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Heartland Ethanol LLC has jettisoned plans to
construct seven ethanol plants around Illinois, including one in Waverly,
in nearby Morgan County.
Walker Filbert, Heartland’s president, says
rising commodity prices, especially of corn, combined with the high price
of petroleum and very little easing in credit markets, prompted the
company’s private-equity investors to “put their money to
better use someplace else.”
In early June, floods swept over the Midwestern
plains, wiping out entire corn crops and pushing corn over the $7 per
bushel mark. Construction of dozens of proposed ethanol refineries had
already been on hold across the U.S., and in Illinois, as Wall Street has
cooled to the idea of corn-based gasohol and banks have grown increasingly
skittish about providing financing for new plants. “When we thought things were getting a
little better, they turned a lot worse,” Filbert says. “People
were wigging out when [corn] hit $5. At $7 and headed to $8, for lack of a
better term, things are just kind of goofy right now.”
Heartland, headquartered in Pittsfield, is in the
process of liquidating and distributing its assets — which include
farmland in Griggsville, in Pike County, and Royal, in Champaign County
— to the group of approximately 35 investors, Filbert says. He adds that an ongoing court battle with Waverly
residents seeking to block the plant is “pretty much moot” and
that beyond shutting down the company he has no immediate plans. “We’ll be OK. All this was voluntarily
done. No one forced us to do it,” he says. “It was the perfect economic storm, I guess you
could say. It just came to an end sooner than we thought.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2008.
