According to Madson, the Cuban people are still grateful to Katzen for revolutionizing the sugarcane industry in Cuba. “He is forever known down there as the doctor who turned on the lights [at Centrol Fransisco] in Cuba,” Madson said. Back then, electricity for the rural villages didn’t come from the government, but rather the sugar mills as a benefit to its workers, Madson explained.

After 1959, Katzen and his partners fled Cuba and the political tumult, returning to Cincinnati, Ohio, where the future held much work for them.

Foreseeing the future of two ethanol industries
In the late 1970s, before Madson began working for RKAII, Madson was searching for an ag-oriented job in chemical engineering. He kept hearing the name “Katzen,” but he couldn’t get in touch with the man. “It wasn’t until after looking coast-to-coast to find an ag-related chemical engineering job that I found Ray Katzen right in my backyard—literally,” Madson said, sort of laughing. “I could see the roof of Ray’s house (the home Katzen lived in when he founded the company) from my dining room window. Of course, I didn’t know that was his former house until after we met.” According to Madson, Katzen had the ear of everyone in the industry then, as he still does. “At the time we met, I didn’t yet appreciate the industry or his standing in it,” Madson said.

Back then, the distillation and dehydration systems varied from industry to industry. Katzen created the vision of what a proper system should be, and then Madson and others helped bring that vision to life. They delivered Katzen’s vision of an efficient continuous mashing, cooking and liquefaction process, and simultaneous saccharification and fermentation (SSF) distillation dehydration system for a disjointed ethanol industry, as it were. This is just one of many instances that exemplify Katzen’s keen foresight.

Lonnie Ingram, director of the Florida Center for Renewable Chemicals and Fuels in the University of Florida’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Science, met Katzen long ago. “He spoke, and it was clear that he was way ahead of his time,” Ingram revered. Ostensibly, the U.S. DOE agreed.

In 1978, after the two OPEC energy crises of that decade, Katzen’s company got a call from the DOE to look into ethanol as a possible source of feedstock for butadiene (synthetic rubber) production. The DOE wanted studies on the energy balance, yield and the “food versus fuel” issue. “We preferred business from industry over government, but we did what they asked,” Katzen told EPM.

The whiskey business is the original dry mill industry, so that was looked at first. That study’s findings demonstrated that fuel ethanol could be made on a large scale using one-third the energy used to make whiskey then. The study, published by the DOE, sold more than 30,000 copies and was reprinted. “Even today, we occasionally see someone pull out a dog-eared copy of that study the company did so many years ago,” Madson said.

Along with the reduced energy finding in the study, it made an amazingly accurate prediction of the optimal capacity for dry mill ethanol plants. Almost 30 years ago, before Fagen/ICM and Broin Companies plants dotted the Midwest, RKAII’s study foretold that the optimal capacity for a fuel ethanol plant would be 50 MMgy. “Now isn’t that incredible,” Madson told EPM. “He had the foresight so many years ago to envision what is true today—most plants in the U.S. are approximately that size.” Katzen also predicted that there could be 350 50 MMgy plants across the United States. That’s a grand production total of 17.5 billion gallons a year. The USDA told Katzen that if the nation’s capacity to produce ethanol exceeded 5 billion gallons, corn prices would spike due to the laws of supply and demand.

Project 20
What does this historical account have to do with Project 20? Simply put: Everything.

“It was clear that the concept of Project 20 was there from the beginning,” Madson stated. “But the actual words for the project came later, around the early 1990s. It was written in very simple and concise terms. He had hoped it would be the ‘battle cry’ of the industry.” Basically, Project 20 has been 50-plus years in the making, consciously or not.
It was clear to Katzen that the USDA’s suggestion on the theoretical maximum availability of corn for ethanol production was on target. “There is a limit,” Katzen said. “That’s why and when we started pushing cellulosic ethanol.”

To get Project 20 rolling—and without spending time considering whether or not government would certify blends of 20 percent gasoline and/or diesel as EPA-approved fuels—a commercial cellulosic ethanol industry must be started. “The key is putting together a total system package that’s economically competitive,” Madson said. “When ethanol [or corn] prices rise, that opens the door for other economically competitive technologies.”

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