Ethanol plant to break ground Thursday
Sunday, July 16, 2006 11:47 PM PDT
By Janine Manny
Printable version
E-mail this articleThe long-awaited groundbreaking for Cascade Grain, the Pacific Northwest's first corn-based ethanol plant, is scheduled for July 20 at Port Westward near Clatskanie.
According to Cascade Grain President Chuck Carlson, construction should be finished in 2008. The plant will employ 50 people and produce about 113 million gallons of ethanol each year.
Another 30 employees will be hired to handle an adjoining carbon dioxide plant. Carbon dioxide is a gas by-product of the ethanol-producing process and will be captured for sale to the soft drink industry.
The plant will extract ethanol from corn, which will be brought to the site from the Midwest on 100-car unit trains.
JH Kelly LLC Ethanol, a joint venture of JH Kelly in Longview and Colorado-based The Industrial Company, is the general contractor for the $192 million plant.
According to JH Kelly, the plant will be the largest on the West Coast and one of the 10 largest in the United States. It will take about 250 construction workers to build. The plant will require about 82,000 linear feet of pipe --- nearly 16 miles --- and 17,000 cubic yards of concrete, enough to cover a football field about six feet deep.
As a gasoline additive, ethanol makes for a cleaner-burning fuel. In Oregon, gas sold at the pump can contain up to 10 percent ethanol.
Ethanol's economic prospects rose significantly last July when Congress passed an energy bill mandating the doubling of "biofuels" output by 2012. Ethanol is unlikely to bring much relief at the pump, however.
Cascade Grain has been working for more than six years on the project, and it took a long time to line up financing.
The Oregon Department of Energy has agreed to loan $20 million to Ridgefield-based Cascade Grain Products LLC, for plant. Berggruen Holdings, a private investment company, announced in June that is had secured $100 million for the project.
Agreements, financing, and permits were finalized in June. Land for the plant will be sub-leased from Portland General Electric, which leases most of the 900 acres of the Port Westward Industrial Park from its owner, the Port of St. Helens.
Under the lease, Cascade Grain would be pay the port about $180,000 per year for the land, according to Port of St. Helens business development manager Greg Jenks.
Port Westward is already home to PGE's Beaver Generating Plant. PGE is constructing a $300 million, 400 megawatt natural gas-fired, combined-cycle combustion turbine plant named the Port Westward Generating Plant. It's expected to be on line in May next year.
Summit Power Group is considering a coal gasification power plant for Port Westward. The $1.1 billion project, known as the Lower Columbia Clean Energy Project, would employ about 100 people once completed, according to Port of St. Helens officials.
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