Profile
CONVEYING C Green Plains Inc. CEO Todd Becker talks with Ethanol Producer Magazine about the company’s ongoing transformation, not away from its core products, but through them. By Tom Bryan
When Green Plains Inc. embarked on its total transformation two years ago, its main business—fuel ethanol—appeared destined to become ancillary to other streams of production as the company shifted resources to higher-margin outputs. Protein,
It seemed, would soon overshadow ethanol. But today, as the layers of its metamorphosis are manifesting through acquisition and investment, Green Plains is still largely defined by ethanol—not despite its makeover, but because of it. “We’re changing, but our baseload business is still ethanol,” says Todd Becker, CEO of Green Plains. “We are, and will remain, an ethanol producer.” Becker explains that the company’s transformation was somewhat misunderstood as a slow retreat from ethanol while, in reality, it was a reimagining of corn dry milling. “The changes we’re making today give us an improved position in this renaissance of firstgeneration ethanol and everything associated
with it—protein, oil, clean sugar, high-purity alcohol, sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), carbon capture and the drive toward low CI,” he says. “We look at it all, and what we’re doing with our gen-one plants—transforming them into true biorefineries—and we see all these new opportunities hinging around our baseload product, ethanol, which is becoming a true low-carbon, potentially zero-carbon fuel.” Becker says Green Plains’ continued faith in ethanol production, in this contemporary context of biorefining, is not unrelated to the global dialogue around carbon reduction. “When you look at our opportunity, what’s happening around the world and this rapid movement away from fossil fuels, I think most agree that it probably isn’t happening fast enough,” he says, suggesting that ethanol offshoots like alcohol-to-jet fuel offer transformative openings for the ethanol industry to play a greater role in climate change mitigation. “There’s an opportunity with the fuel we produce now to move into highervalue fuels that are within reach.”
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The springboard for Green Plains’ biorefining leap has unquestionably been the acquisition of Fluid Quip Technologies and its trademarked Maximized Stillage Co-products (MSC) technology, which enables ethanol plants to consistently produce a 50%-plus protein product that’s gaining footholds in the pet food, aqua, dairy, poultry and swine markets. Green Plains became majority-owner of Fluid Quip in early 2021, merging the companies to accelerate the installation and scale up of ultra-high protein production across Green Plains’ 11 U.S. ethanol plants. Ultimately, MSC has become not just an engine for Green Plains’ own transformation, but a catalyst of industry wide change. “I think we’re a disruptor,” Becker says. “This is a disruptive technology, and when we think about where we’re going with protein, oil, carbon, specialty alcohols, SAF—and then moving into things like yeast, synthetic biology, bioplastics and biochemicals—it’s all, by necessity, going to come from dry mill facilities using a Fluid Quip-type technology to unlock new opportunities.”
