Ethanol > United Ethanol > United Ethanol News > Operation Highlights

Operation Highlights

Aug 15, 2025

United Ethanol plant operations had great improvements coming out of our Spring Shutdown. The plants upgrade on a syrup mixer for our dryers shifted more revenue to our DDGS sales.
 

Second Quarter numbers for United Ethanol:

  • Corn bushels ground averaged 1,740,852 bushels per month.
  • Ethanol gallons sold averaged 5,138,203 gallons per month.
  • DDGS tons sold averaged 11,472 tons per month.
  • Corn Oil pounds sold averaged 1,449,660 per month.


All our numbers improved from the First Quarter of the year, along with plant margins. Finalizing the Fall Shutdown schedule is on track. Scheduled for the 3rd week of October 2025. 

United Ethanol entered into an agreement with FluidQuip Technologies to upgrade our Distillation. This project will implement the Low Energy Distillation (LED) vacuum system. Our current high temp, high pressure plant design is very expensive to operate with energy, cleaning chemicals, and high downtime. This Distillation upgrade will convert our high temp, high pressure Distillation into a low energy, vacuum system. This will reduce the energy required by nearly 40% in Distillation to produce ethanol gallons. Today we are required to shut down and clean, with chemicals, every 2 weeks, due to the high temps in Distillation. In a LED vacuum system, we can now run the plant at much lower temps and no longer are required to do this cleaning. Our plant will now be able to maintain consistent operations between our scheduled 6-month Maintenance Shutdowns. The results are increasing the number of operating days per year, by 10 days, producing ethanol! With lower energy cost for natural gas, lower chemicals for cleaning cost, and more operating days per year, this project will return millions of dollars of savings each year. United Ethanol management and operations teams are very excited for this plant upgrade. Once the LED project comes online, our margin opportunity will improve dramatically, year on year. Final installation and start-up of the LED project is scheduled for November 2026. We appreciate our producers and investors in supporting fuel ethanol from corn.

Read More News

Updates from Milton
Aug 15, 2025
In the second quarter of 2025, the United Ethanol team put a huge focus on continuing our operations team training, reducing our operational costs and increasing uptime. The team has reached some huge milestones in regard to these initiatives. In the second quarter we had significantly increased efficiency in Fermentation by eliminating the vast majority of our infection sources in the plant and focusing on training with our operations team. We have improved from the first quarter in many aspects, but the team is always growing, and I am excited about where the future will take us. The plant has been running exceptionally well out of our spring outage and through the summer as we battle the higher temperatures. 
Greetings from the CEO
Aug 15, 2025
The global ethanol market recently experienced rapid change and increased opportunities. U.S. ethanol producers are starting to see significant financial gains. Over the past six months, the industry has faced some of the lowest crush margins in recent memory, making the start of 2025 particularly difficult. We have seen margins improve in June and July, and it appears we will have decent margins the rest of 2025. They are not as good as 2023 and 2024, but respectable. Our plant is running very well, and July should be a good month. Hopefully, we can string several months together with this performance. That would give us a respectable year for 2025. 
May Operation Notes
May 15, 2025
The extreme cold months had some plant challenges and some opportunities with natural gas. The United Ethanol Team lead by Gavin Dirda has made great strides in good, consistent operations. Our Second Quarter focus is our Spring Maintenance Shutdown. We are optimistic in better ethanol margins during this summer and plan ahead for our Fall Outage. As always, we appreciate our producers and investors in supporting fuel ethanol from corn.