Three Rivers Energy observes first year anniversary
Anniversary: General Wesley Clark (US Army, Ret.) was the guest speaker at the one year anniversary of Three Rivers Energy, held Monday, July 14 at the facility. Clark gave an impassioned speech calling for America’s dependence from foreign oil. Other speakers were Lillian Salerno, Administrator, USDA Rural Development, Congressman Bob Gibbs and Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy. Beacon photo by Mark Fortune
COSHOCTON – A large crowd of dignitaries, agriculture related supporters and business people joined local elected officials and special guests at the Three Rivers Energy facility located on County Road 271 on Monday, July 14 to celebrate the one year anniversary of the company. Jim Galvin, Three Rivers Energy President, thanked the local governmental effort that went into making the plant operational once again, producing biofuels and other related products.
Lillian Salerno, Administrator, USDA Rural Development, told the audience that “I am very humbled and motivated to make sure that any resource that we have at the federal level we can double down for the rural part of this country, which doesn’t always have access to the same type of capital that city folks have. So I think that this administration and Secretary Vilsak (USDA) have done a very noble inventory of the kind of tools that we can use to make sure that all of the biomass in the rural area and the dedicated farmers that work in this area have complete access to ways to turn that into cash and income. And with the passing of the farm bill we have these new opportunities to do some of this work.”
Congressman Bob Gibbs said, “This is great for our local economy, it’s great for farmers, it’s great for the corn basis. There’s no way that we could be looking at 14 billion bushel of corn crops two years in a row and not have a price disaster without the alternative uses like here with ethanol production. That’s key. We have an opportunity here for all kinds of energy and this is a part of that mix with our shale plays and everything else. It’s American home grown and we can be energy dependent if we get serious. This is key, this is viable and it’s really healthy in this region.”
Tom Buis, CEO of Growth Energy thanked the many supporters, suppliers and investors that have helped make the plant possible. “It’s a team effort. This whole thing is a team and the team is under attack. And not just in Washington. We have critics. But the fight all boils down to one thing and it’s a fight over market share. For years they said we have to add value to our product – and we did. We are now 10 percent of the fuel nationwide. We are revitalizing these rural communities.”
General Wesley Clark, (U.S. Army, Ret.) was the featured guest speaker and gave an impassioned speech about America becoming energy independent and in fact, becoming the dominant world player in energy. Clark said at the end of his remarks, “The price of oil is going up unless we produce more. We can produce more but we’ve got to frack and we have states in America that won’t let us frack. We have to use natural gas in automobiles and trucks where it works. We gotta take coal and produce liquid fuel from it. We know the technology and Wall Street has to get with it. Places like Ohio can do all of this. You’ve got the coal, you’ve got the natural gas and you’ve got the oil – and you’ve got the biofuel.
You put together the two million barrels additional a day from ethanol that we can produce – not only from corn but also cellulosic ethanol – and you put that together with the additional oil and gas if we opened up some of the federal lands and expedited people getting access to it and then you take some of these Wall Street bankers and tell them to stop investing in pay day lending and start investing in real things like plants that will take natural gas and convert it to liquid fuel or plants that will take coal and make liquid fuel out of it – in less than 10 years not only would we be energy independent – we will be dominating the fuel market. We will be the Saudi Arabia of energy. So we need your help. We need to stop this quarrel in the fuels business – we need to stop this quarrel between environmentalists and energy – we need to pull this country together.”
mark@coshoctoncountybeacon.com
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