Saskatchewan hopes to kick start the construction of integrated ethanol-feedlot facilities with a new strategy designed to overcome the obstacles in building the dual-purpose plants.
The province and the Saskatchewan Ethanol Development Council are creating customized models for 10 communities that have expressed interest in building joint ethanol-feedlot enterprises.
“That’s a model that we think has great opportunity in the province,” said council president Lionel LaBelle.
In the past the projects have proven too expensive for investors, but new engineering techniques developed in the last 24 months have driven down the cost of building such plants.
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- New fermentation technology has improved ethanol conversion from wheat by 20 percent.
- A process called raw starch hydrolysis eliminates the grain cooking process through the use of enzymes and yeasts.
- A debranner, when added to the milling process, increases grain throughput by 10 to 15 percent.
- A number of energy-saving devices such as boiler systems run on straw or animal waste rather than natural gas.
These advancements and others will be incorporated into the model being developed by Meyers Norris Penny LLC and VCM Engineering of Saskatoon.
“By capturing the latest technology we can drive down the capital costs of these ethanol-feedlot projects, making them even more viable as community-owned operations,”
LaBelle said.
Ten Saskatchewan communities will be provided with blueprints, a line-by-line costing of the hardware required for the plants and a detailed financial analysis demonstrating what happens to profits when input costs rise or fall.
LaBelle said a similar model already exists for larger freestanding, ethanol-only facilities, which have 80 to 200 million litres of annual capacity.
Integrated facilities are typically 20-million litre plants that can support 50,000 head of cattle a year.
There is a natural fit between ethanol distilleries and cattle feeding operations due to the cost savings of not having to dry the grain solids for transport.
Those savings make the smaller plants competitive with larger stand-alone
operations.
If Saskatchewan was able to attract six such integrated plants, it could put a big dent in its cattle feeding deficit of about 800,000 calves a year that are now shipped to be fed in other jurisdictions.
“All of the sudden there are 300,000 head of cattle staying in the province to be fed,” LaBelle said.
The $110,000 model project also supports the vision laid out in the November 2005 Saskatchewan throne speech, which calls for one-third of the fuel used in Saskatchewan to be renewable by the 2030s.
“Saskatchewan needs to be the home of one billion litres of capacity. That is a conservative estimate,” LaBelle said.
There is now 12 million litres of capacity in the province, all located at the Pound-Maker Agventures Ltd. plant in Lanigan.
More capacity is on its way with the 25- million litre NorAmera BioEnergy Corp. facility in Weyburn and the 130-million litre Husky Energy Inc. plant in Lloydminster
expected to be on-line before the end of the year.
LaBelle said those plants are just scratching the surface of the excavation frenzy that awaits the province if the federal government implements a package of proposed financing and tax incentives.
“The future of farming is in fuel,” he said.
“I strongly believe that. I think that’s where the opportunity lies.”
