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Mr. President,
I would like to thank you for taking time to experience first-hand the benefits of ethanol to America. It was a great honor to host the President of the United States at POET Biorefining – Macon, Mo., and it was a memorable day for the plant’s board, team members, and the entire community.
Your vision of a renewable future is one that we share and work hard every day to achieve. I hope what you saw on the tour and what you learned from conversations with POET team members reinforced that point. There are many opportunities to expand the benefits of clean, domestic ethanol.
In our brief conversation on April 28, we discussed the next steps to lead our country down a renewable path. The foundation has been set; it’s where we go from here. POET Biorefining — Macon celebrated its 10 year anniversary the week of your visit. In 10 years, this plant and POET have achieved great things. And we’re not stopping there.
We will continue to advance, to be a sustainable leader for our nation. And in the future, our biorefineries will produce more than just ethanol. They will look radically different from what they do today. We will use a process that will take advantage of every aspect of the corn plant.
Through this process, we will break the corn kernel into three parts, and use every bit of it. The first part will be used to produce ethanol, the nutritious second part will be used to make foods and animal feed and the third part that can’t be made into ethanol and doesn’t hold nutritional value will be used to make renewable co-products like bio-plastics and bio-polymers, displacing even more petroleum-based products.
But there’s more than just the kernel. The cobs, leaves and husks will also be processed into ethanol. The parts of these waste products not used to produce ethanol will be fed back into the plant and will generate enough power to run the entire facility –with extra to spare. Additionally, the ash left over from the process will replace fertilizers made from fossil fuels. And finally, the stalk will remain on the field maintaining the quality of the soil and preventing erosion.
By using this process to maximize every piece of the corn plant, we will give rural America the opportunity to feed, fuel and manufacture new products for our country. But as I mentioned on the tour, to grow our industry we need market access. We have the ability to displace large amounts of imported oil with increasing corn yields and cellulose. But first, we need a fair and open market. This includes three essential items – E15 available for all vehicles, a Flex Fuel Vehicle requirement and blender pumps. This will give ethanol a better opportunity to compete head to head with gasoline.
That’s what POET sees for the future. We will displace large volumes of fossil fuels. The same fuels that have caused a great tragedy in the recent months. My heart goes out to the victims of the Gulf Oil Disaster. It’s more important now than ever to provide renewable solutions, to show America that we are decreasing this dependence on oil and also decreasing the chances that this will happen again. And Mr. President, we stand behind your efforts to achieve the renewable goals this country needs.
Sincerely,
Jeff Broin, CEO of POET
