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Thursday, February 16, 2006

Environment - Ethanol plant granted air permit in Clymers, Indiana [More]

The Indianapolis Star has a brief item today on its website reporting:

The Andersons, an agribusiness based in Maumee, Ohio, says it has received a state air permit for the ethanol plant it plans to build at Clymers, about 60 miles north of Indianapolis.

When the plant goes on line in early 2007, its capacity of 110 million gallons a year will be the greatest east of the Mississippi River.
A perfect opportunity, I thought, to use the new IDEM Air Permit system. This story yesterday, in Government Technology, headlined "Indiana Creates Search Engine For Air Permits On The Internet," reported:
The Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) and Access Indiana have worked together to add an online air permits search engine to the Web. The Air Quality Permit Status Search Engine sorts air permits by source name, county, permit number, time frame and other criteria. The status and information in the permit will be automatically updated when changes occur.

"IDEM is working to make Indiana's environmental permitting process easy to understand and simple to access," said IDEM commissioner Thomas W. Easterly. "Being able to hop online and find every air permit in the state brings our agency one step closer to Hoosiers. What used to take an afternoon in the file room can be done with a few clicks of a mouse."

The old system forced the user to download the entire permit file in order to view basic information. The search engine provides permit status and displays information on a summary page. The complete permit remains available for downloading from the summary page.

So what about this Clymers ethanol permit?

Here is the main page for the new permit status capability. From that page, I selected the first item, "Search 1. partial source name and county." Actually, all I knew from the story was that the new plant was in Clymers, but using Google I quickly learned that Clyers is in Cass County.

I selected "Cass County" and did not fill in the source name, because I was not sure what it was. I got back a list of 40 permits issued in Cass County. Fortunately the third one on the list was Andersons Clymers Terminal, which looked right because "Andersons" was mentioned in the Star story.

Sure enough, the screen showed that Andersons was issued a FESOP permit on 2/15/2006. But that was not enough for me to know whether or not this was the ethanol plant mentioned in the Star story. So I clicked on the permit link: 017-21536-00023. and got a screen explaining that this was a "New Source FESOP (Minor PSD/EO) (120)." Still not the information I was seeking. There was one more link, to the document itself: 017-21536-00023* Unfortunately, as of this writing, the link leads to a "document not found" screen.

[More] From the company's press release:

MAUMEE, Ohio, Feb. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Andersons, Inc. (Nasdaq: ANDE) today announced it has received approval for an air permit from the Indiana Department of Environmental Management for the ethanol facility in Clymers, Indiana. Financial closing for the facility is expected soon.

"We are very pleased we are one step closer to begin construction on the Clymers ethanol facility," says President and CEO Mike Anderson. "When completed in the first quarter of 2007, the facility will have a capacity of 110 million gallons and will be the largest of its kind east of the Mississippi River."
The ethanol plant will be owned and operated by The Andersons Clymers Ethanol LLC. The Andersons, Inc. will be the lead equity investor in the facility and, in addition to managing the facility, will provide grain origination, ethanol marketing, risk management and other services.

The Andersons, Inc. is a diversified company with interests in the grain, ethanol and plant nutrient sectors of U.S. agriculture, as well as in railcar marketing, industrial products formulation, turf products production, and general merchandise retailing. Founded in Maumee, Ohio, in 1947, the company now has operations in seven U.S. states plus rail equipment leasing interests in Canada and Mexico. For more, visit The Andersons online at http://www.andersonsinc.com.


Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 16, 2006 11:57 AM
Posted to Environment