Western Wisconsin Energy Has Sold The Plant to Big River Resources

Western Wisconsin Energy, LLC (Western Wisconsin) was conceived by local farmers, local investors and LLC partners as a best-in-class Fagen/ICM ethanol production facility with a strategic location and world-class infrastructure, design, construction and implementation. Western Wisconsin was formed in 2003 to construct and operate as a 40 million gallon per year (MMgy) ethanol plant near Boyceville, Wisconsin. The plant started operations in September of 2006. In 2008 Western Wisconsin started planning the addition of a 4th fermenter, which came on-line in early 2009. The new fermenter together with other supporting infrastructure brought the nameplate capacity up to 55 MMgy.

The facility incorporates a dry-milling process to produce fuel-grade ethanol, distillers grains feed products as well as industrial corn oil. The facility has consistently run above nameplate production capacity, processing approximately 20 million bushels of corn into 57MMgy of ethanol, 175 thousand tons of dried distillers grains and 7.2 million pounds of corn oil per year.

The project is differentiated by its process design, which results in greater throughput and energy efficiency when compared to facilities of similar size. Availability of corn is not a concern as there is a local surplus, which takes into consideration the corn consumption for the plant and other demand sources. There are numerous regional, national and international outbound markets for the ethanol, distillers grains and corn oil production by both truck and rail. A large percentage of these products move to the Canadian export market to service Canada's renewable fuels requirement and to feed its large livestock population. The plant's infrastructure and facilities were designed to support future expansion of operations that would double the current nameplate capacity.