PEKIN, Ill. — Seventy year-old coal boiler technology was replaced by state-of-the-art high-pressure natural gas boilers as part of a $13.2 million upgrade to Aventine Renewable Energy of Pekin, a leading producer, marketer and supplier of ethanol.

The boiler installation, celebrated with a recent ribbon-cutting ceremony, represents part of a larger $30 million investment Aventine is making to restore its two ethanol plants in Pekin, a town of 35,000 located alongside the Illinois River in Tazewell County.

“Ag processing plants must be rebuilt every 20 years, so we are rebuilding the Pekin wet mill to be productive for another 20 years,” said Mark Beemer, president and CEO of Aventine, during the Aug. 15 ceremony.

Aventine officials noted the company had lately shattered its production records, and the new boilers at the 160 million-gallon wet mill will improve efficiency while greatly reducing annual emissions of sulfur and ash.

“The investments we have made in our Pekin plant will give us the competitive advantage to continue to provide clean, renewable energy for years to come,” said John Valenti, vice president of operations. “It’s a significant improvement to one of the most robust and diverse biorefineries in the industry.”

The vintage 1944 stoker and 1955 steam boilers were permanently retired in early September. Using those outdated boilers, Aventine’s Pekin plant set recent production records, according to Beemer.

“In October of 2013 we broke Aventine’s historical maximum production records across all platforms after fixing a decade-old fermentation problem, and we’ve broken our own record production records twice since then in ethanol, yeast, feed and other products,” he said.

In addition to the $13.2 million boiler work, Aventine has recently invested $2 million to upgrade its Pekin dry mill, $1 million to address the fermentation issue, $1.4 million to install a new starch operator and replace six old separators and $750,000 for centrifuge at its yeast plant. In addition, the company has invested in installing backflow preventers for the Pekin water system, along with seal pots to prevent pump failure.

The investments have come under the advice and direction of Beemer, who has been employed in his current position by Aventine since December 2012.

“(Aventine) had almost put zero capital expenditures into the facilities here in Pekin for almost seven or eight years. When I got here, the wet mill plant was operating at less than 80 percent of capacity, the Fagen dry mill was almost not even operating. There were major issues with our yeast plant,” Beemer told Ethanol Producer magazine earlier this year. “The company was in complete disarray.”

The company is now focusing its efforts on a $5.5 million project to build a new truck and rail dump for its two Pekin plants. “This will allow the Pekin complex to dump 60 trucks per hour or unload 110 BNSF shuttle trains in less than 15 hours,” Beemer said.

A new interactive “CompuWeigh” system is also being installed across the 200-acre Aventine complex that will allow “seamless” electronic metering of all ethanol and specialty liquids, along with electronic weighing of all inbound and outbound grain products, according to the company.

The two Pekin Aventine ethanol plants share a combined capacity of 160 million gallons per year. Ethanol has been produced at the Pekin wet mill (capacity: 100 million annually) since 1981; the dry mill was added in January of 2007 and can produce 57 million annually.

Co-products of ethanol made at the wet mill include corn gluten feed, corn germ, corn meal, distillers yeast and corn condensed distillers solubles. Co-products produced at the dry mill include both wet and dry distillers grains with solubles and carbon dioxide.