Award of Excellence Recipient Doug Tiffany Knows 'Rural Values'

by Tom Bryan (Ethanol Producer Magazine) The prolific career of Doug Tiffany, recipient of the 2020 Award of Excellence, is indelibly linked to his connections to agriculture and farmland. Ethanol and its coproducts have been a frequent point of focus for the University of Minnesota production economist.

While seemingly ordinary, those early life experiences, coupled with Tiffany’s aptitude for ag-based studies—economics, biology, animal science, agronomy—planted a seed in him that would, in due time, become his life’s work.

It wouldn’t happen overnight. The career path of the 2020 International Fuel Ethanol Workshop & Expo’s Award of Excellence recipient was relatively circuitous, and years before his career as a production economist at the University of Minnesota began, he would try his hand at other occupations: banking, land appraisal and farming. None were his calling, but neither was any experience wasted on Tiffany. A consummate student of life, he has always enjoyed learning about the world around him. At the age of 17, Tiffany left high school for a semester as a foreign-exchange student in Malaysia, where he lived with a Chinese family in a small village that had no cars or trucks and could only be reached by boat. The experience broadened Tiffany’s worldview and, perhaps, sparked his latent interest in the patterns of industry and resource utilization. “It was an important event in my life,” he says. “It was my first real experience seeing how people lived in other countries, how they worked and what supported their economy.”

In the early 2000s, with biofuels production growing swiftly, Tiffany’s work frequently focused on ethanol and biodiesel. His reputation as a pragmatic, solutions-oriented economist was established in the ethanol industry as his work, on numerous occasions, focused on enhancing the profitability of dry-grind ethanol plants and utilizing biomass as a source of process energy. A spreadsheet model that he created and placed online in 2003 became very popular as farmers considered investments in ethanol plants across the Corn Belt.

Tiffany took on notable, sometimes unconventional, concepts related to improving biofuels economics. One high-profile project, sponsored by Xcel Energy and the Agricultural Experiment Station at U of M, developed technical data and economic tools to guide the decisions of ethanol plants considering biomass power. Tiffany and his colleagues examined the potential for ethanol producers to use a combination of corn stover and distillers grains as an energy feedstock for combined heat and power (CHP). “Ethanol plants were facing some high costs for natural gas, and we thought it was time to roll up our sleeves and look for solutions,” he says.

Like other concepts Tiffany would investigate, biomass CHP was unquestionably compelling, but perhaps ahead of its time. Today, interest in CHP is experiencing a resurgence, as producers seek to lower their carbon intensity ratings. Tiffany says he has never been dissuaded by the fact that novel production concepts can take years or decades to gain acceptance.

“At that point we said, ‘What if ethanol plants could actually become peaking plants for the power companies and could, therefore, supply energy to the grid while producing waste heat for the ethanol process—cooking, mash and distillation,’” Tiffany says, explaining that the team envisioned some ethanol plants running on CHP and providing dispatchable reserve power to back up wind farms.

And while the CHP ideas Tiffany proffered all those years ago may not have become commonplace in the U.S., he says the work has had incredible international reach. “Even today, there are people reading our work,” he says. “I get notices every week that the research is being cited, especially by people in developing countries where they are pursuing combined heat and power. They’re following the methodology and looking for ways to utilize heat from power production, whether it’s running an industrial process or heating homes. That’s rewarding to see.”

About five years ago, Tiffany joined a research project, led by U of M Associate Professor Bo Hu, that modeled the extraction of phytate from distillers grains in order to make DDGS more digestible to animals, thereby leading to less phosphorous leaching in the environment. “It’s another use for a product that’s right at our fingertips, and we could actually produce a lot of it from corn ethanol plants here, instead of extracting phytate from rice hulls in China and Japan,” he says. READ MORE