2007 The Year in Business, No. 10: GBE pushes ethanol plant despite resistance

But some seven months later, Gulfstream Bioflex Energy LLC still hasn’t purchased 252 acres of farmland along U.S. Highway 60 that company officials pinpointed for the plant in mid-2006.

Two months after learning of GBE’s plans, a group of nearby property owners opposed to the plant – known collectively as Citizens for Groundwater Protection – filed suit against the company in Webster County. The plaintiffs alleged that the plant’s enormous thirst for groundwater – between 880 and 1,000 gallons per minute, according to court testimony – would adversely affect their wells.

After a two-day trial in early March, however, Boone County Judge Frank Conley – assigned to the case after GBE’s attorneys petitioned for a new judge – sided with the ethanol company. Conley denied the plaintiffs’ request for a permanent injunction prohibiting GBE from building the plant and dissolved a temporary restraining order placed on the company in December 2006.

Conley noted that, because Webster County has no planning and zoning regulations, the plaintiffs needed to prove that construction of the plant would either result in a nuisance or damages to surrounding properties. He ruled that they failed to prove that the plant would “certainly and inevitably” create a nuisance.

Bill McDonald, the Springfield attorney representing the plant opponents, filed post-trial motions arguing that Conley erred by applying a standard of proof higher than a “reasonable likelihood” that the plant would negatively impact the groundwater supply. Conley denied the motions, and the case is now pending before the Missouri Court of Appeals.

In November, GBE’s lead attorney – Bryan Wade with Husch & Eppenberger LLC – withdrew from the case for unknown reasons. Springfield attorney Craig Lowther is now representing the firm, which also is planning to build a plant in Monroe City, west of Hannibal.

GBE officials and an air permit application under review by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources indicate the plant would produce 100 million gallons of fuel-grade ethanol annually. DNR Permits Section Chief Kyra Moore said in early December that a draft air permit for GBE’s proposed plant would likely be complete early 2008.

GBE Vice President Charles Luna declined to comment on Wade’s withdrawal or the status the ethanol plant. He did, however, discount widespread media reports that the government-subsidized ethanol boom may be headed for a bust after months of tumbling stock prices and tighter profit margins for producers.

“There is no slowdown,” Luna said. “It’s going full blast.”

In October 2006, Springfield Business Journal reported on Luna’s legal woes in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In 1993, a long list of creditors – mainly banks, fuel suppliers and equipment-leasing companies – forced Luna into a Chapter 7 bankruptcy case that lasted three years.

Greg Wilmoth of Mount Vernon is also one of GBE’s executive officers. Wilmoth is a first cousin once-removed to Gov. Matt Blunt, who signed new ethanol standards into law in 2006 that required gasoline sold in Missouri to contain at least 10 percent ethanol by Jan. 1.

Wilmoth was the president and CEO of GBE until February, when the company announced that Jim Kaiman of Chesterfield would be stepping into the role. Kaiman has 33 years of experience with St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. and various companies that spun off from the agricultural technology behemoth. He was most recently vice president of operations for Israel Chemical Ltd.[[In-content Ad]]