Patent ID: 7682810

Claim:
A method for producing ethanol at an ethanol manufacturing facility to which corn and corn cobs are delivered as feed materials, wherein said corn has previously been dried to reduce its moisture content before it is delivered to the ethanol manufacturing facility, and wherein the corn and corn cobs have previously been subjected to other processing that is performed upstream of the ethanol manufacturing facility and that comprises the steps of: providing a plurality of farm fields for supplying said feed materials to the ethanol manufacturing facility; employing harvesting equipment to pick, from a farm field, ear corn comprising corn and corn cobs as components; harvesting both of said components in a single pass of the harvesting equipment; separating said ear corn components after said picking step and before the components are delivered to the ethanol manufacturing facility; delivering the cobs, apart from stalks, to the ethanol manufacturing facility; delivering the corn to the same ethanol manufacturing facility as the cobs from which the corn has been separated; and performing said processing without consuming cobs, upstream of the ethanol manufacturing facility, to dry corn delivered to that facility; and wherein said method comprises: chemically processing into ethanol the corn delivered to said ethanol manufacturing facility; using heat in the processing of said corn; employing cobs, apart from stalks, as a source of fuel for the heat used to process corn that has been separated from cobs employed as the source of fuel; and performing said method without chemically processing stalks.