I would like to tweet about a visit I made to an ethanol plant, with JD Scholten, who is running for Congress in Iowa's fourth district.
When JD said "let's go visit the ethanol plant", I thought I knew exactly what was up. But he took me to an actual ethanol plant!
When JD said "let's go visit the ethanol plant", I thought I knew exactly what was up. But he took me to an actual ethanol plant!
An ethanol plant is awesome because it is exactly like a fancy distillery, except with none of the wank. There are no oak barrels; there's no artisanal talk about small batches. There's just a bunch of men and women who are serious about turning corn into booze.
The name of the game is to turn corn into alcohol with as much yield as possible. A typical plant gets 2.8% yield. The second best plant in the area hits 2.98%. This plant prides itself on a yield over 3% by weight.
The corn arrives by truck from regional growers (every farmer here owns a semi), and the alcohol leaves by railcar for Chicago, North Carolina, Houston, or wherever the price is right.
The process starts by putting corn in fermentation tanks for sixty-some hours. What comes out is called beer, and smells exactly like its namesake, except that it's cloudy and has a bunch of corn oil in it. It coats as it refreshes.
When it's ready, the beer is put through a column called a stripper, which explains this delightful display in the ethanol distillery's NASA-like control room
The plant has a very fancy Siemens process control. Everything except the fermentation is done in continuous flow, and the key to high yields is getting every part of the process completely optimized. Most of the time, everything works. You earn your salary when it doesn't.
For example, the plant uses a specialized yeast. It is expensive and finicky—"sneeze on it and it dies," says the plant manager. You have to keep it within a narrow range of temperature, aldehyde concentration, and sing it soft songs in the moonlight. But boy, can it yeast.
You can't distill ethanol/h2o past 95% purity because chemistry. To make pure ethanol, the plant adds in nano-coated ceramic beads, which have pores too small for alcohol to pass through, but are big enough to let in water. These are produced down in Houston.
The beads are reusable. You have to put them in a high vacuum, and the water drains back out. Every part of the plant has been optimized like this. The margins are razor thin.
Our host draws a sample of 190 proof ethanol, which smells clean, and 200-proof (pure) ethanol, which reeks of fusil oils. It is even worse than baijiu, and I lived in China and don't say that lightly
To make this ethanol, the plant draws on corn from about a sixty mile radius. Like I said, Iowa farmers now have semi trucks, not just tractors. There's a line of them making the loop around the plant the whole time we're there. The roads are carved up bad.
The corn oil, which smells like fryer grease, is a by-product. They can pour it back on the distillers' grains, but it's ten times more valuable if they can sell it straight, as biodiesel.
The plant runs 355 days a year, and shuts down twice for a five day stretch. You can shut it down in a minute in an emergency, but it takes multiple hours to restart. Don't press the red button as a joke
The whole place employs about 60 people. It's a skilled job, paying 55-60K a year, and it takes training to do right. You need to learn how to respond when things go wrong, which happens rarely. There's an art to it.
People work 12 hours on, 12 hours off, and get a long weekend. Many like it because it helps with child care. The plant is not unionized, but the manager assures us everyone's happy.
This plant, which was built in 2003, is considered old. The pace of technology change—the enzymes, ceramic balls, industrial equipment, monitoring and computerization—has been breathtaking. This is a tech job, pure and simple.
We think of farming as rustic and natural. But farming is heavy industry. And the same pressures of scale apply. Small farms are disappearing in Iowa. The average Iowa farmer is a 74 year old woman. Farming is tied to a huge global supply chain, like everything else.
Events happening far away—oil price shocks in the middle east, hurricanes in Houston—have an immediate effect on Iowa farmers. They also rely heavily on seasonal immigrant labor to get the crop in. And climate change here affects the bottom line.
I asked the manager of the plant how he saw the future for ethanol. Corn was $7 a pound when he started in the 90s, now it is down to $2. It is not something he thinks about. His mind is on yields, process flow, and the details of this difficult job.
But this district deserves someone who is willing to look at the big picture. The jobs at this plant are some of the few that pay a good wage, with benefits. For most people growing up in IA-4, there's not much to keep them there. And the face of farming is changing.
This is the kind of thing JD can speak to. He gets a lot of attention for being an alternative to Steve King, the clownish, bigoted current representative who is an embarrassment to all Iowans. But there are real policy questions in northwest Iowa that need answers.
And in race after race in rural places, these are the issues that come up. How do you create *real* jobs, and opportunities for young people? How do you face the pressures of a globalized economy? The reality show playing out in the White House is very far away.
So, I hope you will support @Scholten4Iowa because he has a real chance of dethroning Steve King, one of the vilest people to serve in Congress. But I also hope you will support him because he genuinely cares about the future of his district. Rural communities are suffering.
The solutions we need in northwest Iowa—a living wage, defense against corporate conglomerates, rural broadband, wind energy—are ones a Democrat can win on. Please help 9 Democrats like this win, each with a comparable story, by donating today: secure.actblue.com/donate/great_s…
