Biodiesel Continues to Expand Globally
19 April 2006
Significant, commercial-scale biodiesel production continues to expand to new countries, with recent announcements highlighting developments in Indonesia, Sweden and China.
Indonesia. The Jakarta Post reports that Indonesia will have its first biodiesel plant in 2008 as the result of a joint effort by PT Bakrie Sumatra Plantations and PT Rekayasa Industri. Bakrie Sumatra Plantations president Ambono Janurianto and Rekayasa Industri president Triharyo Indrawan Soesilo signed an agreement Wednesday establishing a joint venture to construct the factory early next year. The joint venture is called PT Bakrie Rekin Bio-Energy.
The US$25 million plant, expected to come onstream in mid-2008, will have an initial capacity of between 60,000 and 100,000 tons of biodiesel.
Bakrie Sumatra Plantations, which manages 31,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in Jambi, will provide the raw materials needed to produce bio-diesel, including crude palm oil (CPO) and other feedstock, while Rekayasa Industri would provide engineering and construction expertise.
Indonesian demand for diesel amounts to 460,000 barrels per day, or 27 million kiloliters per year, of which 30% is imported. Triharyo said that biodiesel could serve as an alternative for the unsubsidized diesel used by industry, or export it to other countries.
Sweden. Perstorp Oxo, a Swedish chemical company, is entering the Biodiesel production industry and has selected Axens to supply the Esterfip-H biodiesel technology (earlier post) for a 160,000 tonnes per year plant to be erected in Stenungsund, on Sweden’s south-western coast. The plant will be commissioned during the first quarter of 2007.
China. The University of Milan, the Austrian Biofuels Institute and the University of Jaen (in association with the University of Cordoba-Spain) will work with China’s University of Tianjin and Malaysia’s University of Malaya to build a biodiesel plant in Beijing. Researchers from Germany and Vietnam will be associate participants. The project is funded under the Asia Pro Eco programme of the European Commission’s EuropeAid Cooperation Office and the Hangzhou Town Council in China.
The project will start with research on the local resources appropriate for biodiesel production. The researchers will also investigate the treatment of these sources, the selection of the appropriate production technology, the development of new catalytic converters, and the construction of a biodiesel bedplate and tests. They will also carry out a techno-economic and environmental process assessment, the building of a demonstration plants, and the dissemination of results. Demonstration plants will be built in the Chinese districts of Beicheng, Tianjin and Xihu, and later in Malaysia and Vietnam.
Here in the United States, there's a growing interest in oilseed crops. Soybean plantings are up 7% over last year, and they're starting to experiment with canola in Kansas.
If we can produce four billion barrels of ethanol we can do at least that much biodiesel. The energy return is far better anyway.
Posted by: Cervus | 19 April 2006 at 09:37 AM
Biodiesel seems preferable to ethanol. What is keeping it down? Inability to come up with sufficiently clean diesel engines?
Posted by: t | 19 April 2006 at 10:39 AM
I like algae. It uses so much less land and can be harvested daily without driving tons of machinery over hill and dale.
Posted by: tom deplume | 19 April 2006 at 04:39 PM
Oil palm use 10 times less land then soy and 5 times less land then canola. But if oil palm is being planted in USA without considering the climate, lacking of cheap labour will drive the cost up.
Is there any feasible algae production model yet? And a workable one.
USA vehicles mostly running on gas engine, rarely diesel engine on a passenger car, if any. So ethanol as biofuel is prefered.
Posted by: rexis | 19 April 2006 at 05:47 PM
Folks don't like to admit it, but large-scale implementations of biodiesel, such as broad B2 or B5 mandates, tend to run into more technical glitches than broad-based implementations of E5 or E10. See: http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=389013, about the problems Minnesota faced when first rolling out statewide biodiesel. Such events could act to retard enthusiasm for embracing the fuel. As we get over such problems, I think biodiesel will hit a sustained upswing in the U.S., especially since ULSD regulations which are now coming into effect would seem to increase the cost of conventional diesel.
Posted by: NBK-Boston | 19 April 2006 at 08:39 PM
rexis:
There are two companies working on algal biodiesel that I know of. GreenShift and GreenFuel Tech. Both companies use powerplant emissions to accelerate growth, but the latter seems farther along. In the past 6 months they've gotten $16 million in venture capital. They're currently testing a smaller scale unit at a powerplant in the southwest. They expect to have full scale units up by 2009.
Faster, please.
Posted by: Cervus | 19 April 2006 at 10:01 PM