Now picture a dozen biorefinery complexes like this throughout the Heartland, all producing renewable products – green products – destined to replace products made from petroleum and provide other renewable products – from enzymes to green chemicals to whatever you can imagine. Can it happen? Will it happen?
Pasted below are a few paragraphs from the article, click through to read the rest.
From the road, an hour north of Omaha, the giant industrial plant looks like a typical oil refinery, sprawling over more than 600 acres with massive storage drums, miles of piping, clouds of steam and exhaust.
But this refinery is tied more to corn oil than crude oil.
It also presents visitors with an intriguing glimpse into what boosters like President Barack Obama call "the green economy," an industrial base centered on renewable resources like crops and on products like ethanol and biofuels.
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In one end goes corn -- 100 million bushels a year. Out of the other comes edible corn oil, livestock feeds and ethanol fuel but also a growing array of products fashioned from souped-up corn chemistry, such as industrial enzymes and biodegradable plastics.
"This whole notion of bio-based is that everything that can be made from a petroleum product can now be made from a plant," said Alan Willits, president of Cargill Inc's Corn Milling unit. "The technology is there to enable that."
Willits, taking a reporter around for a rare inside look at the giant Blair corn processing complex, doesn't hide his enthusiasm for the challenge of creating the bioeconomy.
"I'm pretty excited," he says. "I think it is more viable to foresee that you are using agricultural-based products to compete in what was once strictly a petroleum market."
"It is really an exciting thing for agriculture," he said, noting that renewable raw material is a winning message for Cargill's customers, a number of which have constructed plants on Cargill's Blair complex -- like spokes around a wheel.
Mike Lewis, an animal nutritionist at the plant and former professor of animal science at the University of Nebraska, said the Blair complex has "an almost endless capability to make new things ... We can literally take the components apart and put them back together in lots of different ways."
For more, read the full Reuters article.
As a wildlife biologist, I hope that a green economy would prioritize HABITAT LOSS as the main culprit in the loss of biodiversity around the planet. Climate change is a close second, but the fact is that most plants and animals are simple running out of places to live as humans and agriculture rapidly gobble up their habitat.
ReplyDeleteI question the ability of companies like Cargill to produce environmentally sustainable corn oil given their track record producing palm oil – a commodity used in consumer goods from soap to breakfast cereals, and yes, even BIOFUEL. Mostly grown in Malaysia and Indonesia, the expansion of palm oil plantations in these countries has been tightly linked to rainforest destruction.
Cargill owns four palm oil plantations in Southeast Asia, and is buying more palm oil from problematic Indonesian suppliers like the Sinar Mas Group. A large and growing number of investigations have shown that Cargill’s palm oil is directly destroying forests, eliminating biodiversity and harming forest peoples.
Before Cargill turns more of America's grasslands (the most endangered habitat in the USA), into cornfields, I hope the Cargill family looks at stopping their abuses abroad.