Central Wisconsin, a region with many dairies and cheese-making plants, is now home to the only manufacturing plant in the nation that converts cheese whey into ethanol. Located in Plover, the plant can produce up to 2.5 million gallons of ethanol a year from whey trucked in from nearby cheese-making plants. Until it was shut down in the mid-1980s, the Plover facility manufactured ethanol from corn.

The output from the Plover plant will help reduce the amount of ethanol, now at about 50 million gallons, that Wisconsin imports each year. As ethanol has become the additive of choice in Milwaukee's reformulated gasoline market, there is room for expansion.

Renewable Oxygenates Industries (ROI), the company that took over and redesigned the Plover facility, expects to capitalize on the growing demand for ethanol n Wisconsin as well as the competitive advantage of using low-cost industry byproducts instead of higher-price corn as feedstocks. With the plant in operation, area cheese-makers have an alternative to disposing their whey on farm fields, an environmentally questionable practice.

"We are taking byproducts from other industries that are potentially pollutants and converting it into a clean-burning fuel," said Michael Stanford, operations manager for ROI.

Cheese whey has economic advantages as well. The price of corn, the most prevalent feedstock in the production of ethanol, has been on a roller-coaster ride this year, resulting in production cutbacks at other plants. Using cheese whey instead of corn spares ROI from the price volatility that other producers must contend with.

ROI also has plans to branch out into other locally available agricultural byproducts such as potato wastes. (See Renewable Projects Vie for DOE Funding).