Yahoo! News

March 7, 2015

By Jon Ward

DES MOINES, Iowa — The political operative, a man named Monte Shaw, pointed to the poured concrete floor and drew an imaginary box that he said Jeb Bush was standing in, metaphorically speaking.

“I thought Bush was fine. Right now we have him in the pro [Renewable Fuel Standard] box,” Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, said. “What I heard was, ‘Hey, I'm gonna keep it in place.’”

This was the sort of conversation that took place in an assembly hall at the Iowa State Fairgrounds here on Saturday after Bush made his first onstage appearance as a likely presidential candidate in the state, whose caucuses in 2016 will kick off primary balloting.

The event was unprecedented in the state’s political history: Nine potential presidential candidates, including Bush, trekked to Iowa specifically to sit on a stage and answer questions not from a journalist, but from businessman Bruce Rastetter, a “pork and ethanol giant” who has become a political player in the state over the past several years. Iowa political observers said they’d never seen anything quite like it.

Rastetter asked the same set of questions, with a few variations, to each potential candidate at the 2015 Iowa Ag Summit. At the top of his priority list was to get each politician on record, in Iowa, on where they stand on the Renewable Fuel Standard, which was created in 2005 and requires each gallon of transportation fuel sold in the U.S. to include 10 percent renewable fuels, with a certain percentage of that being ethanol, a corn-based fuel that’s crucial to Iowa’s economy.

“Iowa has largely missed out on this last recession because of the success of our renewable energy sector,” said Ron Heck, past president of the Iowa Soybean Association.

Bill Couser, co-chairman of America’s Renewable Future, the group organizing the event, bluntly laid out the agriculture sector’s calculus heading into the event Saturday. Their “challenge” for potential candidates, he said, was, “You support us, we’ll support you.”

Most of the possible candidates fell into one of two camps. They were for the RFS, with two exceptions. Former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have stated in the past that they favor ending the RFS and did not veer from that position onstage with Rastetter. In response, ARF sent out a press release while the event was still going slapping Perry and Cruz down in sharply worded language.

“Cruz, Perry Need Education on Renewable Fuel, While Other Leading Candidates Support Renewable Fuel Standard,” the group said.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was unequivocal in his rhetoric on the RFS, a response certain to please the organizers. “The law requires it,” he said.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who currently leads in Iowa polls, reversed his position on the issue. In the past he has expressed opposition to ethanol subsidies, but on Saturday he said that because ethanol does not have full access to the fuel market, the RFS should be continued for now. “It’s something I’m willing to go forward on continuing a Renewable Fuel Standard,” Walker said. He said it should be phased out at some point in the future, but did not specify when.

However, after Bush sat down with Rastetter, listeners were left debating what he’d actually said.

Bush said that the RFS “has worked, for sure” and “has been a benefit” because it has “reduced our dependence on foreign oil.” But he also gave a nod to the more conservative elements of the GOP who oppose government support for industry and corporations.

“I would suggest to you that ultimately, whether it’s ethanol or any other alternative fuel, renewable or otherwise, the markets ultimately are going to decide this,” Bush said. “At some point we’ll see a reduction of the RFS need because ethanol will be such a valuable part of the energy piece of our country. Whether that’s 2022 or sometime in the future I don’t know.”

That sounded like a knock on the RFS. But Couser, Shaw and other renewable fuel advocates noted that the law actually requires the phasing out of the RFS in 2022.

Immediately after Bush finished speaking, Craig Robinson, a widely read conservative blogger who runs the Iowa Republican website, said he thought Bush was coming down ever so slightly against the RFS in a play for hardcore conservatives.

“Bush didn’t come out and say that he outright opposed the Renewable Fuel Standard and wind tax credit, but he didn’t embrace them either. Bush essentially took a similar position to Senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul by saying that ultimately the market should decide,” Robinson wrote in an e-mail.

Robinson thought this might be an attempt to win over conservatives who are unhappy with Bush’s moderation on immigration and education, a move with dubious prospect for success and one that could  hurt him in a general election, when voters in both parties will want federal support for Iowa’s economy.

But the renewable fuel and ethanol advocates said they were generally happy about Bush’s appearance, though they wanted to get more clarification.

“He's doing a little bit of dancing,” Shaw said. “Bush was pretty good, but we probably need to clarify just to make sure we heard what we thought we did.”

Couser said he wanted to follow up with Bush as well. “I'm anxious to sit down with him. ... I would really like to get a definite answer. He kind of sidestepped it."

Another ARF adviser, who asked not to be named, put it more bluntly: “We felt pretty good about it,” he said of Bush’s comments.

An Iowa Farm Bureau official added that Bush’s comments “keep him in the wheelhouse, keep him in the game.”

Bush’s first trip here to the Hawkeye State included a fundraiser Friday night with first-term congressman David Young, a Republican from southwest Iowa; a private meeting with volunteers and activists at a barbecue restaurant in West Des Moines; and a meet and greet with voters at a Pizza Ranch in Cedar Rapids, two hours east of Des Moines.

Another question that Rastetter asked each candidate was about genetically modified crops and whether food manufacturers should be required to label food that is modified. A group of protesters outside the event in the morning held signs demanding that such a requirement be passed into law. To a man, each Republican said they were opposed to requiring labeling.

But some, including Bush, said they were in favor of requiring that food be labeled with its country of origin. When he and his family make guacamole at home, Bush said, “I want to know where that avocado is from.”

Read the original story here : Jeb Bush Remarks On Ethanol Have Iowans Reading Tea Leaves

Fuels America

March 6, 2014

As America marks the 102nd anniversary of tax breaks for oil companies this week, the Fuels America coalition is launching the “Clean, Secure American Energy” campaign, an effort that will highlight the success of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). The “Clean, Secure, American Energy” campaign will culminate in the tenth anniversary of the RFS in August.

Oil company tax breaks were first signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson as part of the very first income tax code, which took effect on March 1, 1913. In contrast, tax credits for ethanol expired several years ago, and the Renewable Fuel Standard has existed for just 10 years. In those 10 years, however, the commonsense, bipartisan RFS has tripled America’s biofuel production and helped lower our oil dependence to the lowest level in decades, while delivering significant environmental and public health benefits. 

The RFS has played an important role in advancing American energy independence and national security as part of an “all of the above” energy strategy. And because Renewable Fuel is produced right here in the United States, the industry supports 852,000 American jobs. 

Last week, renewable fuel champions highlighted the environmental benefits of the RFS with the release of a letter to President Obama, urging him to ensure the EPA’s new multiyear rule for the RFS supports growth for existing and new biofuels technologies and lives up to the original intent of the bipartisan law.

“The RFS is working and has resulted in significant environmental gains,” the letter said. The RFS is America's only fully implemented policy that reduces greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants.”

Grand Forks Herald

March 3, 2015

By Mikkel Pates

Sioux Falls, S.D. - Jeff Broin says if farmers want corn prices back at a profitable level, they need to get involved in politics and get engaged to keep the ethanol industry strong.

At age 49, Broin is the executive chairman and founder of Poet LLC, a company that operates 27 ethanol plants across seven states, producing an estimated 1.7 billion gallons of ethanol a year.

“If it weren’t for ethanol, corn would be $1 per bushel to $1.50 per bushel,” Broin says. “Farmers need to let their senators and representatives know that we need more ethanol production in this country to save the American farm, or we’ll see a long, long period of depressed grain prices and dropping land prices that could go on for decades.”

Ensuring the Environmental Protection Agency keeps ethanol use targets strong, despite lower-than-predicted gasoline consumption, will be crucial. The EPA guidance from the 2007 Renewable Fuel Standard had mandated 14.4 billion gallons for 2014 and 15 billion gallons for 2015. EPA says it will have final numbers this spring for 2014 and 2015, and a proposed rule for 2016. The petroleum industry wants the RFS program scrapped. Significant parts of the livestock industry also oppose it.

Broin and the ethanol industry say farmers need to strongly advocate for the standards to be left alone, although they’re increasingly alone in that fight.

Big yields

Broin says farmers were deep in the ethanol debate in the 1980s and into the 1990s. They became “complacent” when corn hit $7 per bushel, and more so in the drought of 2012, he says.

Ethanol helped add $5 trillion to U.S. farmland values and farmers will wake up when those dollars start to go away, he says. Broin thinks last year’s record corn yield could be followed by another record yield in 2015.

“I’ve seen technology where they’re averaging 300 bushels per acre on corn,” Broin says. “The national average is in the 160s, but the average could go to 300 bushels in the next 10 years. Where’s all that corn going to go? The only place for it to go is ethanol.”

He thinks farmers won’t have any problem feeding the world, even with an estimated 9 billion people by the year 2050.

He says the pedestrian who hears 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop is purchased by the ethanol industry is ignorant of the fact that 6 percent — the starch portion — goes to ethanol production. The rest, including distillers grains and oils, goes back into the food and animal feed supply.

The ‘war’

“There’s a war going on between oil and agriculture for the future fuel supply of the world,” Broin says. “If that’s a shared situation, which is what it should be, agriculture and oil will both have sustainable, decent prices.

If oil wins — and ethanol never gets beyond 10 percent — oil is going to be very high-priced and corn is going to be well below the cost of production and subsidized by the U.S. government.”

Broin and his various ethanol allies are attempting to move the U.S. from a 10 percent ethanol standard (E10) in gasoline to 15 percent (E15).

David Kolsrud, president of DAK Renewable Energy Inc., of Brandon, S.D., agrees with Broin’s points on the importance of farmer involvement in the fight to keep the RFS. Kolsrud, a member of the American Coalition for Ethanol, was a former manager of the Agri-Energy plant in Luverne, Minn., one of the plants built by Broin in the late 1990s.

Kolsrud, who also farms near Beaver Creek in southwest Minnesota, acknowledges he and Broin don’t always agree, but he admires Broin for his commitment to ethanol.

Dave Ripplinger, a North Dakota State University Extension bioenergy specialist, says Broin likely has had the biggest influence on building the industry — the business model, the plants, the markets and the policy.

Ripplinger says he can’t say whether corn prices would drop to $1.50 per bushel without an RFS, because that would depend on how the existing ethanol plants would continue. But he says the outlook would be bearish. He says the pro-ethanol coalition that included farmers, environmentalists and even parts of the oil and gas industry itself are gone.

One key change has been domestic oil production in North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields.

Started at age 14

Broin has seen ethanol overcome big challenges before.

His first exposure to ethanol was when he was 14, growing up on a farm south of Minneapolis near the town of Wanamingo, Minn. Corn was cheap and farmers were heading into a credit crisis.

It was a desperate time of agricultural policy theater. The American Agriculture Movement launched 3,000 tractors to Washington, D.C., in January 1978 and in February 1979.

Broin remembers how Paul Middaugh, a microbiology professor at South Dakota State University, built the first operating dry mill ethanol plant in the country. In April 1979, Middaugh took a farm-scale alcohol plant to Washington, D.C., where he made ethanol on the National Mall. Farmers in the North Dakota, South Dakota and Minnesota built many plants from 1979 to 1981, many of them small, 10,000-gallon-per-year, inefficient plants that soon stopped working.

Broin’s father, Lowell (who still farms today) started experimenting with ethanol in 1983. He was being paid by the government to store corn in Quonset buildings.

“Storing corn for the government — being paid to grow weeds by the government,” Broin recalls. “Corn was $1.30 a bushel and it cost $2.75 a bushel to grow it, and there was no end in sight.”

In 1986, the Broins built an on-farm ethanol plant to use surplus corn and produce 250,000 gallons per year.

Expanding, building

In 1987, the Broins bought a Scotland, S.D., plant out of bankruptcy and restarted it in 1988, running at 1 million gallons per year. It was the only operating plant in the state. Jeff Broin, who held an ag business degree from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, was the company’s general manager at age 22.

“As soon as I got it running and starting to make some money, I knew that it had to be bigger to survive,” Broin recalls.

In 1990, Congress passed the Clean Air Act. The same year, the Broins broke ground to increase the Scotland plant to 2.7 million gallons per year, forming Broin Enterprises as a construction company. A couple years later, the Broins created Broin & Associates, a design and engineering firm. They took their own Scotland plant to 7 million gallons, then 11 million.

“We rebuilt that plant three different times,” Broin says.

They built Heartland Grain Fuels in Aberdeen, S.D., and Heartland Corn Products in Winthrop, Minn.

The Broins also created management and marketing companies to market ethanol and distillers grains from the plants they helped build. They built research and technology entities, today housed on a grand Poet campus in Sioux Falls. The subsidiaries brought DDGs into the swine, poultry, fish and pet food markets.

Beyond corn

In 2000, the family developed Broin Project, a plan to convert starch to ethanol without cooking. The technology was released in 2004. The same year, they built a plant in Emmetsburg, Iowa, called Project Liberty, to become a cellulosic ethanol plant that uses corn leaves, husks and cobs as feedstock.

In 2005, Broin helped found the Ethanol Promotion and Information Council, to educate an “often misinformed general public” about ethanol, he says.

In 2007, Broin bought out his family members. He changed the company name to Poet LLC and expanded its headquarters. The name was created to evoke creativity shared by actual poets and farmers.

“I love that it’s short, I love that it’s memorable and that people ask why Poet? Does that make sense?” he says.

In 2008, Poet launched a quarterly magazine called “Vital.” In 2012, Poet hired Jeff Lautt as CEO, while Broin became chairman of the board.

In September 2014, the cellulosic plant in Emmetsburg opened for business.

“We’re leaving almost all of the stalk in the field for erosion control and fertilizer,” Broin says of the corn-based feedstock for the plant. “The plant’s up and operating well.”

Poet and the enzyme and yeast companies each have spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars developing the technology, he says.

“We can get about 80 gallons of ethanol per acre, about a ton per acre of stover, which is about 80 gallons of ethanol per acre. When you look at corn around the country, you could produce about 10 billion gallons of ethanol, using 25 percent of the above-ground stover.”

A total of 100 billion tons of biomass go to waste every year in the U.S. that could produce 80 billion gallons of ethanol, Broin says.

“That’s enough to replace all of our imported gasoline and oil,” he emphasizes.

The right business model

Broin says Poet is involved in companies that have 6,000 farmer investors. The company owns about 25 percent of the stock in plants it’s involved with — ranging from 2 percent to 75 percent each, a business model that he considers vital to company success. Scotland is the only plant owned 100 percent by Poet.

“We did it right,” Broin says.

Poet built plants in the Corn Belt where corn prices were historically low, compared with national markets. The company became an expert at analyzing sites for infrastructure such as natural gas.

Broin holds up a chart that shows the price of corn and the production of ethanol from 1994 to 2014. The two values are strongly correlated.

“I remember this industry was created and talked about as a way to increase corn prices,” Broin says. “It was the way we sold the stock in the original plants, that you could hedge your grain against energy.”

But he describes the EPA blend wall as, “basically our own government holding back the industry by locking us in at 10 percent ethanol in gasoline.”

Read the original story here : Ethanol Industry And Farmers Should Work Together, Poet Exec Says

Ethanol Producer Magazine

Feb 26, 2015

By Syngenta

Corn feedstock is the single biggest input cost for an ethanol plant, and ethanol yield per bushel is one of the most important drivers of plant profitability. Because higher quality corn means higher ethanol yields, Syngenta is working with ethanol plants to help growers improve grain quality and earn a premium for doing so.

According to Chris Tingle, head of Enogen and Water Solutions for Syngenta, ethanol plants are increasingly seeking not just clean, dry corn with little or no damage or foreign material, but also grain with quality characteristics that can help maximize ethanol production.

“A growing demand for high-quality feedstock is creating opportunities for growers to increase their income per acre,” Tingle said. “By supplying the quality grain that ethanol plants want all year long, growers can maximize profitability, while helping to support the ethanol industry.”

Syngenta designed the Ethanol Grain Quality Solution specifically for growers who plant Enogen, Golden Harvest and NK Corn hybrids. Its goals are to raise yields and drive grain quality through effective insect control, early-season weed management, glyphosate weed-resistance management, and crop enhancement (the Syngenta global business focused on minimizing the effects of nonliving factors, such as heat, wind and rain, on plants). The Ethanol Grain Quality Solution provides the ethanol plant and its growers more high-quality grain, while improving return on investment.

“Growers with an Enogen contract can receive an additional 10 cents per bushel premium above the current Enogen contract premium by following agronomic protocols outlined in the Ethanol Grain Quality Solution,” Tingle said. “Plus, growers who have purchased Golden Harvest or NK Corn can receive 10 cents more per bushel for any additional bushels of corn produced under the Ethanol Grain Quality Solution protocol, provided those bushels are delivered to the ethanol plant.”

According to Adam Todd, grain purchasing manager for Quad County Corn Processors in Galva, Iowa, the Ethanol Grain Quality Solution allows QCCP to buy more corn directly from farmers and provides access to higher quality grain.

“Corn purchased direct from the farm generally has a higher starch and oil content,” Todd said. “It has less foreign matter. Those factors help us increase our crush margins. Higher quality grain is going to have more starch available, and that’s what we’re after, as well as less mold and less bacteria. That starch is going to be more readily available and will help us increase our ethanol yield.”

Todd added that rewarding farmers for investing in higher quality grain can help position them for higher yields, too.

“Farmers tell us the premium available through the Ethanol Grain Quality Solution minimally enables them to pay for a top-notch herbicide and fungicide program, which helps them to not only enhance grain quality, but also, generally speaking, achieve higher yields as well,” Todd said. “For example, one of our growers saw a 19-bushel-per-acre advantage in a side-by-side comparison that was part of the program. Taking steps to manage grain quality can help corn growers improve their return on investment in more ways than one.”

Read the original story here: Ethanol plants, growers partner with Syngenta