Sen. Kaine visits Hopewell ethanol plant
U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine made a stop at the Vireol Bio Energy LLC plant in Hopewell on Monday for the first leg of his five-day spring break tour of Virginia.
Kaine said he has been hoping to visit the plant since the United Kingdom-based company, Future Fuels, announced it would open a plant in Hopewell in August of 2014.
“It was a big win for Hopewell and a big win for the Commonwealth of Virginia and then the plant opened here and I’ve been looking forward to coming and seeing it for myself,” Kaine said.
The ethanol plant, which opened last April, produces 175,000 gallons of ethanol from corn, barley and other small grains a day. Vireol is the first ethanol operation on the East Coast.
Vireol CEO Peter McGenity and Plant Manager Mark Reynolds gave Kaine the tour of the facilities.
Kaine said his reason for visiting the ethanol plant was because of the national debate over the Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuel Standards, or RFS, which was the product of the Energy Policy Act in 2005. The RFS ensures producers comply with federal mandates that require a minimum volume of renewable fuel in gasoline.
The primary debate has circled around whether or not the renewable fuel requirement should be raised from 10 to 15 percent, Kaine said.
“What I learned today, I think I dug into some of the facts and learned about some of the economic and environmental benefits of the RFS,” he said.
The senator said he can take what he learned about RFS from the ethanol plant back to Washington with him.
“It came up when I was governor, it has come up as least once and it’ll come up again in Congress and it’s really helpful for me to come out and talk first hand to folks who are producing the ethanol here, to hear about current technologies and to hear about future technologies so that I can understand some of the federal policy questions,” he said.
When asked if he would support a federal advanced biofuels tax credit, Kaine said he would back it, but with reservations.
“I generally have been supportive of tax credits for alternative energy, the only thing at all that makes me hesitate is that there is some need to do overall tax reform and doing too many individual tax credits can sometimes get in the way of looking at the big picture of reform, but generally I have been supportive of tax credits for alternative biofuels,” Kaine said.
Some processing aspects at the Hopewell plant are “technologically advanced beyond the heart of ethanol country in the United States in terms of the efficiency of getting better and higher quantity product from the milling process,” according to Kaine.
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