CURWENSVILLE – Sunnyside Ethanol continues to move forward, according to Sunnyside Ethanol LLC CEO Eric Wallace.
Sunnyside Ethanol first announced their intentions of building an ethanol plant at the old Howe’s Leather Co. site in Curwensville earlier in the year.
Wallace stated that his team submitted a number of permits to the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection in September. Sunnyside was recently granted a permit to for the use of river water from the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.
Wallace said he believes the permits will be issued in mid-spring, and that construction will begin shortly thereafter.
“The governments from local to the state level have been extremely cooperative and helpful,” said Wallace. “We are grateful for their assistance.”
According to Wallace, the plant will work to improve the environment in the Curwensville area by cleaning up the brownfield site that was the old tannery, using waste coal as the plant’s energy supply to clean up one of the top environmental problems in Pennsylvania and that is stream and river acid mine runoff from piles of waste coal. They will burn this using the latest technologies to keep their air emissions the lowest possible, produce ethanol, and capture their carbon dioxide from the ethanol process and sell it for food grade carbon dioxide purposes.
“Our company was formed with the foundation to improve the environment, not to hurt it,” commented Wallace.
Wallace also answered questions about the plant’s water discharge, an issue that has some area sportsmen concerned.
Sunnyside’s draft discharge permit from DEP limits the discharge quantity to 262 gallons per minute. This discharge limit equals only 1.3 percent of the river’s flow during the consecutive seven-day period of the lowest flow rate that is estimated to occur one time in 10 years, according to Wallace.
“For the West Branch Susquehanna River adjacent to the proposed plant, the seven-day, 10-year low flow rate is 19,583 gallons per minute,” said Wallace. “Under typical flow conditions (i.e., average river flow rate of 301,000 gallons per minute), Sunnyside’s discharge limit equals only 0.09 percent of the river’s flow.”
Wallace said that the plant is designed to have a maximum discharge temperature of 95 degrees, which occurs only during the hottest parts of the summer.
“However, the typical discharge temperature will be in the range of 75 degrees to 85 degrees,” said Wallace. “Assuming a discharge temperature at the maximum of 95 degrees, the river temperature could potentially increase by 0.1 degrees to 0.4 degrees (depending on the season) even when the river is experiencing severe low flow conditions.”
“Under more typical conditions, an 80-degree discharge temperature and the average river flow rate, the impact on the river temperature will be less than 0.1 degree,” added Wallace.
