GreenShift Corporation has announced it has received a $38 million investment to produce 20 million gallons per year of biodiesel from corn oil, squeezed from the corn used in ethanol plants.
This release posted on MarketWatch.com says GreenShift use the money to build twelve corn oil extraction facilities and to expand the capacity of GreenShift’s NextDiesel biodiesel refinery in Adrian, Michigan to 20 million gallons per year:
GreenShift’s biodiesel production model is based on the integration of its patent-pending corn oil extraction technologies into corn ethanol production facilities to extract crude corn oil from distillers grain, a co-product of ethanol production. GreenShift installs its extraction technologies at its expense and then purchases the extracted oil for a price that is indexed at a discount to the price of diesel fuel. This hedges GreenShift’s biodiesel production margins and provides important benefits to participating ethanol clients, such as:
— increased revenue and earnings;
— decreased commodity and financial risk;
— decreased utility consumption and carbon emissions; and,
— enhanced biofuel yield from corn.
GreenShift’s extraction technologies are currently in use at four corn ethanol plants in Michigan, Indiana, New York and Wisconsin, and GreenShift has executed contracts to deploy its extraction technologies at a number of additional U.S. ethanol plants.
“Our view is that the established corn ethanol infrastructure is the most practical pathway in North America to cost-effectively increase the production and use of carbon-neutral biofuels at globally-meaningful scales,” said Kevin Kreisler, GreenShift’s Chief Executive Officer. “To continue to accomplish this in a competitive and environmentally-superior way, existing corn ethanol facilities must evolve to achieve improved production efficiencies. We intend to contribute to that evolution. We look forward to the completion of this investment and delivering the financial and environmental benefits of our patent-pending corn oil extraction technologies to our ethanol clients at an accelerated pace.”
Usually, ethanol producers turn each bushel of corn into 2.75 gallons of ethanol. This process will expand the biofuel content of a bushel of corn to nearly three gallons.