Chemist sees bright future for ethanol

ELLISVILLE, Mo. — Kelly Davis was on the ground floor in the early days of the modern ethanol industry and reflected on the renewable fuel and its growth.

The Renewable Fuels Association is observing its 40th anniversary this year and spotlighting some of the ethanol industry’s pioneers and Davis was featured on RFA’s most recent “Ethanol Report.”

Davis, a native of Huntington, West Virginia, serves as RFA vice president, technical and regulatory affairs. She is also an active member of the American Society for Testing and Materials Committee for Petroleum Products.

She earned her degree in chemistry at Marshall University and in 1980 began working for Ashland Oil in Ashland, Kentucky.

“I had worked there as a summer laborer and they hired me full time at H-coal gasification. As it was winding down they had invested in us chemists and they started distributing us to other parts of the refinery process where we could keep our jobs,” she said.

“I moved over to South Point, Ohio, and my job was to help them start an ethanol plant. That was the first time I ever heard the word ethanol. That was about 1982.

“The plant wasn’t running at that point, so I was a temporary employee and showed up at a 60-million-gallon-a-year, coal-fired dry mill and was there for the next 13 years. I started it up and shut it down. It was called South Point Ethanol in South Point, Ohio. We weren’t a new build. We were a retrofit of an existing industrial site.”

South Point Ethanol’s processing was designed by Raphael Katzen Associates based on dry milling of corn, batch fermentation, distillation to anhydrous ethanol, mechanical vapor recompression of the thin stillage and steam tube drying of the distillers dried grain with solubles.

“It was azeotrope distillation. The molecular sieve later replaced that dehydration ability. So, we had an azeotropic plant that we ran for 13 years until 1995. It was when corn went to $5 a bushel for the first time that I could ever remember. The plant hadn’t bought any corn, so they decided to close the whole facility,” Davis said.

RFA Involvement

She became involved in the RFA and recognized as the technical person in the industry.

“There weren’t very many of us and so when RFA formed the Technical Committee I was always part of that. Then over a period of years I was the Technical Committee chair, as well,” she said.

Davis then moved to an Ashland Oil refinery in Minnesota and was there when she got a call from a friend who, along with her fiancé, was starting an ethanol-focused publication which today is Ethanol Producer Magazine.

“It was a newsletter at first and she wanted me to not leave the industry and she said, ‘We’re building under this Minnesota model. You’re already moving to Minnesota and you should stay in the ethanol business.’ So, she advertised me in her first newsletter. I talked to a few people which led to the job at Chippewa Valley Ethanol Company in Benson, Minnesota,” Davis noted.

“The Minnesota model is where the state invested in ethanol by guaranteeing that if the producers built the plant and operated the plant they would be rewarded with payback. It was like a 10-cent a gallon type payback.”

The Minnesota model is a private/public partnership where local farmers and others invested in ownership of the ethanol facility.

“The Minnesota model is a huge piece of our industry because $5 corn was not going to get us small plants involved,” Davis said.

Early Challenges

There were plenty of challenges in the industry’s infancy.

“When I think of early challenges I think of the producer, the scale-up of the dry mills to the size that we were going to. I can remember at South Point Ethanol under azeotropic distillation we started with energy values 65,000 btu per gallon. The challenges were the cost effectiveness, getting prices down, getting yields up,” Davis said.

“The early challenges, too, were enzymes and our enzyme companies. I actually credit them because in our early days and through the 1990s they were the ones that led our best innovations. The enzymes just got better and better as we got bigger as an industry.”

In her long-time role as a chemist, Davis noted she is most proud of the contributions she made to the industry in the laboratory.

She worked on the high-performance liquid chromatography method while at South Point Ethanol and developed a lab manual and brought those advancements to Chippewa Valley Ethanol Co. where another opportunity came down the pike.

“When Dave VanderGriend decided to build his first turnkey ethanol plant, which was 18 miles from where I was working at CVEC, Dave was installing an ICM dryer there and he took the challenge to turnkey Denco into a small ethanol plant. He hired me to set up the laboratory and that laboratory and that set-up became part of his builds,” she said.

“So, to this day I get a kick out of going into the laboratories and seeing them still counting cell counts the way that we did, that the HPLC method hasn’t deviated too much and the set-up is pretty much the way we did it. The biggest part of the accomplishment was really just being part of a bigger picture.”

Vodka

Davis was involved in another distilling process, the results being the development of Shakers vodka.

Chippewa Valley Ethanol was approached by a group of entrepreneurs in 2003 who wanted to make the first high-end American vodka.

“We got called by some very rich people who wanted something specific. I tried to pass them off and send them to a routine distiller and they said, ‘No, we don’t want to go there. We want to start with you guys.’ So, we invited them out,” Davis said.

“They had a story to tell and anyone who knows me knows I don’t say no and I said we could try that and then they were more specific. I was like, that’s not engineering possible. It was one those kinds of challenges.

“I was the Technology Committee chair at the RFA and Bill Lee was chairman of the board at the time and we were working on this industrial alcohol unit and serendipitously we made a wonderful product.

“We went to Poland on a research tour. At that time I’d already made Shakers and had it in a regular lab jar and I got praised by the master distiller there. He liked it a lot, so we knew the pressure was on to come back home and repeat what we did and we successfully sent it to the Spirits Fest and won a double gold.”

The Shakers trademark was bought in 2012 by Gallo Winery, the same year Davis joined the RFA staff.

Optimistic Outlook

Davis sees a bright future for the ethanol industry.

“The biggest thing is how fast we grew. From the time I was first in it — 1981, 1982 time frame — we always had growth. There was maybe a little turn-back in the mid-1990s, but right around 2005 there was that hockey stick growth and the fast-build of so many of the same type of technology plants were unbelievable,” she said.

“It was something that you never saw coming, but it was stimulated at the right time and honestly I think it’s made us too big to fail, too many jobs, too many small towns are very related to this.

“I think ethanol’s future is globally bright and it’s going to grow around the globe. It’s a simple compound to make. It’s not toxic like its counterparts would be. It can be used as a feedstock and lots of other bio-based chemicals. If you make products out of the facility versus commodities then I think you stand a bigger chance of depreciating the ethanol value compared to co-products.

“I’m a believer in the molecule. It’s going to be utilized in home and healthcare products, cosmetics, beverages and gas tanks, it’s going to be used in a lot more formulas and I really hope the bio-based incentives and eliminating the fossil fuels will get the product into the feedstock, as well.”