The Rural Voice, 1992-05, Page 34Grain
revolution:
Environmental
push for ethanol
helps local plant
(and corn growers)
When ethanol fuels go on sale in
Ontario for the first time on a regular
basis this month, the first ethanol will
come from a local plant.
United Co-operatives of Ontario
(UCO) which experimented with
ethanol use in 1987, will be the first
company to offer ethanol fuels at 19
of its southern Ontario gas bars and
the alcohol in that fuel will be
produced by Commercial Alcohols
Inc. of the Bruce Energy Centre, near
the Bruce Nuclear Power
Development. The operation, already
the largest producer of high quality
alcohol in Canada hopes that if the
trend to cleaner -burning ethanol
catches on, it will expand its
operation four to six times over to
meet the new demand.
Ethanol is a low-grade alcohol
produced by the fermentation of
cereal grains, usually wheat or corn.
When blended at up to 10 per cent of
the content of gasoline, it produces a
gasoline with higher than normal
octane that also burns cleaner with
few toxic emissions because the
alcohol puts more oxygen into the
fuel. Cars don't need to be converted
to handle ethanol fuels. Ethanol has
been used in Western Canada and the
U.S. for years and more than a trillion
miles have been driven there on
ethanol.
Ontario's corn producers have
been strong proponents of the use of
ethanol and finally won the support
of the federal government in the 1992
budget when an excise tax on ethanol
was eliminated. If all fuel in Ontario
was ethanol -blended the potential is
for ethanol production is 1.1 billion
litres. "Broader use of ethanol -
blended fuels in Ontario could
Commercial Alcohols uses waste heat from
Development to assist in creating fuel from
provide a market for 20 per cent of
the province's corn crop," says Jim
Johnson, President of the Canadian
Renewable Fuels Association, a
group organized to promote ethanol
production.
Bob Billingsley, president of
Commercial Alcohols Inc., says the
Commercial Alcohols
was built to the day
ethanol would come.
It became No. 1 in
commercial production
in meantime
opening for ethanol production is
what his company has been waiting
for. It was started in as Sunroot
Energy in late 1989 (the name
changed in January) with full scale
production beginning about mid
1990. In the two years since the
the Bruce Nuclear Power
Ontario corn.
company has become the largest
producer of high-quality alcohol in
the country, selling 16 million litres a
year to hospitals and industries from
coast to coast. If ethanol catches on,
however, it's just the beginning.
Billingsley sees expansion to a plant
that could produce 60 to 100 million
litres of ethanol a year on top of the
commercial alcohol that's now being
produced. For Ontario's farmers, that
could mean a huge new market for
com.
Already Commercial Alcohols
uses 1.5 million bushels of No. 2 corn
a year, all of it from southwestern
Ontario. Expansion provides a market
for 5.5 to 9.5 million bushels. For the
time being, the plant will be
providing the purest ethanol around,
putting it through its regular
purification process before shipping it
off to be blended with the gasoline.
Ethanol for fuel needs to go
through only one to two distillation
processes compared to the high
standards of purity Commercial
Alcohols presently provides. Today
the alcohol trucked from the plant in
big shiny tank trucks is for industrial,
food grade, industrial and
30 THE RURAL VOICE