Private Research

I applauded the FDA last week, I might as well give a shout out to Archer Daniels Midland Corp. ADM is a private company, but I always smell their filthy corn-infested hands behind farm subsidies and ethanol mandates. Rightly or wrongly.

There was a fun story in the Wall Street Journal today on Steve Bytnar who develops more effective compounds for melting ice on roads. He uses byproducts from ethanol distillation. He was launched by some forward thinking by ADM:

Mr. Bytnar, 37 years old, plunged into the field of de-icing in the mid-1990s after Minnesota Corn Processors, a cooperative where he worked as a researcher was acquired by Archer Daniels Midland Co., Decatur, Ill., gave him free rein to experiment.

"I saw it as a way to separate myself from everyone else," he recalls. "They said don't lose $2 million and blow the plant up, but otherwise do what you want to do."

One of his first projects: finding a way to turn the Hungarian discovery into a commercially viable product. The result was "Ice Ban," a brown blend of magnesium chloride and residue from ethanol distillation. It attacked the ice-and-pavement bond more effectively and at lower temperatures than sodium chloride did, he says, allowing highway managers to cut their salt use.

Economics and Markets Posted by jk at February 25, 2008 10:15 AM