Ethanol Sets Record Production In 2009

Posted by Matt Hopkins|22 February 2010

According to the newly released 2010 Ethanol Outlook, which evaluates the challenges US ethanol industry endured in 2009 and details the priorities for 2010, ethanol production reached a record 10.6 billion gallons last year. Bob Dinneen, President and CEO, Renewable Fuels Association, states in the report: “Expanding ethanol use is critical to future growth.” Some of these opportunities for expansion, according to Dinneen, include increasing the amount of ethanol blended in convention gasoline and broading the use of higher level blends through the utilization of blender pumps.

From the industry’s start in 2000 with only 54 biorefineries online, ethanol operations by January 2010 have expanded to 189 working refineries with 11 more currently under construction. Last year’s record production, worth US$53.3 billion, was based off of 3.8 billion bushels of corn. Ethanol represented 30% of gross corn use in the 2008/09 US Department of Agriculture (USDA) marketing year. Co-products — such as 30.5 million metric tons (mmt) of livestock feed produced by ethanol processing in 2009 — balanced out corn input, bringing net US corn consumption to 21%. USDA projects a gross use of 4.2 billion bushels of corn in the 2009/10 marketing year to produce 11.75 billion gallons of ethanol and 33 mmt of feed.

The progression of the industry will rise or fall on such actions as addressing and refuting fictitious claims of international indirect land use change, improving efficiencies, expanding sources of feedstocks, and developing and marketing new co-products and by-products such as high-value livestock feed, distillers grains, and corn gluten feed and meal, says Dinneen.