| FARGO -- The Northern Crops Institute and several groups
have asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture to release 100,000 tons of
surplus sugar to use in factory-scale ethanol production tests.
The goal is to verify an earlier test that indicated sugar can
"accelerate" ethanol production in corn dry mills, cutting down
a pile of government-owned sugar and making valuable fuel at the same
time.
Faced with 20-year lows in sugar prices, sugar companies forfeited some
810,000 tons of refined sugar to the USDA's Commodity Credit Corp. in the
past several months. The government has been struggling with how to get it
out of the market.
At least 10 participating factories each would receive no more than
10,000 tons of the CCC-owned sugar, said Patricia Berglund, director of
the NCI in Fargo. The NCI is a multistate group that promotes the use of
Northern-grown crops.
Berglund said participating factories would be responsible for keeping
track of how the sugar might help the sugar production from corn in their
dry milling plants. They also would estimate how much they'd be willing to
pay for sugar to make it into ethanol, Berglund said.
The research program would follow up and expand on tests run last fall
at the Minnesota Energy plant at Buffalo Lake, Minn., which showed that
adding 4 percent sugar into ethanol fermentation tanks could speed the
process and increase corn grind at the plant.
No disruptions
"It is not anticipated that the additional production of ethanol
will disrupt the (ethanol) market," the group wrote in a proposal
sent to former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman last week, just
before the change in administrations. Berglund said the group will follow
up to make sure that new Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman gets a similar
pitch.
"An additional 15 million gallons of ethanol produced due to the
addition of this amount of sugar in a 1.6-billion-gallon market would
represent an increase of less than 1 percent -- a fairly insignificant
amount in a growing market," the proposal said.
The group calculates the additional ethanol produced in the tests would
create a $500,000 revenue increase for each of the 10 plants the region,
which would result in regional economic impact of $5 million and a total
of 15.4 million in economic activity.
While Berglund and the NCI are facilitating the proposal, the primary
sponsors are the North Dakota Corn Growers Association and the American
Coalition for Ethanol, based in Sioux Falls, S.D. The proposal carried
support from Farmers Union, Farm Bureau, grain and rural electric groups
in North Dakota and Minnesota. Berglund said the idea is supported by
North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven.
Joining Berglund on the "study team" is Wallie Hardie, a
Fairmount, N.D., corn and sugar beet farmer, who is a director of the
North Dakota Corn Growers and a former president of the National Corn
Growers Association. The third member is Trevor Guthmiller, executive
director of ACE.
"This is a good example of win-win," Hardie said, emphasizing
that corn growers don't need to worry about granulated sugar displacing
corn. "I'd like to see the wheels start to turn within a month or
two." He said the plants would need to try the sugar for six to nine
months and send information back to the USDA by the end of the year.
The Red River Valley Sugarbeet Growers Association was not among the
sponsors for the proposal but donated a small amount of sugar used in a
successful test at Buffalo Lake. |