Ethanol byproduct grows in popularity with Chinese

Des Moines Register
By DAN PILLER • dpiller@dmreg.com • May 13, 2010

China made news this month by buying U.S. corn for the first time in almost a decade.

But for more than a year, China has slipped into the back side of the American corn market by buying dried distillers grains, a byproduct of ethanol, to feed its livestock.

Distillers grains are the shell and some of the inside matter of the kernel after the starch is removed to make ethanol. U.S. ethanol plants annually produce the equivalent of about 1.2 billion bushels of distillers grains. Total corn production exceeds 13 billion bushels.

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