With 2024 coming to an end and 2025 on the horizon, Big River Resources CEO David Zimmerman shares that production rates have been strong. Zimmerman says Big River Resources has worked to debottleneck its plants, leading to increased production, especially when looking at the Galva plant.
“We’ve seen about a 15% increase in Galvas production since we instituted a deep bottlenecking process on our corn conveying and added some more hammer mills that allow us to grind that corn to a little finer mash before we start mixing the enzymes,” says Zimmerman. “So it’s a great outright production project, plus it increases our efficiencies, and gives us better ethanol yield per bushel of corn. We’re looking at probably December, to commission our new regenerative thermal oxidators- that’s our emissions ablation system.”
Zimmerman adds that once that is done, they will look to commission a combined heat and power unit in January helping take Galva off the Illinois grid.
“We have a new energy center at Galva. We’re going to have more steam than we can utilize, at least currently, but the combined heat and power have allowed us to essentially produce all of our electricity with the same amount of energy inputs. So our electricity bill is essentially going away at Galva,” says Zimmerman.
Which allows the facility to lower its carbon intensity score significantly.
“Six to seven points with combined heat and power. So that’s a big deal for us, as 45z starts to be implemented here in 2025 and it gives us some energy and power security versus the Illinois grid that a lot of times in the summer they like to call you and see if you’re willing to go down for four hours because the grid is taxed and for our production process, that’s just not a fun thing to do.”
Initially, says Zimmerman, the heat and power system will be powered by natural gas with biogas as a possible alternative down the road.
