Florida’s first bioethanol plant would create jobs in county
The Press Journal 02/13/2010, Page B01
Florida’s first bioethanol plant would create jobs in county
VERO BEACH — Leaders of a new alternative-energy company hope to learn next month how much it would cost to build what would be Florida’s first bioethanol plant.
“Our project is a brand-new opportunity with new technology,” Tex Carter, vice president and chairman of INEOS New Planet BioEnergy LLC, said Thursday. “We’re turning garbage into ethanol.”
The Vero Beach company is a “marriage,” Carter said, between partners New Planet Energy, a development company from Marina Del Rey, Calif., and INEOS Bio, a chemical manufacturer from Lisle, Ill.
Next month, he said, INEOS New Planet leaders plan to review and estimate the costs of setting up at a proposed Oslo area location still under negotiation.
The company has been discussing buying and converting Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc.’s 71-acre former grapefruit-processing plant, southwest of Oslo Road and 74th Avenue and north of the landfill.
Carter said the demonstration ethanol-processing plant, expected to convert vegetation waste into 8 million gallons a year of fuel-grade ethanol, could provide 150 construction jobs during the next two years and 40 to 50 full-time jobs.
The U.S. Department of Energy in December awarded a $50 million grant to INEOS New Planet to help build the plant. Carter said the building costs will show how far that grant will go.
“If the demonstration is a good one, we’ll be on our own to grow the business without government help,” Carter told members and guests of the Indian River Neighborhood Association in a luncheon.
Questioned by some of the members, Carter said the company chose Florida – and the Treasure Coast in particular – because this area leads the nation in producing tree clippings and other yard waste.
And it’s yard waste that will be the plant’s first “feed stock,” he said, in demonstrations for the government. After that, he said, the company could be looking to add other kinds of organic garbage.
Currently, he said, the ethanol in gasoline at Florida fuel stations comes from the Midwest. Making it in Florida would lower the costs here.
“This is a market for our product where there’s no competition,” he said. “There’s no domestic ethanol production in Florida, so we would have the ability to establish the manufacturing of clean ethanol.”
And every 8 million gallons of ethanol, he said, is 8 million gallons of foreign oil that won’t have to be imported.
IRNA Chairman John Higgs said the project, so far, meshes with his group’s goals for a sustainable economy and a high-tech job base.
