The manufacture of ethanol is an old technology dating back to antiquity when man first figured out how to distill fermented alcoholic beverages. But the EKAE plant in Garnett is completely modernized. “It's much like making corn mash whiskey,” says Kent Calvert, a sales engineer with Hughes Machinery Company, Wichita, Kansas, the Dresser-Rand equipment representative who helped introduce a steam turbine generator at the plant. In addition to manufacturing ethanol, the plant generates approximately 750 kW of electricity.

The EKAE plant, about 100 miles southwest of Kansas City, operates around the clock 353 days a year (a dozen days are for scheduled maintenance outages), according to Doug Sommer, plant manager. Completed in June 2005, the $46.8 million plant is one of six ethanol plants in Kansas, and the first in the United States to incorporate a steam turbine to generate electricity as part of its operation. EKAE, a farmer cooperative with more than 600 owner-members, decided during the design phase to add the steam turbine. The electrical generation represents a small portion of the coop's profits, and profitable it has been. The board authorized a first-year profit distribution of nearly $3.5 million among coop unit holders. download complete story PDF→