By Rebecca Houg, staff writer

MANLY, Iowa &8212; Work is under way on a first-of-its-kind truck-to-train biofuels trading and distribution center in this Worth County town. The new company, Manly Terminal LLC, will be servicing the regional ethanol market by April next year.

&8220;People have told us we can&8217;t build it fast enough. It will be a place where marketers, producers, and traders can work with each other,&8221; said Lee Kiewiet, president of Manly Terminal, which is a part of Kiewiet Group Companies of Buffalo Center, Iowa.

Back in July, plans for construction of the facility were announced, outlining the truck and railroad reload and trading facility with over 20 million gallons of liquids storage capacity.

The 100-acre facility will sit off U.S. Highway 65 and Iowa Highway 9 and is eight miles from Interstate 35 and 15 miles from Interstate 90.

The company is situated among multiple ethanol facilities currently in operation and under construction or development.

Currently, there are about 14 plants within a 100 miles of the proposed facility. By 2009, there will be more than 75 plants in operation within 275 miles, representing 5.1 billion gallons or half of the nationwide production capacity.

The project will provide a common delivery point for ethanol trading and truck and railroad distribution throughout North America. Ethanol producers will be able to truck their product to the terminal, where it can be stored or shipped out by rail for distribution throughout North America.

&8220;This facility will allow our area ethanol plants and other biofuel producers to better broker and transport their product while bringing strong development, commerce, and jobs to northern Iowa and southern Minnesota,&8221; Kiewiet said.

&8220;After considerable research, Manly, Iowa, was determined to be the most desirable strategic location for this facility, with great road access, an independent short line railroad with multiple connections, and the geographical center of the entire bio-fuels world. We envision that this facility will directly and indirectly create hundreds of new ethanol industry and transportation jobs over the next few years.&8221;

The new terminal facility will allow ethanol producers, buyers and traders to truck production to the facility to transfer the ethanol into outbound railcars. This will allow consolidation from numerous production facilities into one loading location.

Once loaded, units of 75 or more railcars will be shipped together to form a &8220;unit train&8221; to various destinations and primary driving markets demanding ethanol. Iowa Northern Railway likely will classify and stage the outbound cars by destination, then deliver the unit trains to connecting large rail lines.

Manly Terminal should have enough product to load a unit train in one day instead of the 20 days it would take a 50-million-gallon-per-year plant.

Railroad freight rates are typically less for unit trains, and moving product in larger trains means a faster turnaround of tank cars, Kiewiet said.

Manly Terminal broke ground Oct. 27 and operation is planned to start in the spring of 2007.

&8220;We&8217;re excited to see this project move forward and very pleased that we&8217;ve found such a perfect home in Manly and northern Iowa,&8221; said Kiewiet. &8220;The groundbreaking has brought our idea to reality, and we&8217;re grateful for all the support from area leaders, businesses, and the public. We hope this will also serve as a catalyst to the area&8217;s economy and we foresee hundreds of new biofuels industry and transportation jobs created, both directly and indirectly with Manly Terminal.&8221;

Manly Terminal will provide the missing infrastructure needed to facilitate the growth, commodity trading and distribution of ethanol, which nationwide is expected to grow from four billion gallons to more than 12 billion gallons over the next five years, Kiewiet said.

During the Manly Terminal ground breaking, there was another announcement made for a peripheral project by Central BioFuels. This company has secured 85 acres directly north of the terminal and will be implementing a project that is biodiesel in nature. There have been no specifics given yet, as there are still details being worked on.

&8220;For Winnebago and Worth counties, the Manly Terminal means the creation of more jobs,&8221; said Teresa Nicholson.

Nicholson is the executive director with Winnebago-Worth Counties Betterment Council (Winn-Worth Betco) and says they anticipate the Manly Terminal will create more than 400 jobs that are directly and indirectly related to the terminal. This includes jobs on-site at the terminal and trucking positions and railroad positions with peripheral companies and firms throughout the region.

&8220;This terminal could very likely become a delivery point and be on the Chicago Board of Trade.

That is huge,&8221; she said. &8220;This is a new step for the renewable fuels marketplace. We are extremely satisfied with our partners at Manly Terminal and look forward to working with them for years to come on the terminal and other projects of interest.&8221;