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POET Innovation - Waste Powered Ethanol Production

POET Biorefining -- Chancellor (SD) is a highly efficient ethanol plant. The 105 million-gallon-per-year ethanol plant uses two alternative energy sources to offset a large portion of its fossil fuel needs, drastically lowering its environmental footprint.

A solid waste fuel boiler burns several hundred tons of wood chips each day, material that otherwise would go to landfills where it would decay and emit methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas. The boiler also captures and burns methane gas, brought to the facility through a 10-mile low-pressure pipeline from the nearby Sioux Falls Regional Sanitary Landfill. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the annual environmental benefits from using this gas for power is equal to removing emissions from more than 27,000 passenger vehicles or removing carbon dioxide emissions from more than 344,000 barrels of oil.

The two sources together now offset as much as 90 percent of the plant's process steam needs currently met using natural gas and are expected to replace 90 percent of the plant's total energy needs, as additional wells are added at the landfill and methane production increases. The recently formed POET Biomass is looking to proliferate the use of similar alternative energy sources at the other 25 ethanol POET Biorefining facilities.

These unique power sources are in addition to the technology used by POET plants across the country to improve efficiency, such as BPX™, a process which reduces energy use by 8-15 percent by eliminating the "cooking" process from ethanol production.

In the future, POET will look at other ways to decrease our use of fossil fuels in our quest to become an even more efficient producer of ethanol. To stay updated on our latest innovations, be sure to visit the news section of our web site.