LONDON (Reuters) – Major British independent oil firm Greenergy sees its future as an exploration company, but one that hunts for fuel in piles of stale pork pies and cakes rather than under the ground or from food crops.

The refined oil product wholesaler is still investing in the embattled European Union biodiesel sector, aiming to utilise ever more challenging waste products after abandoning, at least for now, the widely criticised use of virgin vegetable oils.

“We are investing more and more so we can take harder and harder wastes to process. By late spring or early summer next year we will be able to take almost any liquid you can imagine,” Greenergy founder and chairman Andrew Owens said in an interview on Wednesday.

The European Union’s biofuels industry has struggled to attract funds and expand during the eurozone’s economic crisis, hurt not only by a challenging investment climate but also questions about the sector’s environmental credentials.

Biofuels had been seen playing a central role in helping the EU achieve its target of meeting 10 percent of road transport fuel needs from renewable sources by 2020.

Political support has wavered as scientists raised concerns about the environmental impact of diverting food crops to biofuel production.

Greenergy’s biodiesel plant at Immingham in eastern England was built to use vegetable oils but in the last couple of years the company has built units to pre-treat and post-treat production to allow use of waste such as used cooking oil.

The plant now has the capacity to produce nearly 200,000 tonnes of biodiesel from waste products.

EXPLORING PIES

“We get pork pies, crisps, cakes, dairy products that are not suitable for sale anymore because they have got too old or been damaged in the factory and we can extract fats and oils to make biodiesel,” Owens said.

The move to waste was prompted partly high vegetable oil prices, which made it hard to process them into biodiesel profitably, potential extra regulatory benefits from processing waste and a company target to achieving 70 percent greenhouse gas savings across all its biofuels.

“We are focussed on trying to broaden the feedstock base. We are becoming an exploration company but we are not exploring oil fields, we are exploring pies,” he added.

Owens said the EU’s biodiesel sector faced two main challenges, a massive over investment in capacity across Europe and continuous political tinkering and uncertainty.

He said investment decisions had to be made based on “intuition and common sense” in the absence of a clear future framework for the industry.

“The problem with political decisions is that common sense isn’t always one of the biggest drivers towards the decision,” he said.

But Owens said he remained hopeful about the future of the EU’s biodiesel industry.

He said bioethanol, a substitute for gasoline that is generally produced from grains and sugar crops, was now the cheapest way for oil companies to comply with obligations to blend biofuels into motor fuel.

But the EU overall had too much gasoline and not enough diesel.

“The point that people should not forget is that Europe remains short of diesel. This remains an absolutely pivotal issue,” he said.

“Biodiesel fills a strategic hole in the energy balance which bioethanol doesn’t do to the same extent.”

(Reporting by Nigel Hunt; Editing by Anthony Barker).

SOURCE: REUTERS

Tim Haig, president of BIOX.Great strides being made in the development of biodiesel fuel.

To get to the Green Highway, auto makers are making the most amazing and fuel-efficient petroleum-burning engines ever. What doesn’t get nearly as much attention are the huge opportunities to achieve a cleaner world by burning something other than petroleum. A couple of weeks ago, I tried to dispel many of the “ethanol is a scam” myths. This week it’s biodiesel’s turn.

What I knew about biodiesel until recently was that Willie Nelson was probably making homebrew biodiesel in his kitchen somewhere to fuel a rainbow-coloured school bus. It’s true that the back-to-the-land crowd had long ago figured out that a fairly easy way to save the world and beat the taxman was to collect all the French fry grease they could and perform some simple chemistry. Biodiesel is that easy to make and it’s a wonderful fuel.

Biodiesel is a non-toxic and biodegradable fuel that is made from vegetable oils, waste cooking oil, animal fats or basically anything with a lot of fat in it. More on that later. Biodiesel combusts better than petroleum-based diesel, has a higher cetane (like octane) rating and produces fewer life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions. Ethanol is for gasoline-powered engines and there are a lot more of them on the roads than diesels and, as a result, the ethanol industry is much more established. But diesel engines are more efficient than gasoline engines and biodiesel fuel has come a long way from Willie’s kitchen.

BIOX, a Canadian company with some interesting patented technology first developed in the 1990s at the University of Toronto, has built a 67-million-litre annual capacity biodiesel production facility in Hamilton, Ont. This plant is one of the largest continuous flow biodiesel production facilities in the world. Animal fats and recycled vegetable oils are trucked in and 45 minutes later high-quality biodiesel is ready to be trucked out. “The technology is going great,” says BIOX CEO Tim Haig.

BIOX is processing inedible waste material simply because it’s cheaper than buying edible oil like canola. The biodiesel industry generally is on the ropes because the price of feed stocks have been rising while the price of petroleum-based diesel has been coming down. There is no legal requirement or “mandate” forcing petroleum companies to blend biodiesel into fuel the way there is for ethanol. But it’s coming.

“New federal mandates going into effect in 2012 require all diesel fuel in Canada to contain a 2 per cent biodiesel blend,” said Haig. “Getting a 2 per cent blend across the country would be a monumental feat – that’s 600 million litres in the next few years, but I think we can do it. Canada is producing about 120 million litres a year now and BIOX is producing about half of that.”

Haig says that BIOX is “feedstock agnostic” – which means it can process edible oils or non-edible fatty waste at the same time. But he believes new feedstocks are coming that will lower the price and expand the supply of biodiesel significantly. After BP blows through that first $20-billion for the Gulf disaster you might expect it to become a little more interested in bio-based energy than in more deep-sea drilling. The two most promising new feedstocks are algae and jatropha.

Craig Venter, the man who mapped the human gene, is all over algae. Exxon Mobil entered into a partnership with Venter’s Synthetic Genomics (SGI) in mid-2009 to apply SGI expertise in genetic engineering to create algae that can produce biofuels on a large, economical scale. Exxon Mobil had committed to invest more than $600-million in this effort – which is peanuts for the world’s largest oil company but a lot of money for a scientist.

Jatropha is a plant that can grow in marginal soil and doesn’t have to be fertilized or watered, yet yields more biofuel per acre than corn. Poor farmers in India, China, the Philippines and Malaysia are planting millions of acres of it hoping to turn unproductive fields into a biofuel opportunity. BP is investing in jatropha cultivation.

The adoption of biodiesel, like ethanol, has been delayed by the “Food versus Fuel” argument because both compete with the food industry for raw material. Other potential biofuel feed stocks like palm oil plantations have encroached on rain forests. Algae and jatropha squelch such concerns.

“Petroleum is algae that’s been processed by the earth’s crust for hundreds of thousands of years,” says Haig, “although everyone thinks it’s dinosaurs. But there is now the prospect to skip the earth’s crust’s work and go direct from algae. Algae is up to 50 per cent by weight lipids – fats. That’s perfect for biodiesel.”

Producing renewable fuels – gas from alcohol and diesel from animal fat and plant oils – is already a $2.2-billion industry in Canada, according to the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association. The Gulf disaster is pushing public opinion and political will toward the renewables over the drill-ables. This is happening as science and engineering are on the verge of delivering cellulosic ethanol and jatropha and algae-based biodiesel. Finally, we’re getting green.

Michael Vaughan is co-host with Jeremy Cato of Car/Business, which appears Fridays at 8 p.m. on Business News Network and Saturdays at 2 p.m. on CTV.

Michael Vaughan

Globe and Mail

SOURCE: THEGLOBEANDMAIL.COM

The president of the National Agency of Investment Developments, Beatriz Nofal and Jorge Piwko, director of Biodiesel del Plata, announced this morning the inauguration of a biodiesel plant using used vegetables oils.Â

Associated to spanish capitals, Piwko formed the company of renewable energy Ricard Set and with a total investment of u$s1,5 million the plant was built to produce biodiesel with an installed capacity of 1.200 monthly tons of biodiesel and 500 tons of industrial glycerine to 85% concentration, destinated to the export. It is forseen that the commercial production will begin in June.Â

Biodiesel del Plata is developing a plan of biodiesel elaboration starting from the gathering of used vegetables oils that will involve non governmental organizations, public and private schools, and beneficiaries of social plans and street collectors, creating ecological conscience and collaborating in the achievement of a clean and sustainable development in time.Â

This way, this initiative contributes doubly to reduce the levels of contamination. On one hand, because the vegetable oils of domestic use when they are degraded and poured by the drainages, they form films in the water that impede their oxygenation and they complicate the correct purification of the residual waters.Â

On the other hand, the biodiesel possesses aptitude to replace the fossil fuels in any conventional diesel motor providing significant reductions in the emanation of particles and of carbon monoxide in comparison with the petroleum diesel.Â

Also, their biological cycle in the production and the use reduces approximately in 80% the emissions of carbonic anhydride and almost 100% those of sulfur dioxide; and their combustion diminishes in 90% the quantity of total not burned hydrocarbons, and between 75-90% in the aromatic hydrocarbons.Â

ProsperAr will facilitate the access of Biodiesel del Plata to the support programs for the patenting that the national Government ahead is carrying out in the area of Science and Technology as well as the contacts with the authorities of investments of the county of Buenos Aires and their participation in commercial missions and international fairs.Â

Source:Infobae