Center Ethanol?s owns an ethanol production facility in Sauget, Illinois. Production at the Facility can be broken down into 4 areas: grain processing, fermentation, Distillation, Dehydration, and Evaporation (DD&E), and storage. Corn bushels are ground into flour in the grain processing area. The flour is then mixed into a slurry to from a mash for fermentation. The mash is then fermented in one of several fermentation tanks. In DD&E, fermented mash is pumped through distillation columns to separate a mixture of 95% ethanol and 5% water. The last 5% of water is removed in the dehydrator to produce 200 proof ethanol. The pure ethanol is sent to two day-tanks in storage. The pure ethanol is then denatured using natural gasoline as it is pumped to final product tanks. The grains that remain after distillation undergo a drying process to remove a majority of the moisture. The dried distiller?s grain is a byproduct created by the process that can be sold.
During an April 2017 inspection, EPA discovered several violations of LDAR requirements required by the New Source Performance Standards (NSPS) for Equipment Leaks of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOC) in the Synthetic Organic Chemicals Manufacturing Industry (NSPS VV). Multiple violations were discovered of how Center Ethanol personnel incorrectly performed EPA Method 21 (Method 21) while monitoring equipment at the Facility. Zero leaks were discovered by Center Ethanol personnel for the duration of all records reviewed by EPA