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August 20, 2008

CountryMark goes all-American

By Rod Rose/The Lebanon Reporter

Lebanon — For area drivers and farmers, CountryMark has gone one better than “made in America.”

Tuesday, the company announced that it will sell only gasoline that is pumped from Midwestern wells, refined in Indiana, and that contains 10 percent ethanol derived from corn.

Dozens of persons attended the announcement ceremony at the Co-Alliance fuel station on West South Street in Lebanon.

CountryMark is comprised of 42 member cooperatives in Indiana, Ohio and Michigan, with about 138,000 individual owners. It is one of only two farmer-owned cooperatives in the United States.

The Indiana Farm Bureau Co-Op began tapping Midwestern oil in 1940. The company built a 240-mile-long pipeline to a refinery in Mount Vernon.

A self-described “oil man” all his life, CountryMark CEO Charlie Smith said CountryMark will use crude oil from the Illinois Basin, a geological formation in Indiana, Illinois and western Kentucky. Wells are owned by more than 40,000 persons, he said.

“We fuel farms, families and fleets all around the state,” Smith said. “Every dollar we spend supports families in the heartland.”

CountryMark now has 90 fuel stations in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Michigan.

Congressman Steve Buyer, R-4th, said CountryMark’s decision was an example of how the nation can turn away from dependence on foreign oil.

“America is turning toward American sources,” Buyer said. That is one step toward learning “how to live, work and prosper in the future,” he said.

American dependence on foreign oil costs the equivalent of 3.6 million jobs, Buyer said — or just half a million jobs less than in Indiana.

Ken Klemme, acting director of the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, said the U.S. is keeping $35 billion a year in the U.S. by including ethanol in gasoline.

He said CountryMark was an example of a corporation that recognizes the economic advantages of ethanol.

Donnie Lawson, a Boone County farmer, noting Indiana is the fourth-largest corn producing state in the nation, said, “imagine if we had embraced biofuels in 1992.”

While the ethanol industry won’t solve all the nation’s energy problems, Lawson said, Indiana is “fortunate that CountryMark is committed to 100 percent U.S. crude oil.”

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