By the end of 2011, Poet LLC expects to produce enough corn oil to supply feedstock for 12 MMgy of biodiesel. The technology is currently being installed at the company’s sixth ethanol plant, with more expected in 2012.

Beginning in January, the company started selling its trademarked Voilà corn oil into the biodiesel and feed markets. The Poet Biorefining plant in Hudson, S.D., was the first Poet ethanol plant to produce the product followed by four Iowa Poet plants, including Emmetsburg, Gowrie, Jewell and Hanlontown. The sixth plant in Laddonia, Mo., is currently starting up. In all, all six plants will produce about 100 million pounds of corn oil per year.

“Voilà has been a very strong part of Poet's business this year, and I'm excited to see more plants getting this technology,” Poet CEO Jeff Broin said. “The more we can diversify into new profitable products, the more successful our plants will be.”

Corn oil is a readily accessible feedstock for the growing biodiesel industry, said Clayton Vaughan, Poet Nutrition's director of business development. Poet’s crude corn oil, however, is unique from crude corn oil produced at other ethanol plants, due to Poet’s patented and proprietary no-cook fermentation process, called BPX. The resulting corn oil has a lower free fatty acid content, meaning biodiesel producers will have less residual waste left over after the biodiesel process.

In addition to ethanol, Poet produces Dakota Gold distillers dried grains and captures CO2 at seven of its plants, which it sells to beverage producers. A year ago, the company unveiled Inviz, a trademarked Zein product that can be used to replace petroleum-based coatings and films. “This is pretty exciting. We're producing energy as a by-product of energy,” Broin said. “It's incredible to see how many different things we can get from a kernel of corn.”