In recent years, POET has acquired four terminals that enhance the company’s ability to market and distribute its bioproducts to customers throughout the U.S. and around the world — but they all play very different roles.
“While each terminal operates with its own unique processes and characteristics, we all share a common purpose: to serve as a key transition point in delivering POET’s products to our customers, ensuring quality and efficiency throughout the supply chain,” said Austin Broin, General Manager of POET Terminal – Savannah.
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POET Terminal – Savannah
Broin has managed the Savannah, GA, terminal since it was acquired by POET in 2022. The team at POET – Savannah transloads rail cars filled with dried distillers grains (DDGS) into 40-foot containers bound for export from the Port of Savannah just 4.5 miles away. One crew handles transloading, another team jockeys trucks from the unloading track to the facility yard. Top lift operators are trained in moving the 65,000-pound loaded containers (57,000 pounds of product), stacking them in the yard for fumigation to be held for at least three days before being loaded onto third-party trucks and moved to the port.
Maintenance, office staff, terminal engineers, health and safety specialist, supervisors, and managers round out the 55-member team.
POET Terminal – Savannah lies on the CSX rail line, unloading between 230 and 240 cars each week. “We have the capacity to unload 26 cars in a day on one track when we’re running really well and 20 a day on the other,” Broin said. The DDGS product is transloaded directly into containers, with about 2,000 containers loaded monthly. The logistics and paperwork requirements are complex, working with multiple container companies using different steamship lines, all with different dates.
Broin added the Savannah terminal handles about half of all containers shipped by POET, with most coming from the Eastern Corn Belt. Other POET containerized shipments are either loaded by the plants themselves, or by third-party transloaders.
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POET Terminal – Camilla
Further south in Georgia, just an hour north of the Florida state line, POET Terminal – Camilla receives bioethanol and DDGS by rail from a short line railroad with connections to both CSX and the Norfolk Southern railroads. Once a 100 million-gallon-per-year bioethanol production facility, the plant was idled during the COVID pandemic, transitioning in 2020 to operate as a terminal. POET acquired the facility in 2021 and began upgrades, improving the bioethanol handling and adding DDGS in 2023.
“At first we struggled to keep up with truck demand here because we weren’t built as a terminal,” said Georgia Taylor, Terminal Manager at POET Terminal – Camilla. “We were taking existing equipment that we used to unload denaturant rail cars to unload bioethanol rail cars into storage tanks. It would take us an hour and 45 minutes to do one rail car.” But the team has come a long way. Today they can unload three rail cars in a little over an hour, “and we stay way ahead of truck demand.” Camilla handles between 4.5 million and 5.5 million gallons a month of bioethanol, primarily shipped to the big blending terminals in Albany and Bainbridge, GA.
On the DDGS side, Camilla both transloads DDGS from rail cars directly to trucks, as well as to its flat storage, unloading between 13 and 15 rail cars each week. “We have good blending capabilities,” Taylor said, which makes Camilla unique in the POET system for being able to blend accurately to specification. “Our customers are pretty much in our backyard,” she added, “with some loads going into Alabama and Florida.”
While the bioethanol tanker truck drivers load themselves from the facility’s rack, needing little assistance, the eight members of Camilla’s team load all DDGS.
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POET Terminal – Bossier City
West of Camilla in northwest Louisiana, POET Terminal – Bossier City is quite different from its eastern counterparts, not handling any DDGS. Four POET team members transload bioethanol from rail cars to trucks. Located on the Canadian Pacific Kansas City rail line, the facility can hold about 35 cars, although it usually gets about 15 cars at a time, said Terminal Supervisor Justin Hedgepeth.
The Bossier City team unloads four to five rail cars daily that will fill three and a half to four fuel tankers. “Opening up a car and hooking it up to the truck probably takes five minutes, and then it takes roughly 20-22 minutes to pull product from the car into the truck,” Hedgepeth said.
Unlike other POET terminals handling bioethanol where tanker drivers load themselves, the Bossier City crew loads each tanker. “There’s a lot of manual labor that comes with this job,” Hedgepeth said. “Lifting heavy, heavy things. What makes us most unique is just the manual labor part of it.” In late 2024, the facility averaged 20 to 23 trucks loaded each day.
POET took over operational control of the facility in December 2019 from a third-party operator.
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POET Terminal – Buda
Located in the Texas hill country just south of Austin, Texas, POET Terminal – Buda was purchased by POET in 2021 as part of its acquisition of the Flint Hills Resources bioethanol assets. Buda unloads a 108-car unit train in a day. Located on a rail siding just off the Union Pacific main corridor, Buda utilizes an integrated third-party contractor whose team of nine splits the unit train for offloading half the train at a time.
“Start to finish, a complete unit train takes about 16 hours — splitting it up, offloading, unhooking, building it back up,” said Scott Rachels, Terminal Manager at POET Terminal – Buda. The offloading is performed by an integrated third-party operator and monitored by four POET team members, taking approximately eight hours for the unit train. “We have six offload pumps, so we can offload a little over 10,000 gallons a minute,” Rachels said. Buda gets a unit train every five to 10 days.
Each rail car in the 108-car train holds about 28,800 gallons, enough bioethanol to fill the facility’s two aboveground storage tanks, each holding just under four million gallons. The drivers of the fuel tankers picking up bioethanol load their own trucks, in a system just as efficient as the rail offloading. “We can load a 7,800-gallon truck in about 12 minutes,” Rachels said,
“doing anywhere from 80 to 120 trucks a day. Monthly it adds up to between 15 million and 18 million gallons.”
Trucks go as far north as Waco and south to Corpus Christi, delivering bioethanol to major oil companies’ blending and pipeline terminals. “We supply a large portion of the market in central Texas with bioethanol,” he added.
Buda’s high-speed, efficient terminal handles an impressive volume each week. “We’re probably the biggest POET-owned bioethanol terminal as far as throughput,” Rachels said. “But to put it in perspective of how much POET produces, even if we had 12 months of the maximum throughput we’ve seen, we’re only moving 216 to 230 million gallons annually. Compare that to the three billion gallons POET produces each year.”
Its four strategically located terminals have played a key role in POET’s robust and efficient logistics network, allowing the company to seamlessly deliver bioethanol and DDGS to customers across the U.S. and beyond. Each facility plays a unique role, from high-volume rail offloading in Buda to precision blending in Camilla, labor-intensive transloading in Savannah, and hands-on tanker loading in Bossier City. Together, these terminals help POET meet customer demand with speed, flexibility, and reliability, ensuring that its bioproducts reach key markets while strengthening the company’s position as a leader in feeding and fueling the world.
