The interview is pretty wide-ranging but I thought this bit was interesting: [...]
The interview is pretty wide-ranging but I thought this bit was interesting:
One thing that folks might be interested to hear about is how the tightly-coupled supply chain is affecting everybody else. Ethanol plants have been hit really hard by this administration.
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[...] We've had plants shut down, we have several that only go six months a year; some have gone idle indefinitely. This was all before COVID-19. As a result, we have too much corn, and when we have too much corn the price goes down, and things just get harder. Right now with COVID-19 and this, the combination of the two, for every gallon an ethanol plant makes they're losing $.20. It goes through their reserve money and so things are really really bad.
[...] There are two other products these ethanol plants make. One is DDG (dried distillers’ grains), which is used to make livestock feed. There's actually a livestock feed shortage right now that I believe is related to ethanol.
A second product that comes out of ethanol plants is CO2. We use the CO2 to make dry ice for our freezers for cold storage. If we don't continue to produce ethanol, then we don't have the CO2 to freeze the meat that’s being processed. So you see how all these supply chains are connected.
That CO2 also goes to our water plants, where it helps purify our water. We need it because of all the runoff from agriculture and a lot of different things, we need that, otherwise we would have lots of chemicals in our water. So we're scrambling right now on many fronts because all the ethanol plants are shutting down. What do we do? It's just a mess.
The interview is pretty wide-ranging but I thought this bit was interesting:
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