A Whole New Game for Auto Manufacturers: Q&A with Doug Berven from POET
Doug Berven is Vice President of Corporate Affairs at US ethanol production company POET, who this April overtook ADM to become the country’s top biofuels producer. He is an outspoken advocate of the benefits biofuels present for the climate, the economy, and for vehicle performance. We caught up with him at the World Ethanol & Biofuels conference to get his perspective on the future of ethanol in the US, and the hopes for a growth in the production of cellulosic ethanol.
How do you see the US ethanol industry developing within the next 20 years?
Well I see more biofuels being blended into the fuel supply over the next 20 years. The value proposition that ethanol offers to the consumer, to the refiner, to retailers, is just being realised. We’re also working with auto companies to develop a higher-octane fuel that will allow the automakers to design a much more efficient high compression engine that will get more miles to the gallon, more power, fewer emissions. It will be a whole new game for the auto manufacturers with a higher-octane fuel containing a higher blend of ethanol. I also see cellulosic ethanol coming along and supplementing that of the starch based industry. We’ve made great strides in cellulosic ethanol, and I see it in the next ten to twenty years becoming a major source for biofuels in the United States.
Can you give us an update on your cellulosic plant?
Our cellulose facility has made tremendous gains over the last six months, where we have redesigned and reconstructed our pre-treatment facility. We are now running about eighty percent uptime on pre-treatment, where prior to our reconstruction and redevelopment of that phase of the process we were running very seldom. It just didn’t work. Now that we have redesigned and reconstructed that process, we are very, very confident that cellulosic ethanol production can come to a reality in the United States, and we look forward to commercialising the next plants. And not just from corn stover, but from other types of biomass as well. Corn stover in particular right now is making the difference between break even or profit for some farmers in Emmetsburg Iowa, versus a loss on the farm due to low corn prices today. So we have great hopes for cellulosic ethanol in its current capacity for us, from corn stover to many different forms of biomass. And we think that it will be competitive against its competitive molecules in the fuel supply. It will be a much more prevalent fuel source for the United States in the coming years.
As a representative of the US’s largest ethanol producers, how important is attending World Ethanol & Biofuels to you?
It’s important to come to these events to give a very fresh perspective, especially to European countries that I think have been fairly sceptical about ethanol’s growth and use over the past several years. The fact that we are producing more nutrition for the world today, at a point where we are producing more biofuels for the world than ever in the history of the world, really makes a tremendous argument for the fact that we can produce both food and fuel for the world – not just food or fuel. Big difference. It’s great to get the European perspective, the global perspective, share ideas, share policy perspectives, and that’s what this conference brings.
