Ethanol plant reopens with new leadership

Sept. 16--PERRY TOWNSHIP -- New owners and $30 million in upgrades means the new Guardian Lima ethanol plant that celebrated its grand opening Thursday is nothing like the failed facility it began as.

Officials from the plant's owners and partners were joined by employees and local officials to cut the ribbon on the Hoax Parkway plant and to celebrate the rebirth of a facility that, just one year ago, all but symbolized failure.

"It was 18 months ago when I made my first trip here. All I'd ever heard about this facility were rumors. I had heard all about the problems they had," said Don Gale, CEO of Guardian Lima. "I walked through that plant and found out they were not all rumors."

The plant actually began operation earlier this summer. By June and July it was running at up to 95 percent of its 54 million gallon initial capacity. In August, it hit 100 percent and figured it was time to let people know they were open for business, Gale said.

"We would be in staff meetings and they would ask why we don't take out an ad or something. I said, we haven't had a fire department here once. We haven't had an emergency response team here once. We haven't had 30 complaints about the smell, we haven't had one. We're going OK," Gales said.

That cautious approach comes with the realization that the plant had a bad reputation well before Guardian got the keys. Guardian Energy Holdings LLC, headquartered in Janesville, Minn., purchased a majority stake in the plant in late 2010 from Paladin Ethanol Acquisition, an arm of the Washington, D.C., capital group that purchased the facility in November 2009 after its founders, Greater Ohio Ethanol, filed bankruptcy.

The original plant ran for just five months before shutting down and ultimately losing hundreds of thousands of dollars for local investors who bought into the plant at $50,000 a piece. Guardian has since invested $30 million to fix the engineering problems that lead to its failure.

"No portion of this facility went untouched," Gale said. "The only thing that stayed the same is the structure."

The re-engineering left them with a plant that is both productive and environmentally friendly. It was engineered to be a zero-process water discharge plant, meaning all water used in the plant is reprocessed and used over. And by the completion of a maintenance update later this month, they expect to exceed capacity in ethanol as well as produce massive amounts of distiller's corn (used for animal food) and corn oil, both byproducts of the process.

At full run, the biorefinery will produce 56 million gallons of fuel-grade ethanol and 170,000 tons of dried distillers grains and 8 million pounds of corn oil, Gale said.

"And we're going top do that cost effectively by 33 very dedicated employees at the plant," Gale said.

Those 33 employees -- chosen from more than 600 applicants -- are working the "green" jobs the Obama administration has been talking about, said Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, who spoke during Thursday's ceremony.

The longtime ethanol lobbyist said the success of the Lima plant, the jobs it created and, most of all, the ethanol it produces, are proof that ethanol is good for communities and vital to the country.

"I know where the green jobs are. They're right here in Lima, Ohio, today," Dinneen said.

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