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CEO plans to produce ethanol from South Florida sorghum
If Aaron Pepper has his way, the ethanol blended into gas for your car in South Florida will soon come from the shores of Lake Okeechobee.
His Fort Lauderdale company seeks to build three factories by the lake to produce the biofuel fromsweet sorghum, a tall stalky plant now used mainly as a cattle feed sweetener.
The first $75 million plant would be up and running by 2011, said the chief executive of Southeast Renewable Fuels.
“This is an untapped market,” Pepper said, noting soaring demand for ethanol because of recent government mandates but a lack of commercial-scale factories in South Florida.
Pepper is planning one of the first sweet sorghum-to-ethanol factories worldwide. Several are being developed in India and South America.
But questions abound over the crop in Florida, from potential diseases on large scale farms to available acreage and its sales price.
“Expectations are raised too much with little data,” warned George Philippidis, associate director of Florida International University’s Applied Research Center.
Pepper said his team has been developing the project for more than 15 months and has a 500-acre test farm near Lake Okeechobee.
It plans its first factory in the Clewiston area of Hendry County, known for sugar, citrus and other crops. The plant would make up to 20 million gallons of ethanol a year, a tiny amount in a state that needs almost 1 billion gallons yearly just to meet 10 percent of current transport fuel needs.
South Florida now gets ethanol – blended into gas to trim fuel prices and cut pollution – mainly by truck or ship from Midwest factories that make it from corn. It also imports sugar cane-based ethanol from Brazil and countries in the Caribbean.
Biofuels experts say sweet sorghum appears promising as a feedstock. It yields more energy than corn and resembles energy-rich sugar cane, so that Brazil’s lengthy experience in production can be applied.
Pepper’s company already is talking with farm groups about planting sweet sorghum, which grows like sugar cane to 12- to 15-feet tall, but is not widely cultivated in the area. Initial reaction is good, since sorghum yields two harvests a year and can be planted on sugar lands when they are fallow, he said.
The company also is working to raise at least $75 million for the project, with up to 80 percent likely to come from equipment suppliers in Brazil or Spain.
The factory would buy sweet sorghum from local farmers, squeeze juice from the stalks, ferment and distill the liquid into ethanol and also burn stalks to make electricity.
It would earn money in three ways: selling ethanol to fuel companies; selling carbon dioxide captured from producing electricity to soft drink makers; and selling surplus power to the grid – likely 20 megawatts a year worth at least $15 million, Pepper said.
If all goes well, plans call for two larger factories, each costing at least $140 million. Those would boost the company’s ethanol output to 100 million gallons a year and require about 100,000 acres of sweet sorghum to supply the three mills.
A former schoolteacher in New York City, 59-year-old Pepper hadn’t prepared to become a biofuel entrepreneur.
He had developed a poster company and then sold it five years ago, retiring to South Florida. But eco-business opportunities piqued his interest, and plans to require 10 percent ethanol in all Florida gas by 2011 mobilized him.
“It’s too costly to bring in ethanol from the Midwest; there’sno pipeline to South Florida. And there’s a 54-cents-a-gallon tariff on Brazilian ethanol,” Pepper said. “Locally-produced ethanol is the solution.”
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