Pacific Ethanol building 50M gallon plant in Idaho

Pacific Ethanol (NASDAQ: PEIX) today announced it will soon begin construction on a 50 million gallon per year ethanol facility in Burley, Idaho, mid-way between the fuel markets of Boise and Salt Lake City, Utah.

It expects to begin construction, which should take approximately 12 months, within the next thirty days.

The Burley Idaho plant site has access to both the Union Pacific Railroad and Interstate 84. A local population of over 300,000 dairy cattle and 100,000 feedlot cattle will represent a market for the wet distiller's grain from the new ethanol facility. A fuel blending rack is within eight miles of the plant site.

"The Burley Idaho plant expands our production footprint to new markets in the Western U.S., from existing markets in California, Oregon and Colorado. Moreover, the Burley plant fits well with our destination model and will serve local markets for both fuel and feed with significant production cost advantages over products imported from the Midwest," said Pacific Ethanol CEO Neil Koehler.

Pacific Ethanol owns and operates an ethanol plant in Madera County, California, is constructing a second plant in Boardman, Oregon and owns a 42% interest in Front Range Energy, which owns and operates an ethanol plant in Windsor, Colorado.

In May 2006, Pacific Ethanol completed an equity funding of $138 million, which provided the company with sufficient cash to accelerate its stated goal of completing five ethanol production facilities totaling 220 million gallons of capacity per year by the middle of 2008 and to add additional facilities to increase total capacity to 420 million gallons per year by the end of 2010.

Earlier this month, Pacific Ethanol obtained a commitment for up to $325 million of senior secured credit (see Ethanol layoffs - harbinger?)

Pacific Ethanol and its wholly-owned subsidiary Kinergy Marketing is the largest West Coast-based marketer of ethanol. In addition, the company says it's working to identify and develop other renewable fuel technologies such as cellulose-based ethanol production and biodiesel.

Cleantech developments making news in the past 24 hours

• Econcern partners on €863M Chinese wind farm deal
• Behind the scenes at Cleantech Forum Shanghai
• Infinite Power raises $13M to ramp thin-film batteries
• Hawaii becomes next stop for Better Place
• Thar Technologies looks at India's karanj, jatropha for biodiesel

View the last week of cleantech developments here | Subscribe to full feed