Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Cascade Grains Files for Chapter 11 Protection

Its been a rough few months for the ethanol industry. First with falling commodity pricing washing away the protective assumptions of a hedged position. Then a recession reduced fuel consumption further reducing not only the price of gasoline but the mandate blend usages expected in Oregon.

To compound this Cascade Grain also shipped some product with (from what I've been told second hand) ASTM spec fuel that exceeding a sulfate content that threw the ethanol out of specification use by a major refinery selling E10 gasoline to retail users. This same (less than reliable rumor) source told me that the cause was the well water used in the manufacture of the product which had sulfur in it to begin with .

(NOTE: I have no idea if the above is true this is all second hand information that sounded plausible enough to post. If incorrect I will gladly pull this down and apologize).

This being reported in far less detail as part of the Chapter 11 story in the following news papers.
See it in the Portland Business Journal, Seattle Post Intelligence, an AP mention in the Oregonian (where I first saw the story this morning) and the local community to the plant the Longview Daily News

The best reporting on the subject is the local Longview Daily News. I recomend reading that first.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mark I have no first hand knowledge of what was going on at Cascade but unless I am mistaken sulfur and sulfates should not be passed through the distillation process. If they were present in the water they would be concentrated in the distillers grains.

Mark Fitz said...

Ahhhh,

I don't doubt it. Hence why I dsclaimed the rumor. When there are stories floating around at the truck driver level (which is my source) you know to take them with a grain of salt.

Thanks