Driving Ethanol's Digital Transformation

by Susanne Retka Schill (Ethanol Producer Magazine) Ethanol producers are no strangers to computers and automation. Distributed control systems (DCS) have been in use for decades to monitor and control fermentation and distillation. Indeed, the needs of the ethanol industry drove innovation in computerized truck receiving and weighing to speed up truck handling, says Tim Ciucci, vice president of sales and marketing at CompuWeigh.

The SmartTruck system, deployed at more than three dozen plants now, uses a cab-level terminal at the truck scale, outfitted with a touch screen, scanner and printer, so drivers never have to leave the cab.

Ethanol producers are now taking the system’s capabilities to the next level, Ciucci says. In addition to using RFID (radio frequency identification) cards to speed up paperwork processing, plants are recording RFID data at every point through the dumping or loading process, analyzing the time stamps to identify bottlenecks.

The ethanol industry has experienced the first steps of many of the transformations to come, Lichty (Bruce Lichty, management systems lead for Christianson PLLP) says. “Almost all our ethanol clients have several types of presence on the internet. They have a web portal that provides business information to their growers and customers about contracts and deliveries.” Increasingly, that information is accessible on mobile devices, and in recent years, producers are taking it up a notch. “We have clients that use a bid/offer system on the web, where if there’s a striking price on a bid and offer, it generates a contract automatically.”

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Digital innovations also are changing the underlying hardware and software at plants, Lichty says. In the past year, two clients, both managing multiple ethanol plants, have moved their data storage to the cloud rather than replacing their in-house servers.

For many, the digital transformation taking hold now is about moving information—invoices, orders, meter readings, documents— electronically, machine to machine, Lichty says. Nothing gets printed on paper nor manually entered into a spreadsheet. “Our customers love it, it saves time and accuracy. But it’s just the beginning.”

Following trends to anticipate clients’ needs four or five years ahead has been Lichty’s role for years as a business software developer. He expects several trends to continue:

• Unmanned collection of data that is automatically processed and shared up and down the value chain—from the supplier or vendor to the end customer, and even the customer’s customers.

• 5G connectivity that enables greater processing capability in cellphones and tablets, making them more useful at greater distances from the plant office or control room.

• Robotics, smart sensors, artificial intelligence and machine learning finding new applications throughout the plant.

• Augmented reality for training, where new hires don smart glasses that immerse them in simulations, performing functions as they learn through virtual reality.

Macro Opportunities
“I think there are going to be micro things the digital technology enables, such as better sensors to provide more data to make better decisions,” says Steele Lorenz, head of sustainable business with the Farmers Business Network. “But I think there also will be macro opportunities that can now be chased for the first time.”

One pilot project Lorenz has worked on with an ethanol producer taps into new digital technologies to collect farm-level data to plug into the GREET model to determine carbon intensity (CI). Currently, the Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Transportation model uses national averages for yield and inputs such as fuel, fertilizer and pesticides to calculate corn ethanol’s upstream emissions from feedstock production. Developed by U.S. DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, the GREET model is used by California and other states that have adopted low-carbon fuel standards.

“The point is to build the case that the CI score being claimed is accurate without boots on the ground, using everything from satellite imaging and weather data to receipts and the precision agriculture information collected by the equipment used,” Lorenz says. While the indicators available to farmers of what happened in the field are good, Lorenz adds, “they are probably not enough to build the kind of confidence the market would need to accept that CI rating.” The weather and satellite data are used to confirm a yield claim and artificial intelligence is used to spot errors and potential fraud.

The goal is to make it feasible for an ethanol producer to economically gather information from as many as 1,000 corn suppliers and claim lower-than-average farm-level greenhouse gas emissions, thus reducing the plant’s carbon intensity score. Such a program could also enable awarding carbon credits to farmers who lower their carbon intensity through conservation tillage or best fertilizer practices—a recommendation made in the recent white paper, A Clean Fuels Policy for the Midwest. READ MORE