Bioprocessing in Cedar Rapids

Bioprocessing is big business in Cedar Rapids, IA and could potentially grow even larger if its agribusinesses adopt new processing technologies to produce novel, high-value bi-products.

That’s the conclusion of the second installment of a report issued recently by Iowa State University in partnership with the city of Cedar Rapids, the second largest city in Iowa. The partnership was created to increase connections between Iowa State researchers in Ames and agribusinesses in Cedar Rapids, a city of 138,000 located on the Cedar River in east central Iowa. The roster of its bioprocessors includes ethanol, grain-based food products, animal feeds, yeasts, processed foods, and vegetable oil, the report notes.

The report seeks to identify where new and emerging technologies can be implemented to increase the value of the existing processors in Cedar Rapids or to identify how new start-up enterprises can be established there.

Participating in the partnership are several Iowa State research centers: the Center for Crops Utilization Research, the Office of Economic Development and Industry Relations, the Bioeconomy Institute, and the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development. Through the partnership with Cedar Rapids, the Iowa State research centers are assisting in the development and commercialization of bioprocessing technologies to assist Cedar Rapids’ businesses in understanding and supporting further development of their bioprocessing and manufacturing industries.

Authors of the report are Chad Hart, an Iowa State professor and extension economist, and Oranuch Wongpiyabovorn, a postdoctoral research associate. Both are affiliated with Iowa State’s Center for Agricultural and Rural Development. In an early February press announcement about the release of the report, Hart stated that the partnership serves to connect the science being done at Iowa State to real life applications in Cedar Rapids. In turn, he adds, Cedar Rapids officials have access to experts at Iowa State who help guide the development of the city’s bioprocessing industry.

Other key points include:

• Corn, soybean, and oats processed in Cedar Rapids have a value of approximately $2 billion.

• Cedar Rapids’ bioprocessing industries employ approximately 4,000 individuals with a median annual income of $87,922. That is 42%, higher than the city’s average wage of $61,653 a year. Four additional jobs are supported throughout the wider economy for each job in the food manufacturing and bioprocessing industries.

• Between 2010 and 2023, employment in the food and bioprocessing industries increased at a rate nine times that of the general employment rate in the Cedar Rapids area.

• It takes approximately 2.1 million acres of Iowa farmland to produce the corn and soybeans processed in Cedar Rapids.

“The report shows how big of a pull the bioprocessing industry has on attracting business to the area and the impact the industry has on Iowa’s economy,” Hart says.

Large Agribusinesses in Town

Cedar Rapids’ economic development website cites large agribusinesses such as Quaker Oats, Cargill, DuPont Industrial Biosciences, Ingredion, Archer Daniels Midland, and Diamond V Mills that have plants in Cedar Rapids. The city is within one day’s trip by truck to 72 million North American consumers and has access to nearby interstates and highways, an extensive network of short line, regional, and Class I rail service, and is a short distance from river and deepwater shipping.

In addition to the major grain processing and bioproduct manufacturing facilities, what the report deems to be “lesser-value secondary products and significant solid and liquid waste streams” also are part of the Cedar Rapids business community.

“Technological advances and developments over the past few decades have introduced novel avenues for converting these lower value and waste streams to higher valued products,” the report relates. “Examples of potential technologies on the horizon include acid hydrolysis of distillers wet grains to produce xylose, recovery of phytic acid from thin stillage in a dry-grind (ethanol) facility, conversion of oat hulls to furfural or for use directly as a solid fuel, fermenting corn steep liquid to valuable bioproducts, and hydrogenating vegetable oils with novel catalytic and more efficient methods to produce less trans fats.”

Also included in the report are details of the major processing steps that each bioprocessing activity entails, descriptions of the major products and byproducts coming out of those processes, and discussions of water and energy use and the amount of waste generated from each area. Product volumes, economic trends, and current market values are included when available, the report’s authors state. Historical economic data for major products are included in an appendix of the report.

Potential growth areas are identified for the present-day processing and manufacturing sectors of the major bioprocessing activities through an evaluation of the contemporary scientific literature and the feedback from surveys of some of the larger players in Cedar Rapids’ agribusinesses. Future technical publications will offer specific measures to improve and expand current practices, the report concludes.

Dry and Wet Milling

In its examination of how corn processing operates in Cedar Rapids, the report cites two corn processing plants owned and operated by ADM. One is a dry mill ethanol plant with a production capacity of 300 million gpy, and the other is a wet mill with an annual ethanol production capacity of 240 million gallons, according to a table in the report.

“If both [ADM] ethanol production plants in Cedar Rapids operated at full capacity, it [sic] would generate approximately $1.4 billion in gross revenue from ethanol,” the report says, citing the average per-gallon ethanol price in 2022 of $2.61, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service.

If ADM’s dry grind ethanol plant in Cedar Rapids produces 300 million gallons gpy, that means approximately 1 million tons of dried distillers grains with solubles (DDGS) is also produced, according to the report’s assessment. The report defines DDGS as a nutrient rich coproduct of dry-grind ethanol production that is utilized as a feed ingredient for energy and protein supplementation.

“If 30% of DDGS can be converted to xylose and arabinose,” the report continues, “this suggests 0.31 million tons of xylose and arabinose could be produced in Cedar Rapids annually.

At $2,000 per ton for xylose, according to Biocore, a European research program dedicated to investigating second generation biofuels and biomass derived chemicals, this represents an annual economic value of $620 million. The $2,000 per ton price is likely assuming a high purity. [The] retail price for food grade xylose used as a sweetener is closer to $1,000 per ton, which still represents a significant potential revenue. This supports the notion that further growth and development of the bioprocessing industry in Cedar Rapids is possible and that novel products and commercial practices can be established.”

Two co-products produced by the Cedar Rapids food and bioprocessing sector that are being highly sought after for additional development, the report notes, are corn oil and carbon dioxide. Corn oil accounts for 1 to 2 pounds of every bushel of corn processed. “For Cedar Rapids corn processing,” the report calculates, “this is approximately 1.7 to 3.4 million tons of oil per year.” A chart in the report’s appendix shows that the prices of inedible corn oil and edible corn oil were $1,390.40 and $1,200, respectively, in 2022. If those prices were applied to the amount of corn oil produced in Cedar Rapids in a year, sales would have ranged from $2.04 million to $4.7 million.

Jerry Perkins, contributing editor