Energy security and improvement in environmental quality continues to be a public concern. For the farming community, there is the added desire of an agricultural policy that stabilizes farm income without the need for large social transfer payments. To this aim, old and new policies, including the recent Energy Bill, have promoted ethanol and other biofuels as key mechanisms for achieving these goals.

The corn ethanol industry has dramatically expanded production capacity over the past twenty years. Significant expansion has come from investment by farmers interested in margin enhancement through cooperative ownership. Over forty percent of the industry capacity is controlled by farmer-owned operations, creating significant financial inflows to rural communities across the US.

For the corn ethanol industry to reach economic sustainability and deliver on its broad social and economic goals it must first achieve more efficient conversion of corn to fuel energy. The complexity of achieving that goal is substantial.

Problems Addressed

The importance of continually improving efficiency in ethanol production has not been overlooked over the years as significant research and development investments have been made in corn breeding and enabling technologies.

Biotechnology research is beginning to yield crops tailored to the needs of the ethanol industry via both traditional genetic and transgenic approaches. (On the process side, such R&D investments have largely been in the standardization of process engineering and mechanical design.)

The first ethanol-specific corn varieties were commercially released in 2003. Some had elevated extractable starch content for wet-milling and others featured increased fermentability for dry grind facilities. Tests suggest that ethanol yield improved by up to 4% with little impact on the crop's agronomic properties. Such gains are significant as they improve the economics of ethanol production due to increased process efficiency and better capital utilization.

New transgenic varieties are also forthcoming with the expectation of larger benefits. The first commercially available biotech corn variety customized to the needs of the ethanol industry is expected to be High Amylase Corn. Amylase is used in the ethanol manufacturing process to liquefy starch slurry so that the starch is solubilized and readied for subsequent enzyme treatments.

Concern-- The use of such new biotechnologies is complicated by the existence of large infrastructural investments already made by the industry and continuing today over 20 new plants under construction or expansion annually. In order for any technology to be adopted by the ethanol industry, they must work within the context of existing infrastructure, requiring significant research and development effort to allow them to work efficiently together.

Research Project

The project will combine models developed within EMAC (Economics and Management) with those developed by NCREC (National Corn-to-Ethanol Research Center) to develop a predictive model for process and economic optimization of representative ethanol plants and their supply chains. This model will be able designed to consider:

1. New technologies including their impacts on process efficiency, bottlenecks, safety, environmental concerns, energy consumption, material costs, etc.
2. Facility Configuration including: Facility scale, complement of technologies used by the facility, etc.
3. Upstream and Downstream Systems including: Production, storage, transport delivery schedules, facility locations, supply and demand conditions, prevailing regulations, etc.
4. Product/Co-product Streams including: Yields, market values, composition, o-products value, and optimal delivery schemes.

The project will evaluate and optimize the impacts of three early corn biotechnologies on the ethanol industry, prior to physical adoption.

Specifically, the project will:

1. Collect data from the NCERC facility and conduct case studies on representative ethanol facilities.
2. The NCERC/SIUE (Southern Illinois University/Edwardsville) group will develop the predictive models for the facility, while the UMC group will build the models for upstream feedstock acquisition and downstream product and co-product demand, handling and delivery.
3. Integrate simulation models for complete wet and dry ethanol production chains.
4. Evaluate, the process efficiencies and bottlenecks associated with biotech corn hybrids given alternative environmental constraints.
5. Measure all scenarios and technologies against a baseline of current economic/technological conditions to determine feasible simulations.

In addition to the benefits to NCERC and its ethanol manufacturing clients, such models have a large research potential. Predictive models make it possible to evaluate the feasibility of technologies in a wide configuration of scenarios.

Through published results of applications of the model to specific technologies the understanding of the industry will be increased.

The models will facilitate the outreach efforts being made to the ethanol industry by increasing the capabilities and effectiveness of the NCERC. This outreach effort directly facilitates bringing the benefits of emerging technology to those who need it most—the smaller, farmer-owned, dry grand ethanol mills.

This project will provide tangible near term means for ensuring and creating future economic value for dry-grind ethanol plants.

The models developed can help to propel a number of technologies (transgenic or not) into the commercial ethanol industry. By lowering the hurdles of adoption, the ethanol industry can maintain its path of increasing efficiency and continue to provide jobs to rural America, a fuel source that improves the environment, and enhance US energy security.