Construction began Wednesday in Indian River County on a bioenergy plant expected to produce 8 million gallons of ethanol a year and 6 megawatts of power from local yard, vegetative and household waste.
The project is the first fuel ethanol plant to break ground in Florida, although a few others are in the works. In Florida, a mandate requires that gasoline contain 10 percent ethanol, also known as ethyl alcohol.
The state uses about 800 million gallons of ethanol a year, all of it produced elsewhere.
The U.S. has 204 ethanol plants, but 99 percent of ethanol is produced from grain starch. The U.S. produced 13 billion gallons of ethanol in 2010, said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association in Washington.
INEOS New Planet BioEnergy, a joint venture between INEOS Bio and New Planet Energy, will be the first advanced waste-to-fuel biorefinery in the U.S., the company said. The technology was developed by INEOS Bio, a part of INEOS, the world's fourth-largest petrochemicals company
.
Located at a former Ocean Spray grapefruit juice plant near Vero Beach, the BioEnergy Center will provide 380 direct and indirect jobs, including 175 construction jobs, over the next two years and 50 full-time jobs in Indian River County
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In addition to a $2.5 million Florida Farm-to-Fuel grant, the project received a $50 million federal grant in 2009. Recently, it received a conditional commitment for a $75 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The facility will be the first commercial-scale project in the world using INEOS Bio's patented technology. Using naturally occurring bacteria, the process converts gases derived directly from biomass into ethanol.
The company expects to begin producing ethanol and power by mid-2012.
Hartwig said the economic downturn hampered the commercialization of new technologies.
"Frankly, we will need dozens of facilities like the Indian River bioenergy center all across the country using a variety of technologies to break America's addiction to imported oil," Hartwig said. "America can be energy self-reliant, and this project represents a pathway to achieving that goal."
The economy has slowed investment in energy start-ups, but several other ethanol plants are planned.
United States EnviroFuels LLC is developing a 20-million-gallon-a-year plant in Highlands County using sweet sorghum as the primary feedstock.
Vercipia Biofuels, owned by BP, plans to build in Highland County, too. Fort Lauderdale-based Southeast Renewable Fuels LLC plans to build three sweet-sorghum-to-ethanol plants in South Florida.
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