Thursday, March 8, 2007

Panda ethanol refinery opening in Colorado

Aventine Renewable Energy Holdings Inc., an Illinois company that produces, markets and supplies ethanol, has signed a marketing agreement with Panda Ethanol, Inc. to build two new ethanol refineries, including one in Yuma, Colo. It will be fueled by natural gas.

Lurgi Inc. will build the plant, and construction will take 18 months. When finished, the Yuma plant will annually refine about 38 million bushels of feedstock-grade corn into 105 million gallons of denatured ethanol.
That will displace about 2.5 million barrels of imported oil a year.

The other new ethanol refinery will be in Haskell County, Kansas. Aventine will market the ethanol produced at the plants.

Panda Ethanol is headquartered in Dallas and is developing six 100 million-gallon-per-year ethanol projects in Colorado, Kansas, Texas and Nebraska.

Four of the plants, including the one in Haskell County, will generate the steam used in the ethanol manufacturing process by gasifying 1 billion pounds of cattle manure each year.

Panda also is building its first biomass refinery in Hereford, Texas.

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