Ethanol plant could power state to top of heap in US

Ethanol plant could power state to top of heap in US
Allentown Morning Call - Allentown,PA,USA
... McGinty also said planned facilities to make soy-based biodiesel fuel would make Pennsylvania home to 40 million gallons of annual production. ...
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Ethanol plant could power state to top of heap in U.S.Environmental chief Kathleen McGinty says huge project in central Pa. could be announced within months.By Marc Levy Of The Associated Press Pennsylvania is close to getting its first ethanol plant and could become the nation's largest producer of soy-based fuel additives within a year, the state's environmental protection chief said Friday.Efforts to attract such businesses are part of Gov. Ed Rendell's wider directive to find alternatives to the hundreds of millions of gallons of transportation fuel from Persian Gulf oil that is used in Pennsylvania each year.In an interview with The Associated Press on Friday, Rendell's environmental protection secretary, Kathleen McGinty, said a ''very substantial'' company is close to announcing a large ethanol plant to be built in central Pennsylvania.''We are very close, I would say probably two, at the most three, months away from a massive ethanol plant being announced,'' McGinty said during the interview in her Harrisburg office.She would not name the company, but said it is possible the plant would be the largest east of the Mississippi River and could be built within a year. She pegged the cost at around ''a couple hundred million dollars.''Schuylkill County officials have been working with Green Renewable Energy, Ethanol and Nutrition Hilding LLC of Zionsville, which is proposing a large ethanol plant in Porter Township near the Tremont exit of Interstate 81. Green Renewable Energy said that plant could be operating by December 2007 and would employ 50 to 60 to turn 40 million bushels of corn into 100 million gallons of methanol annually.McGinty's office said the proposal she spoke of and the Schuylkill proposal are separate projects.The central Pennsylvania plant would start by fermenting ethanol from corn, McGinty said. But plans for the plant involve eventually using crop waste or dead forest timber to produce cellulosic ethanol, which is far more energy-efficient to produce.Demand for ethanol is surging as a way to make gasoline burn cleaner, reducing tailpipe emissions of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.McGinty also said planned facilities to make soy-based biodiesel fuel would make Pennsylvania home to 40 million gallons of annual production. That compares to 75 million gallons produced nationally last year, a number that the Missouri-based National Biodiesel Board believes could double this year.''It's not a stretch to say within 12 months we could be the leading state in the country in the production of soy-based fuels,'' McGinty said.Soy-blended fuels are credited with burning cleaner and more efficiently in diesel engines, and are used by school districts, mass transit agencies, manufacturers and government agencies.The state has one biodiesel producer up and running — Keystone BioFuels in suburban Harrisburg. The company expects to make 1 million to 2 million gallons of biodiesel this year and has plans to expand.Since joining the Rendell administration in 2003, McGinty has rankled the power industry and Republican legislators by calling for tougher automobile emission standards in Pennsylvania and tougher-than-federal regulations on mercury emissions from power plants.She said, however, that she believes the public increasingly will be demanding ''clean, affordable and reliable'' energy sources, despite resistance from some quarters.''What we're seeing with $3-a-gallon gasoline is the economic harm that we suffer for our failure to move to clean, more diversified energy sources,'' McGinty said.Finding alternatives to Persian Gulf oil within a decade, as per Rendell's directive, would mean replacing 900 million gallons of transportation fuel, McGinty said.One key to reaching that goal will be opening coal-to-liquid fuel plants, such as a $612 million coal-to-diesel project that is also proposed for Schuylkill County and waiting for federal loan guarantees, McGinty said.''It's not a stretch to say within 12 months we could be the leading state in the countryin the production of soy-based fuels.''