POET announced it has acquired Flint Hills Resources’ entire ethanol business. Reuters says that highlights the largest American biofuel producer’s bet that conventional renewable fuels like corn-based ethanol will play a big role in the push to reduce U.S. carbon emissions. The company says the deal will boost POET’s ethanol production capacity by 40 percent to three billion gallons annually. “Biofuels are one of the best near-term solutions to climate change,” says POET founder and Chief Executive Jeff Broin. “We don’t have decades to wait, and biofuels are already here today.” The acquisition includes six biofuel processing facilities that are in Iowa and Nebraska, as well as two terminals in Texas and Georgia. POET, based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, will now operate 33 biofuel processing operations in eight states. Flint Hills is a refining, biofuels, and petrochemical company based in Wichita, Kansas. It was the fifth-largest ethanol producer in America before the acquisition. The deal will also boost POET’s dried distiller’s grain production to seven million tons a year and its corn oil production to 975 million pounds annually.

POET Ethanol expands business by 40 percent