Ethanol production from corn is the fastest growing industry in the U.S. Corn is ground, cooked, treated with enzymes, and then fermented to produce ethanol. The ethanol is separated by distillation, which leaves behind copious amounts of stillage, from which the solids are removed, leaving thin stillage. This thin stillage is partially recycled then concentrated by flash evaporation, an energy-intensive process whose byproducts are dried grains, with limited use as livestock feed, and water vapor, containing volatile compounds, which has limited recyclability.

Not having to evaporate the water from thin stillage would save considerable amounts of energy. To that end, researchers at the Fungal Research Group at Iowa State Univ., Ames, and the Univ. of Hawaii at Manoa, jointly with researchers at MycoInnovations, also of Ames, have developed MycoMax, a fungal cultivation process that cleans and concentrates thin stillage without evaporation. The fungal treatment produces a protein-rich biomass that provides desirable health benefits to animals. If all dry-grind ethanol plants in the U.S. recovered water by this process, energy savings from eliminating stillage evaporation could save $800 million/year and 10 billion gallons of water. In addition, the potential revenue from high-quality livestock feed production is expected to be worth another $400 million/year.