A company’s plan to build an ethanol plant at a south Denton industrial park won approval Tuesday from the City Council.
Tetra Point Fuels of Flower Mound plans to take soda, beer, sports drinks and other sugary liquids that have expired or have packaging defects and covert them to ethanol, a cleaner-burning renewable fuel often combined with unleaded gasoline. The facility would differ from the more conventional grain-based ethanol plants, which have been blamed for increasing corn prices.
Council members approved a permit to allow heavy manufacturing inside an existing building at the Granite Point Industrial Park at Interstate 35W and Metro Street. The company hopes to start ethanol production there by spring 2008, with an initial capacity of 4 million to 5 million gallons a year, said Tim Geiger, company president.
Denton is already home to Biodiesel Industries of Greater Dallas Fort Worth, which produces biodiesel fuel from recycled vegetable oils.
“This is one more cog in the wheel of Denton becoming a leader in recycling and reusing products,” Mayor Perry McNeill said of the Tetra plant. “These are products that have served a useful life and this company is proposing to covert these into fuel.”
Texas currently has one plant producing ethanol, in Cleburne, but a number are planned or are under construction around the state, said Russel E. Smith, executive director of the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association. The industry is expanding at a time when Congress is considering raising the national standard for biofuel production, he said.
Texas oil refineries also are substituting ethanol for the gasoline additive MTBE in areas of the state that failed to meet federal clean air standards, including the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston areas, Smith said.
“That’s where a huge amount of fuel is consumed,” he said.
At the Denton ethanol plant, trucks will bring in liquid products discarded by the food and beverage industry, and otherwise destined for a landfill, Geiger said. The company will separate and recycle the containers while fermenting and distilling the liquids into ethanol, which is then sold to commodities buyers, he said.
Council members raised questions about potential odors and increased traffic on Metro Street and the I-35 frontage road.
Interim Planning Director Brian Lockley said large tanker trucks would visit the facility several times a day, but that other traffic would be minimal. Geiger said the production process would produce some odor, but nothing noxious.
LOWELL BROWN can be reached at 940-566-6882. His e-mail address is lmbrown@dentonrc.com.
