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2007 ENERGY TOUR: Day 8 July 2, 2007Today we fueled up with pure B100 biodiesel at the Consumer Cooperative on Highway 6 in Iowa City, Iowa. It is located off of Exit 240 on I-80 East. This farmers co-op was started many years ago and about five years ago started carrying biodiesel.  Most of the farmers in the co-op are corn and soybean farmers, they also have some grain farmers. Interestingly they don't make the biodiesel but have it brought in from Des Moines. The biodiesel they sell is made from soybeans.  We asked Chuck, the person helping us fuel the Energy Aware Express, how many people come to the co-op to fuel with biodiesel. He informed us that only a few per day, very few freight trucks, mostly diesel passenger vehicles. Their main advertising is with a newspaper ad and at www.biodiesel.org, which is how we found them. We spoke with him about corn ethanol. He said many farmers are changing their crops to corn because of all the proposed corn-ethanol plants. Interestingly, according to people at the co-op, most of the farmers use regular petro fuels in their farm vehicles. Our conversation at the co-op brought up some interesting questions like:
We were interested in doing a tour of the Illinois River Energy facility near Rochelle, Illinois. This is a 50 million gallon per year ethanol plant that is just coming online. They are doing construction and adding on to their facility so we could not tour it, however we drove by to check it out.  We will be visiting other energy facilities here in the Midwest for the next few days. Check back to learn what we are learning. |
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