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Too Many Trade-Offs On Ethanol Plant
By Mr Ethanol | November 21, 2007
The Virginian-Pilot:
Developers of a proposed ethanol plant are asking the Chesapeake City Council tonight to approve a grand experiment: placing the largest ethanol plant in the U.S. just downwind from two downtowns and plenty of neighborhoods.
Council members must weigh a difficult set of competing interests, economic, environmental and political. Some are intensely local, like the prospect of a $4 million-a-year payday. Some, like the risk of obnoxious smells, are regional, while others, such as the need for alternative energy, are national in scope.
This is a close call, but the unknowns argue for the council to play it safe and deny the conditional-use permit. This plant is too big and too close to one of the region’s population centers, while its safeguards against odors are just too untested for comfort.
International Bio Energy Virginia LLC wants to invest $400 million on 97 acres next to the St. Juliens Creek Annex.
It eventually could produce as much as 237 million gallons of ethanol a year, an output that dwarfs other plants now up and running.
The company takes seriously its responsibilities to be a good neighbor. It has met with dozens of groups, changed details based on what it heard and pledged to spend $10 million extra to eliminate odors and emissions.
“We’re not going to put anything detrimental in the atmosphere,” said Rick Starnes, one of the key backers of the project and senior vice president of ITAC Engineers and Constructors. The problem is there’s no track record to rely on for a distillery of this size and complexity in such a densely populated area of the country.
Chesapeake’s Brentwood and Portsmouth’s Cradock neighborhoods, in effect, would be guinea pigs. So would the reviving downtowns of Portsmouth and Norfolk.
The consequences would not be… continue reading.
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