Data
When data became vogue in ethanol production half a decade ago, producers quickly embraced newly available tools for capturing, viewing and analyzing their lab and control system intel. Process data, it appeared, might soon be the basis of all plant decisions. Every change would be guided by statistical analysis. Every trial would be immersed in data. Capital projects would be defined by it. That future arrived only in part, says Joseph Reese, technical services manager at IFF. “When we look at data use in ethanol production today, we’re not seeing an all-in,
one-size-fits-all approach,” he says. “There’s no single data technology helping every plant make all their decisions. Each facility is on a different point in their journey into datadriven optimization. They’re in different places on the continuum.” Reese says almost every U.S. ethanol plant is currently using data to make process decisions—and looking to do more. But he also sees considerable gaps between producers with the most advanced analytical resources—like custom-engineered data platforms that integrate and conveniently dashboard process information from the lab and control system, or DCS—compared to those with only basic data regimens, using little more than spreadsheets to moni-
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tor core process parameters. “It’s still a wide spectrum in terms of what some producers are doing with data compared to others, but I think they’re all asking, ‘What more can we do?’” Anne Chronic, director of market analytics for Phibro Ethanol, says there has been an incredible amount of real-time process input that’s become discoverable and incorporated into data reporting at ethanol plants in the past five years, and a total transformation of process monitoring and analytics during her 15-year career in ethanol. “When I started in this industry in 2006, many were entering data manually and there was very little data automation,” she says, explaining that virtually every area of an
