IBEC

The Chamber of Commerce held its monthly luncheon at Indiana Bio-Energy Company (IBEC), located in Pleasant Ridge. As I drove into the parking lot I noticed that a new 750,000 gallon storage tank was under construction. When it is completed, another one will be built.

 The lunch was in the new maintenance building. The table decorations were the three products that IBEC produces, ethanol, dried distillers grain (DDG), and corn oil. Several people could not resist making jokes about who had sampled the ethanol

 The maintenance building is not quite completed. It will replace a much smaller space in the main building.

After lunch we heard about IBEC, which was built in 2007. It is a fuel-only facility--the ethanol is only produced for fuel. When it was built, its capacity of 50 million gallons a year was large, but now plants twice as big are being built. The DDG is about 1/3 of the corn--it is what is left when all the starch is removed. The corn oil is the fat and is used for animal feed or for a source for biodiesel.  The plant began producing E85 a few months ago and, as reported in some other posts, IBEC will soon install a pump open to the public selling E10, E15, E30, and E85. (Everyone can use E10, cars after 2001 can use E15, but only flex-fuel cars can use E30 and E85.) The cost of the corn is about 80% of the cost of production.

Then it was time for a tour. The tour was probably the reason that this was the best attended Chamber lunch ever.

 We entered the main building and saw the control room from which the entire operation is run. All the equipment can be monitored and controlled from this room and its banks of computers. Every few hours a sample of output is taken to make sure that what is on the computer monitor is what is happening and any adjustments necessary are made to the process. Most of the time life is boring in the control room, but at those few times when there are problems, it can get very exciting.

 We then entered the production area outside the control room and this was an area in which photographs were not allowed. In this area was equipment that ground the corn to a fine consistency and then mixed it with hot water and enzymes to break down the starch. The starch molecule is made up of sugar units and it must be converted to sugar before it can be made into alcohol. Then the mix goes into three huge fermentation vats where yeast produces a corn beer with about 18% alcohol. When we were outside later we could see the vats. The three vats are used continuously and when the brewing is completed, the beer is piped into a fourth large tank.

The next step is to distill the beer, separating out the alcohol. It is done with heat which works because alcohol has a lower boiling point than water. The vapor flowing from the first tank to the second is about 100 proof. A bit more processing in the second column, called a rectifier, and the result is 190 proof, which is the best one can do with distilling.

 I asked what this smaller tower did and was told that it extracted alcohol from the vapor that came out of the second tower. It is complicated.

 190 proof is pretty potent, but for fuel the alcohol needs to be 200 proof--pure alcohol. The three tanks shown below do some kind a process that I did not quite catch, filtering out the water molecules. Though the guide did a good job, the crowd was large and the equipment in many places was very loud, so it was hard to hear.

 We then left the alcohol story and moved on to see what happened to the part of the corn that was not starch. It was dried in two very large drying bins that rotated. This room was hot because the air in the bins was very hot. The water vapor extracted here went through a heat exchange to recycle heat and then it was vented trough the stack. This water vapor is one of the most noticeable things you see when you drive past the plant on the highway, especially in winter. (You can see the water vapor behind the vats in the sixth picture of this post.)

 The DDG is taken by conveyor to a large, dark room where it is dumped into piles. From there a loader moves it to a hole and from there it can be loaded onto trucks. The plant sells the DDG to distributors who then sell it to farms for cattle and poultry feed.

 All of the corn used in the plant is produced locally and all of it arrives by truck. About half of the ethanol is shipped via rail and about half via truck. When the alcohol is shipped out, it is mixed with 2% gasoline. That changes its tax status and makes it undrinkable.

 As we left the building with the piles of DDG we passed by some cooling towers. They are used to control the temperature of the fermentation vats.

One odd thing mentioned on the tour: Goose Island Beer, a small brewery in Chicago, sends its waste beer, the part of the vat that has all the yeast, to IBEC and IBEC distills it.

Fixing the highway

On Tuesday afternoon I crossed SR 114 on Melville and noticed that the pavement was being ripped up. This morning I thought I would go see how work was progressing. I was very surprised to see that the work was apparently finished. The eastbound lane was resurfaced and nothing had been done to the westbound lane.

Perhaps because the garbage trucks are loaded as they head east, the eastbound lanes were in worse shape than the westbound lanes? It seems to me to be a strange way to fix a road.

Note the bit of fall color in one of the trees.

This coming weekend will be another busy weekend. On Friday the high school has its homecoming game, and on Thursday we will enjoy the annual homecoming parade. On Saturday Main Street presents Oktoberfest, which maybe should be called Septemberfest. This year there will be no admission charge, though a donation is requested. The Meister Winds from Indianapolis will start the music with German tunes and the local band McGuffin will close out the evening. CDC Resources will have a fundraising concert at eMbers. It will feature Elvis tribute performer Kurt Lechner. The music starts at 7:00 and the doors open at 6:00. There are also food events at the Knights of Columbus and at Brushwood Methodist Church on Saturday.

Speaking of CDC Resources, I was part of a tour last week at CDC Resources that looked at the work done in their sheltered workshop. One contract that they have is with Emerson Electric in Monticello. CDC makes wooden shipping boxes that are used for ball bearings. Some of these are used in oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, so when drilling slowed or stopped after the BP spill, demand for bearings dropped and boxes were not needed.--what was happening in the Gulf was affecting people in northwest Indiana. Another contract is with Rockland Flooring west of Monon. Rockland makes floors for truck trailers, and when the machine turns out a floor that is not quite level, they use little wooden wedges to fix it. CDC produces thousands of these wedges a week. A final contract that is current is for National Gypsum. The local plant is the only National Gypsum plant that produces the tape rolls. Most of them are packed by machine, but there is one size box that the machine does not fill properly. They are filled at the CDC workshop.

A few more meeting notes

On Wednesday evening the Airport Authority Board met for its monthly meeting. They mostly discussed routing things--drainage, the proposed fuel farm, a nepotism policy, the courtesy car. One new item was the approval of the purchase of a new truck and snow plow that will be used to clear the runway in the winter. They hope to get ten years of use from it.

The airport manager challenged them to come up with goals for the next two to four years. They will apparently take this up at future meetings. One member suggested that a goal should be a website. Presently neither the airport or airport authority has a website.

Across the road, something has happened at the MacAllister site. A green box is in place--one of the essential items on any construction site.

On Thursday evening the Park Board had its monthly meeting. There was discussion about the Staddon Field. The School Corporation owns the land, and earlier this year the Park Board or maybe the city offered $40,000 for it. That offer was rejected on a 5-2 vote. The School had the land appraised and the result came back at a bit more than $90,000. One member of the Park Board wanted to see if negotiations might move ahead if the Park could get the Blacker Trust (or the City--the Park Board does not have the money to purchase the property) to offer about $60,000. This idea was met with resistance. One member said that the School should be left to sit on the property, maintaining it. If they decided to sell it, it would not fetch $90,000, but it would fetch a lot of criticism for the school board members. There was agreement with this sentiment, so the matter did not go further.

Then there was more discussion of proposed ball field in Brookside Park. Again, the Park Board has no money to do this, but it is trying to put together a proposal that will be acceptable to the lawyer who controls the Rex Blacker Trust. The Park Board will try to get cost estimates for the various parts of their plan.

There was some discussion of the proposed Dog Park in Iroquois Park and how that project could be advanced.

It was noted that Kentland spent about $1.5 million to update their swimming pool. It apparently has added water-park features. As for the Rensselaer pool, on the last weekend the water level was unusually low. After the pool was closed, a crack in a pipe under the pool was discovered as the reason that the water level was not what it should have been.

And in completely unrelated news, a very long utility pole was delivered to the Melville substation this morning.

Truck show 2014

One of the attractions at the Fall Festival last weekend was a truck show. Last year's Fall Festival also had a truck show, but there were quite a few different vehicles in this year's show. I forgot to get the date and model of this old, rusty truck, but a close examination of the original photo reveals that it is a Mack B-6-0. Behind it is a livestock trailer that was modified to serve as a display room. The sign on the trailer, which you can barely read below, says "Jim and Jean Gingerich's 'Growing Up with Trucks' Museum." It contained a lot of pictures plus two diesel truck motors.

 In addition to trucks, there were some other vehicles. This bus was from 1951.

 A peek inside showed that after its career as a bus, it was converted into a RV. It was in rough shape.

 This old milk delivery truck was a 1965 DIVCO. The milk delivery business was dying by 1965 where I lived--the arrival of supermarkets was driving them out of business.

 The oldest truck on display was a 1920 Nelson LeMoon truck. The company lasted from 1910 to 1939 and made only about 3000 trucks.

 It did not even have a radio.

 Also at the truck show, though at some distance from the other trucks, where some old military vehicles, some from WWII. They had been carefully restored to it was difficult for a casual observer to recognize which were the really old ones and which were more recent.

Update: Because of the heavy rains on Saturday, not many people got to see these vehicles.