Biodiesel refinery in works
ABERDEEN, Wash. – A Seattle alternative-fuel company on Tuesday said it intends to build what will likely be the nation’s largest biodiesel refinery on a 12-acre strip of land in Grays Harbor County.
By the end of next year, company president John Plaza said, Seattle Biodiesel hopes to have the site producing 100 million gallons a year of the vegetable-oil-based fuel. That’s 20 times the output of the company’s existing plant in Seattle.
“The market’s there,” Plaza said. Already, he said, a buyer has signed a contract to buy “significant production” from the new $40 million facility. He wouldn’t say who that buyer is or how much they’re taking. But to meet that demand, he said, the company plans to break ground within six months.
“These things are just popping up like mushrooms. Biodiesel is hot,” said Patrick Mazza, research director for the Puget Sound environmental group Climate Solutions. National biodiesel use, he said, grew from 25 million gallons in 2004 to 74 million gallons last year. And in the past week, the rising cost of conventional diesel in many areas made it more expensive than biodiesel. When that happens, Mazza said, drivers are much more likely to opt for the “green” fuel.
Still, at the state Department of Agriculture, bioenergy coordinator Greg Wright was stunned Tuesday afternoon when told the size of the proposed plant.
“One hundred million gallons a year? My God!” he said. “Are you sure you heard that 100 million correctly?”
It’s correct. But it’s unclear how such a large producer would affect the smaller biodiesel projects – mostly crushing plants to extract oil from rapeseed or mustard seed – that are starting to spring up across Eastern Washington. State lawmakers are doling out more than $17 million in grants and loans to encourage such projects.
“I don’t think it’s going to affect things, quite honestly,” said Jim Armstrong, a biodiesel proponent who works for the Spokane County Conservation District. Anytime seeds or oil are shipped anywhere, it drives up the cost, he said. To avoid that problem, he envisions a network of small crushing and refining plants scattered throughout agricultural regions. “The large (biodiesel) plants back in the Midwest are located right in the middle of a soybean field,” he said.
For refiners, one potential workaround is to use palm tree oil, which is much cheaper than soybean or canola oil. But palm oil biodiesel brings a separate problem, Armstrong said: It gets cloudy and gels in cool weather.
Plaza said that can be fixed by blending it with conventional diesel. Even with palm oil, he said, a biodiesel blend of 20 percent “will work in Spokane in the middle of winter.”
It’s also unclear what effect the new plant will have on Washington’s farmers. Plaza said he’d love to feed the plant with Washington oil, but Armstrong said there’s no way Washington could grow that much vegetable oil anytime soon.
It would take 1.6 million to 2 million acres of seed crops to feed a plant the size of the one that Seattle Biodiesel is planning, Wright said. How much canola have the state’s farmers planted so far? About 7,800 acres. Seattle Biodiesel feeds its Seattle plant with soybean oil shipped from the Midwest in rail cars.
To encourage a market for biodiesel, Washington state lawmakers this spring mandated that 2 percent of the state’s diesel sales must be biodiesel by 2008. That would require about 20 million gallons.
But Plaza made it clear Tuesday that the company isn’t limiting its sales – or its purchases of raw vegetable oil – to Washington. One of the reasons Seattle Biodiesel liked the Port of Grays Harbor, he said, was its access to both rail lines and a deep-water port. Oils may come from Midwestern soybeans, U.S. or Canadian canola oil, or oils brought in from overseas, he said. And the company plans to ship its biodiesel on bulk barges “up and down the West Coast” as well as overseas.
“The country is counting on you all in that room to show the way in getting off fossil fuels,” said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., who was patched in to a press conference by video link.
In an interview after the meeting, Plaza said the Grays Harbor County plant is just the start.
“This is one of five (plants) that we hope to be working on in the next two years,” he said. None of those sites is in Eastern Washington, he said. One potential site is on land owned by the Port of Seattle.
Local officials were delighted Tuesday by the 25-year lease on the land between Aberdeen and Hoquiam and the prospect of as many as 350 construction jobs. (The plant will employ about 50 people permanently.)
“I think, commissioner, you have to say that this beats Tom Cruise,” Cantwell joked, referring to the film star’s Tuesday visit to Aberdeen after a local fan won an online contest.
The timber boom times long gone, Grays Harbor County is struggling to reinvent itself and revive its economy in the face of mill closures. One of the largest employers today is a state prison.
Grays Harbor port commissioner Chuck Caldwell said he’s hoping the new plant anchors “an economic development green zone.” And Plaza said afterward that his company is in talks with a company that manufactures ethanol from wood waste, of which Grays Harbor has plenty. Biodiesel typically includes ethanol or methanol to keep the oil free-flowing. That company might also land at the site, Plaza said.
“God, Aberdeen is going to be so happy to have something going,” Mazza said. “Instead of becoming a place that just gets sucked dry buying petroleum, they get to be a place where fuel comes from.”