels of corn a year, so it is a big expansion of corn demand for the area,” said Jeff Broin, POET CEO.

The project will also increase the production of dried distillers grains from the current 178,000 tons annually to 360,000 tons.

POET is the world’s largest producer of biofuel. The 30-year-old company has 28 production facilities across the Midwest.

It buys about 5 percent of the U.S. corn crop, which it turns into biofuel, high-protein byproducts and oil byproducts for biodiesel production, in addition to several other “cool products that end up in different industries,” as Broin put it.

“We are entering a commodity crisis. Prices have been ridiculously low for about a year-and-a-half, and it looks like there is no end in sight. The thing we need from farmers is help with Washington. Obviously, the oil industry doesn’t want to see this industry expand.”

POET would like to see the Reid vapor  pressure (RVP) waiver extended to blends above E10, Broin said. “Right now there is an antiquated, technical law for RVP that was set up around 10 percent (ethanol) but it doesn’t extend to 15 percent ethanol,” he explained.

“It is a very simple technical correction, but of course our competition does not want us to get more market share. Agriculture and oil are in a battle over market share.”

Bush, who lives and farms about 15 miles east of the plant in Marion, hopes agriculture wins that battle. He likes that POET prefers to source its corn locally, “and that means they’ll pay the farmer for it.

“This means everything to me,” he said. “My son, Darren, is just entering his first year of college and wants to come back to the farm. The best way to bring the next generation back to the farm is to make farming profitable. When you add 20- some million bushels of corn to the local economy, that makes farming profitable. That is what is so important about this project.” 

 

 It took teamwork to bring the project 

to Marion, he said. He appreciates what public officials and entities including the Ohio Corn Marketing Program, the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Assoc. and others, have done to accomplish that.

The expansion is the largest project in the Marion area since the construction of the original POET plant in 2008, Broin said. The $120 million project will bring 225 temporary construction jobs and 18-21 new permanent jobs to the area.

It will be completed in the third quarter of 2018.

He added, “We need agriculture to supply not just our food in our future, but our food, fuel and fiber. There is plenty of capacity in the earth to keep producing these crops. The agricultural potential of the world is potentially untapped if you look at the data. Products from the surface of the Earth, or ag products, will out-produce hydrocarbon-based products well before the end of the century.”