Fine-Tuning Fractionation

Dry fractionation was the technology du jour some years ago, seen as a way to lower energy costs and survive high feedstock prices, while gaining efficiency, capacity and coproduct revenue. Ethanol Producer Magazine wrote about it in 2009, when several companies were promoting their technologies and the first system had been installed by Cereal Process Technologies. That system is still the only such dry fractionation system in a U.S. ethanol plant.

What Happened?
“With the dry fractionation, the vision was right,” says Chuck Gallop, director of innovation at ICM, which pursued dry fractionation strategies years ago, parallel to competing firms like CPT. “Not only us, but other companies had the same vision with dry fractionation, but there was a perfect storm of uncontrollable events at the time. We had corn that got as high as $11 a bushel. We had natural gas that was between $7 and $11 per MMBtu. We had a market crash in 2008 at the same time, and a lot of plants were still in their infancy and had debt to service. Ethanol margins on a per-gallon basis were just not there.”

“There was truth to it back then,” says Neal Jakel, president of Fluid Quip Technologies. “But when we tried to really push this technology into the marketplace, we had a lot of headwinds.” The capital required for the buildouts in the mid-2000s meant most plants were carrying big debt loads. “They really didn’t have a lot of excess capital available to spend on other technologies.”

Read the full article on Ethanol Producers Magazine →