E3 BioFuels chairman and CEO, Dennis Langley, announced Monday that operations will commence in Dec. 2006 at its new Mead, Neb., facility featuring the first closed-loop system for distilling commercial quantities of ethanol using methane gas recaptured from cow manure, instead of fossil fuels.
The closed-loop system combines a 25-million-gallon ethanol refinery, beef cattle feedlot, and anaerobic digesters to maximize energy efficiencies that would be unavailable to each component on a stand-alone basis. It eliminates the necessity for fossil fuels in ethanol production.
According to Langley, the plant will make ethanol more than twice as energy-efficient as other methods of producing ethanol or gasoline.
E3 BioFuels is planning to construct 15 more closed-loop plants, near feedlots and dairy farms, in the next five years