Before any plant trackage went into service, they were approved by the carrier. In most cases, the carriers management was copied in during planning and construction, and the carriers basic track standards had to be met.
First off, any plant wishing to ship units, must have a track capable of holding the entire train in one cut. There are a few plants owned by POET who are grandfathered into this scheme (they co-load units). But POET is big enough to get those terms. Others, had to expand their plants to accomodate units before we would accept them. No doubling out, just couple on, pull, and hang the marker. Air must be made.
The plants that Valero just purchased are a model of efficient rail operations. One or two balloon tracks, each holding 100 cars, plus several other tracks for holding interchange of singles. The Fairmont plant took the existing elevator facility, and added loading and two balloons, easily holding several hundred cars. The newly enlarged Mason City trackage has a capacity of close to 300, last I looked, they had 250 on hand.
In Chicago for example, there are nine racks serving the metro area of about 9.5 million people. Five of them are at refineries (Lemont, Lockport, Blue Island, Whitting).
Where are these plants located that they have a shortage of corn? Not in the mid-west to be sure. And anyone who builds a corn plant in California for example should have their heads examined. Anyone who invested that money, would have been better off giving it to charity.
We have a net surplus of corn in Iowa, even with exports and whole grain shipments to feeders. While we have not reached the point of saturation, given the events of the past year, expansion is not a good thing to consider. Yet ADM is going full force in Cedar Rapids with a huge increase of capacity.
I’m not sure where your information comes from, but a great deal of ethanol is indeed shipped by rail alone or in combination with barges without any trucking involved at all.
An interesting take on ethanol plant location came from a farmer friend of mine. He’s certainly not an “agridummy” having a degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Illinois, being on the board of a major CO-OP, and having retired from the Air Guard after 30 years after reaching what his wife said was “The highest enlisted rank in the Air Force.” No, I don’t know what the Air Force/Guard calls the rank, but he made the E9 pay grade and that’s a lot better than most do. (Edit to add things I forgot. He’s also past president of the school board and currently head of the fire protection district.)
His informed insight: Don’t put the ethanol plant where the corn grows. Put it where the cattle eat. Put it near the feed lots in SW Kansas and the Texas Panhandle. This region produces around 42% of the “Fed Beef” in the US.
Ethanol plants produce two things. 1) Ethanol and 2) “Distiller’s Grains”, which is what’s left of the corn after the ethanol is produced. Distiller’s Grains aren’t a waste product. They’re used as livestock feed. There is a concentration of feed lots in SW Kansas and Texas, near the huge beef plants. If you make the ethanol in Iowa you have to ship the distiller’s grains to those feed lots. Before you ship it you have to dry it, which is an expensive process.
The feeder cattle can eat wet distiller’s grains. If such cow food is produced and consumed locally it doesn’t have to be dried. This aparently saves quite a bundle.
On the downside, you have to ship the corn from the midwest. On the upside 1) you don’t have to dry the distiller’s grains, 2) you only have to move the distiller’s grains locally instead of from the midwest, 3) for ethanol going to the west coast, you don’t have to ship it as far.
And in the Navy it would be Master Chief Petty Officer. The highest E-9 is the Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy. A good friend and neighbor of mine was expected to be the next MCPON (some years ago) when a nasty divorce derailed (thus we are on topic) him.
Wet cake has a very short shelf life in the summer. Around the plants, it is in high demand. Prior to the opening of Fairmont, that area faced a shortage of wet cake
Indeed it does. But the price of DDGs includes the heating fuel used in the process. And demand is there for the product. Several experiments were tried several years ago in shipping wet cake to Texas. In the winter it was not too bad, but it cannot be done in the summer. We are looking at $142/ton DDGs FOB Mason City. Add transport, and you pay$172 in California, and $184 in Laredo, TX (export to Mexico).
[quote user=“greyhounds”]
On the downside, you have to ship the corn from the midwest. On the upside 1) you don’t have to dry the distiller’s grains, 2) you only have to move the distiller’s grains locally instead of from the midwest, 3) for ethanol going to the west coast, you don’t have to ship it as far.
An interesting take on ethanol plant location came from a farmer friend of mine. He’s certainly not an “agridummy” having a degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Illinois, being on the board of a major CO-OP, and having retired from the Air Guard after 30 years after reaching what his wife said was “The highest enlisted rank in the Air Force.” No, I don’t know what the Air Force/Guard calls the rank, but he made the E9 pay grade and that’s a lot better than most do. (Edit to add things I forgot. He’s also past president of the school board and currently head of the fire protection district.)
His informed insight: Don’t put the ethanol plant where the corn grows. Put it where the cattle eat. Put it near the feed lots in SW Kansas and the Texas Panhandle. This region produces around 42% of the “Fed Beef” in the US.
Ethanol plants produce two things. 1) Ethanol and 2) “Distiller’s Grains”, which is what’s left of the corn after the ethanol is produced. Distiller’s Grains aren’t a waste product. They’re used as livestock feed. There is a concentration of feed lots in SW Kansas and Texas, near the huge beef plants. If you make the ethanol in Iowa you have to ship the distiller’s grains to those feed lots. Before you ship it you have to dry it, which is an expensive process.
The feeder cattle can eat wet distiller’s grains. If such cow food is produced and consumed locally it doesn’t have to be dried. This aparently saves quite a bundle.
On the downside, you have to ship the corn from the midwest. On the upside 1) you don’t have to dry the distiller’s grains, 2) you only have to move the distiller’s grains locally instead of from the midwest, 3) for ethanol going to the west coast, you don’t have to ship it as far.
Aparently, the economics of the situation favor putting ethanol production out near the f
(1) in the case of Mason City you have a shortline that invested in it’s future by hiring an engineer and trying to make a railroader out of a former county engineer staff employee. That railroad had guts, vision and made some really good staffing decisions. Mason City is not the norm.
(2) With most shortlines, that is not the case. The “we run trains” attitude is prevelant. The better shortlines are looking at the idea of investing in and upgrading their plant and don’t fear the FRA. A large percentage of the non-railroad track owners in this country have no idea what their responsibilities really are and have no idea that the FRA 213 rules apply to them. Maintenance and inspection are treated as a totally unwanted expense by those people. (…and then there are the real estate and industrial development people who go deaf, dumb and blind when you point out a serious deficiency…)
(3) The plans may be approved by the carrier (if it’s a class 1), but inspection by qualified field staff is quite another issue (UP and NS have issues here) . Plus agridummies are famous for changing the plan because they found something cheaper or don’t understand the original design. (Some of the cobbled-on JoeBob modifications to plant defy description. The biggest violations are normally of the clearnce nature, but there are all kinds of blunders encountered)…There are some rather large Ag firms that we won’t work for because they are cheap to the point of being reckless. There is at least one shortline run by mechanical people (gets most of their business repairing cars) that insists on doing things just as RWM stated, they have a horrendous idea of what is FRA excepted and what isn’t.
(4) Ethics lesson : operating department does NOT care about basic standards, just when do they start hauling cars? Learned this the hard way after taking multiple tracks out of service over the years after finding multiple problems that could
I wonder if there are different types of distiller’s grain byproducts? I know a big dairy farmer, who has been in expansion mode for several years. He says he gets nearly all his feed from the local ethanol plants, at what he says is a give-away price. Do they add nutrients to the stuff ?
Yes, right across that road. There used to be a derail right at the top of the hill there. Not sure how stuff rolls uphill… The experienced crews say if you get to 10 mph or more going down the hill, just go ahead and plug it. I haven’t been out there in quite some time, but it was common to roll cars in to the plant, account lack of headroom at the west end. There was an old ROW to follow, but they decided to veer off to the north, put a couple squiggles in the track, and down a 1-2% grade. Just past the end of track is somebody’s house.
Poor? Try telling that to the University of Minnesota; Department of Animal Science, University of Georgia; Poultry Science Department, Iowa State University; Pork Industry Center, University Extension, University of Nebraska - Lincoln; Department of Animal Science, University of Nebraska; Haskell Agriculture Laboratory, Department of Agricultural Economics - Lincoln, just to name a few.
Ask the producers up in Blue Earth, MN, who cannot get enough wet cake in autumn and winter.
Of course, one cannot use DDGs totally, rolled corn, moist corn, and milling byproducts, Bean meal, and alfalfa hay, along with supplements must be use in animal diet management. The fat content in DDGS is 11.1% where as corn is 3.8% Digestible protein is 30.8% for DDGs, and 8.3% for corn. Even at a modest replacement rate using DDGs (20% of diet) instead of corn has no side effects, yet brings about a huge cost saving.
A publication by the University of Wisconsin saw no loss in milk production at a 20% inclusion rate of either DDGs or WDGS (wet cake). In that study, both soybean meal and ground corn were reduced while DDGs/WDGS were increased. At a that inclusion rate, bean meal was reduced to about 1.6% from 12.5%
Chances are he is using both DDGs which is dry, and WDGS which is wet (and cheaper, but in summer has a shelf life of hours).
DDGs is what is left from the distillation process. The solid parts are dried, and the wet mixture left over from the process, is added into the dry, and further dried. Since only starch is removed from the ground up corn, you are left with everything else. As DDGs is dried, it becomes concentrated. Wet DDGs (WDGS) skips the drying portion, and is mixed with the liquids remaining from the process.
This is why you see that DDGs has a higher fat and protein content per pound than whole grain corn. As I understand cattle feeding, there is a need for additional nutrients as well as hay or silage. It becomes a complex balancing act to produce good cattle, at a reasonable price, and with all the characteristics for good beef (fat content, marbling, ect.).
(1) in the case of Mason City you have a shortline that invested in it’s future by hiring an engineer and trying to make a railroader out of a former county engineer staff employee. That railroad had guts, vision and made some really good staffing decisions. Mason City is not the norm.
(2) With most shortlines, that is not the case. The “we run trains” attitude is prevelant. The better shortlines are looking at the idea of investing in and upgrading their plant and don’t fear the FRA. A large percentage of the non-railroad track owners in this country have no idea what their responsibilities really are and have no idea that the FRA 213 rules apply to them. Maintenance and inspection are treated as a totally unwanted expense by those people. (…and then there are the real estate and industrial development people who go deaf, dumb and blind when you point out a serious deficiency…)
(3) The plans may be approved by the carrier (if it’s a class 1), but inspection by qualified field staff is quite another issue (UP and NS have issues here) . Plus agridummies are famous for changing the plan because they found something cheaper or don’t understand the original design. (Some of the cobbled-on JoeBob modifications to plant defy description. The biggest violations are normally of the clearnce nature, but there are all kinds of blunders encountered)…There are some rather large Ag firms that we won’t work for because they are cheap to the point of being reckless. There is at least one shortline run by mechanical people (gets most of their business repairing cars) that insists on doing things just as RWM stated, they have a horrendous idea of what is FRA excepted and what isn’t.
(4) Ethics lesson : operating department does NOT care about basic standards, just when do they start hauling cars? Learned this the hard way after taking multiple tracks out of service over the years after finding multiple problems that could have killed a sw
[tup] Sounds like a winner to me. Here’s an unsolicited (and maybe unnecessary) suggestion, for as long as she stays that way: Do anything (within reason) to support her, keep her with the company, and her career moving forward/ upward.
Otherwise, an excellent, informative dialogue. As I said before, the stuff we can learn on here just amazes me. Thanks !
One other thing to remember is ethanol plants must import gas to mix with the ethanol. For some reason, they cannot ship pure ethanol, maybe to discourage those with a long straw from “sampling” as it is transported. So along with imbound corn, there is also inbound tank cars loaded with gas to switch. While the cost to transport this is very small compared to the inbound corn and outbound DDGs, it still has to be considered.
RWM: If you like that plant in Wisconsin, you’ll love the soybean plant in Decatur, IN. There is a major street (it used to be a US highway) that crosses the inside the clearance points of most of the twenty or so tracks.
I’m begining to think that the “Ethanol people” don’t like the rail industry much. There was supposed to be a big plant that produced ethanol going in a small town just to the west of my town. Then the news paper announced that it was going to have rail scervice. Needless to say, I was extatic, Oh another place to railfan! Well, after the annoucement of rail being involved, the company involved reportadly went bankrupt… Care to speculate?[%-)]
One thing you also have to remember also is that the Ethanol Industry was expanding and then the BALLON did not Burst on the Banks it went THEMONUCLEAR. When the largest banks had to get bailed out by the US Goverment to avoid failing because they took on way to many toxic Mortages and other bad debts. There is NO way that any Ethanol company could get the cash they need to BUILD a new plant right now let alone expand unless they have been running and shown a profit.