The ethanol industry continues to over-produce, shift the blame and point fingers at everyone else. As an investor in GreenShift’s corn oil extraction process, I like to think of this situation as karma coming back to bite the industry. Had the industry focused on innovation instead of over-production, they wouldn’t be in this situation again. Like they haven’t learned from past mistakes.

Everyone in the industry should be extracting oil from not just the disputed thin stillage process, but also GERS’ patented method 2 whole stillage process. Every ethanol producer should be producing biodiesel on-sight, like GreenShift advocated over a decade ago. Instead, REGI and VLO are making money from DCO and it’s another lost opportunity for the industry.
Everybody knows GreenShift invented corn oil extraction.
The 2003 Samples Cooled In Minutes, Took Hours To Process

The reason the centrifuge continuously plugged during the 2003 testing is because they didn’t practice the methods.

Defendant’s misled The Court to believe the syrup in the 2003 test was “170 degree’s”. It may have been 170 when they collected it, but not by the time they tested it. The patents specify a range of 150-212 (ideally 180). They collected 4, 2 quart pitchers of syrup and processed them over a period of 4-6 hours, without heating the syrup.

I did a quick experiment, here’s what I found: I heated 100% water to 170 degrees and poured it into a 2 quart pitcher. The temperature instantly dropped 7 degrees. Within 9 minutes, the water was 149.9, below the required temperature to practice the patent.

I repeated the same experiment with 100% oil. The temperature was below 150 degrees within 4 minutes.

Syrup is a mixture of oil, water and solids. The syrup pulled from Agri-Energy’s syrup tank during the 2003 test would’ve cooled below 150 within roughly 6 minutes, let alone 6 hours.

Think about that. By the time they collected the samples, walked to the test centrifuge and started processing it, the samples were below the required temperature to practice the method. “A cold vinaigrette”.

The centrifuge didn’t process the syrup in a continuous fashion because it repeatedly clogged and had to be disassembled. Were not talking about CIP here.

The inventors knew something in the evaporation process allowed for oil recovery but it wasn’t reduced to practice. The methods weren’t established until the 2004 test which is why the inventors didn’t try to sell to sell it to anybody for a year.

This case is a travesty-of-justice. Stealing COES technology has hampered innovation and investments. I must say, the silver lining is this thievery stopped me from investing more in the industry. Undoubtedly saving me from massive losses The industry should be ashamed of themselves…