ICM: "We’re looking for work"

The SkunK has already laid waste to the myth on the boards that ICM and Westfelia developed the COES and GreenShift somehow then patented their idea. The real timeline given by GreenShift in the filings has NOT been challenged. The GreenShift patent goes back to a provisional application in 2004. http://greenshift-gers.blogspot.com/2010/02/confirmation.html

In fact, ICM did not start selling their COES until they had purchased two of the COES from the GreenShift Inventors. This does not seem to be in dispute. The SkunK even found a 2005 article where ICM officers talk of buying those particular COES and Westfelia talks of developing a system in the future. http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=4604
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2008 - Desperate Times in the Ethanol Industry!

Now - here is another lead that a reader led me to. Many investors (understandably) cannot understand why a legitimate company could possibly decide to ignore US Patent law as a business decision. In fact - this sophistry can lead to the conclusion that something must be wrong with the GreenShift position - since obviously if their patents were valid - those patents would be respected by a lawful company.

Although this article is not about "backend fractionation" and COES - it does paint a vivid picture of what ICM was thinking in the fall of 2008. They did not "want" new business in the ethanol by-product industry - they seemed desperate for it. They had just gone through "downsizing" and ICM was in the process of pushing out new products for the industry. It seems more than a coincidence to the SkunK that they were also seemed to be aggressively undercutting GreenShift in the corn oil extraction business at the same time with non-patetented COES.

Read for yourself in the Sept 2008 Ethanol Producer Magazine:

"If the notion of “fuel and feed-for-food production” isn’t clear enough ICM Inc., a leader in dry-grind U.S. ethanol plant process design, is doing its part to clarify any confusion. It’s not doing this as charity to the industry though.

Not long ago ICM downsized by 105 employees, a striking impact of the industry’s slowdown. At the May 2008 Distillers Grains Technology Council symposium in Kansas City, Mo., Dennis Vander Griend, the brother of ICM’s Chief Executive Officer Dave Vander Griend, said very clearly “We’re looking for work". He meant that the the building bubble of 2005-2006 had burst and ICM needed to roll out its next successful design—". . . http://www.ethanolproducer.com/article.jsp?article_id=4604

SkunK