Only an air permit keeps Al-Corn from breaking ground on expansion

Al-Corn in Claremont is continuing to do preliminary work in preparation for its upcoming expansion as the company awaits issuance of an air permit from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.
The plan, said CEO Randall Doyle, remains that construction will start as soon as the permit is issued.
“As soon as the permit is issued,” he said, “we’ll begin. I’ll have the permit in one hand and a shovel in the other.”
Al-Corn officials have said all along that they hoped the permit would be granted by September but Doyal said the MPCA process is always lengthy.
A favorable thing, he said, is that Al-Corn officials have been assisted by Sen. Vicki Jensen, Sen. Dave Senjem, Rep. Rod Hamilton and Rep. Brian Daniels who have expressed their support and a desire that the permitting process move as quickly as possible.
They have also worked with former MPCA official Peter Larson who is helping guide the company through the process.
While waiting, Doyal said, Al-Corn team members continue to meet with the project engineers and have been able to refine the design.
“It’s a lot easier to do the design on paper,” he said, “than if there is steel in the ground.”
It is the largest expansion project that Al-Corn has ever started, he said, and is estimated to cost $146 million.
It will raise the ethanol production capacity from 50 million gallons to 120 million gallons a year, he said.
It will also add up to 15 full-time equivalent jobs and bring in approximately $10 to $14 million in new tax base divided between Claremont, Dodge County and the Triton School District.
In addition to increasing the plans ethanol output it will also allow the company to expand its market for distillers grains, the by-product that is used to produce animal feed.
Ethanol production, Doyal said, only uses the starch from the corn. The rest of the corn is used to make the grain which is a good protein source for all types of livestock, he said, including chickens, turkeys, hogs, dairy, feeder cattle, sheep and goats.
All of the turkeys raised commercially in Minnesota consume Al-Corn’s distillers grain and it has even been purchased locally for llamas and dogs.
It’s a very high protein and low carbohydrate product, he said, which makes it ideal to mix it with other products.
The distillers grain, Doyal said, is looked at as a high quality product by those in the foreign market. The co-op has shipped a lot of the product to China, he said.
Much of the shipping to China, he said, is because of a firm in Wisconsin that gets a lot of product from China. Instead of sending the ship