Texas-based Panda Energy is planning to build a 100-million-gallon fuel ethanol plant in southwest Kansas. What’s even better than the production of domestically-produced fuel is the fact that the plant will use up a problem by-product of cattle feeding in the area!
The plant will use a billion pounds of cattle manure each year as a renewable fuel to power the plant’s operations. The $120 million facility will refine US corn and milo into fuel ethanol that will be blended with gasoline to produce a clean, low cost fuel for America’s cars and trucks. The ethanol produced in this plant will replace the need to import 100 million gallons of gasoline each year.
The Haskell project is Panda’s third fuel ethanol project announced this year. In May, Panda announced a 100 million gallon plant in Hereford, Texas and in August the company announced that its second facility would be built in Yuma, Colorado. The combined production of the three announced Panda fuel ethanol plants will replace 300 million gallons of imported gasoline annually.
These projects will use a total of three billion pounds of cattle manure a year as a renewable fuel. The manure is gasified and converted into a clean bio-gas used to power the plant. By utilizing bio-gas produced from manure instead of natural gas, each facility will save the equivalent of 1,000 barrels of oil per day.
The company says the plant will produce enough ethanol to replace 100 millions gallons of gas that would have to be imported each year.