Gevo Inc. plans to open plant in South Dakota

Nearly 11 months after laying off its local workforce at the Agri-Energy LLC in Luverne, parent company Gevo Inc. has no immediate plans to rehire and resume full production.
Gevo officials did, however, recently announce the home for a new production plant would be built on 240 acres near Lake Preston, South Dakota.
The new plant called Net-Zero 1 would produce 45 million gallons of renewable jet fuel and gasoline from corn each year.
These are the same renewable fuels the Luverne plant is currently being retrofitted to produce from renewable energy sources of wind and cattle manure.
Agri-Energy stopped production on March 27, 2020, and laid off 27 employees in response to the growing coronavirus pandemic that negatively affected market prices for ethanol.
 In a letter to the Luverne community dated Feb. 11, plant manager Phil Cherry said the Luverne plant will reopen to full production.
“While there are fewer cars in our staff parking lot these days and less activity at our scale house, you should know that inside the plant we are working hard to make sure we are ready to roll if and when we decide to restart operations,” Cherry wrote.
“In fact, we recently posted a job for a project manager position for our expanding work in the production of renewable natural gas from dairy cows.”
Gevo engineers are working to develop a digester that would take biogas generated from cattle manure and use the green gas to lessen the Luverne plant’s dependence on natural gas.
The Luverne plant was the first of its kind to use wind power to lessen its reliance on electricity, also generated from coal. Construction of the two wind turbines, located west of the plant, were finished in early 2020 and began producing electricity in April.
The electricity not used at the plant was sold to the city of Luverne and Missouri River Energy Services.
The use of green energy to produce renewable jet fuel and gasoline is also the goal of the Net-Zero 1 plant in Lake Preston, which is anticipated to be in production by early 2024. Gevo plans to construct up to three plants generating renewable energy from renewable energy sources.
“Gevo would like to convert and upgrade our Luverne facility into a net-zero site as well sometime in the future,” Cherry indicated.
“We are not abandoning Luverne and, in fact, we want to make this a world-class production site as well.”