Eight People to Watch in 2008
By Steve Miller, Journal Staff
The Rapid City Journal, January 6, 2008

You may not know their faces, but they'll likely make news this year.

One will bring hockey to Rapid City, another will stage “Miss Saigon” with high school students. And a pair of business partners will do their part to free the country from dependence on foreign oil. These are some of the people who will be making news and shaping lives in our community in 2008.

An Introduction To The Leaders

[Excerpt] Randy Kramer and Dave Litzen: Business partners who are on the cutting edge of ethanol production.

Partners Share Passion for Ethanol

Randy Kramer and Dave Litzen are two South Dakota natives who are on the cutting edge of ethanol production.

Yes, we know they add a ninth person to our “Eight in ’08,” but we couldn’t choose between them.
 

Kramer and Litzen are partners in KL Process Design Group of Rapid City. The company operates corn ethanol plants in Sutherland, Neb., and Rosholt, in northeast South Dakota.

But they are most excited about their demonstration plant at Upton, Wyo., which has been turning wood waste into ethanol since August.

Litzen, 48, grew up on a Hoven area farm and graduated from South Dakota School of Mines & Technology in 1981. “I always had an interest in a way to meld a technical degree with agriculture,” Litzen said.

“Even at that time, it seemed like ethanol was a great way to do that.”

But for the next 16 years, Litzen worked for Shell Oil Co. in Houston, where ethanol was a dirty word.

But Litzen says getting rid of fossil fuels is not a good strategy. “A good strategy is to use fossil fuels wisely in coordination with biofuel.”

Kramer, also 48, grew up in Platte, served in the U.S. Army for seven years, then came back and attended South Dakota State University from 1985 to 1987, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science and a commission as a second lieutenant in the Army.

He served in the Army as an artillery officer in Desert Storm and later as a professor of military science at the School of Mines.

Kramer received a master’s degree in public administration from the University of South Dakota in 1999 and retired with 22 years in the Army in 2000.

Kramer and Litzen met through Litzen’s wife, Lori, who worked at Mines when Kramer was teaching there. They discovered they both were interested in ethanol.

To complete the family connection, Kramer’s wife, Rebecca, served as the bookkeeper when they started the company.

Then, with investment partners, they acquired the two corn ethanol plants.

The one at Sutherland, particularly, has helped finance their wood-to-ethanol project at Upton.

Although others involved in ethanol say the process for pulling alcohol from wood waste is a few years away, Kramer and Litzen say they’re already doing it — at Upton.

They developed the process with help from Mines at a laboratory on East St. Patrick Street.

Then they built the plant at Upton. Litzen credits Kramer for his “Field of Dreams” approach of “building something and forcing us all to figure out how to run it. Most companies want to research everything to death,” Litzen said.

Kramer and Litzen have put up $2 million of the $6 million cost of the Upton project.

They didn’t use federal money for the plant, although they received a $60,000 grant to do some of the initial research at Mines.

The Upton plant is working slowly, and they hope to have their first truckload of ethanol to deliver in January, to run in Rapid City Area School buses.

The future looks bright, they say. KL Process is contracting to manage a corn ethanol plant in Kansas and is working on other corn ethanol projects in Iowa and New York.

They also are looking at other locations for small wood-to-ethanol plants.

Kramer and Litzen are both veterans of the Iraqi oil fields. Litzen worked for a company that pumped oil from those fields, and Kramer fought in the oil fields during Operation Desert Storm.

They say developing fuels that can be grown and processed in the United States is a way to fight terrorism and lessen U.S. dependence on foreign energy.

“The passion that drives us is so much of that,” Litzen said.