Minn-Dak Sugar Tour
If you were looking for us noon Tuesday June 24th we were at our usual meeting place, Prante’s only for a very short while. Program manager Shawn Longhenry arranged an innovative program of touring the huge Minn-Dak sugar refinery site. Our transportation was the double-decker bus and our guide was Minn-Dak’s business development manager Allen Larson. The refinery is owned by the Minn-Dak Farmers’ Cooperative and is tucked away in the north end of the city. Driving past it on Highway 75 one only gets a suggestion of how large it is and even near it on Red River Road one does not fully appreciate the size.
The purpose of the tour was to show off the new $ 70 million Molasses De-Sugarization (MDS) unit currently under construction. Costing each shareholder $ 125,000.00 the unit will extract more sugar from the beet residue leaving very little molasses. It will also move the “processing time” to 320 days a year. With much of the structural steel up the unit’s footprint is not large when compared to the whole refinery. There are 125 contractor employees (10 to 15 contractors) involved with the construction of the unit.
While at the site we were taken to see the huge sheds each of which stores 80 thousand tons of beets, sufficient for 10 days operations. We were easily able to drive into the sheds with the double decker bus (door clearance is 60 feet) and take the long drive to the far end. As with the outside units cold air is blown up from the bottom of the pile to freeze the beets until they are needed for processing. As with each summer the refinery is currently in repair and renovation mode there are no sugar beets on site so some of the interior of the shed we visited was being used to ready the pipes for the MDS unit.
The sugar beet is 70 to 75 % water most of which needs to be evaporated away (the plumes of steam one sees when the plant is processing). This requires 800 tons of coal (5 rail cars full) per day. Mr. Larson was proud to report that in their processes and evaporators each pound of steam generated is used 5 times and more water is produced than is used by the plant.
There are several by-products of the sugar beets including yeast. The yeast plant generates 3 million pounds of yeast per month. It is the highest quality yeast in the country and most of us have tasted it as Pizza Hut is a major national customer.
Members enjoyed the change in pace and innovative program and likely better understood what Mr. Larson was talking about than had he just made a formal talk at the restaurant. Few understood the magnitude of this major economic driver of the community.