He points to the west Texas town of Sweetwater to prove his point.

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Sweetwater Ethanol, for example, has a business strategy that seeks to solve a growing market need with a novel technology.

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Ten years ago Sweetwater was a dusty backwater best known for having the world's largest rattlesnake round-up (see article).

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Rather than abandoning the only alternative fuel currently produced on a commercial scale, Sweetwater Ethanol wants to reinvent it by retooling the way ethanol is made.

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In Wyoming's Sweetwater County, gusts up to 71 mph damaged a marina at Flaming Gorge Reservoir and broke windows at the Western Wyoming Community College in Rock Springs, according to the National Weather Service.

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Sweetwater isn't the first company to pin its hopes on leveraging ethanol, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that sound business strategy wasn't enough to seal the deal in this year's ICE competition.

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Sweetwater says it can "make ethanol make sense" by reorganizing the refining process around the company's signature cellulosic liquid concentrate called CCF that the company says will lower the cost, energy and carbon footprint of producing ethanol.

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