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Indiana biodiesel plant up to speed after acquisition

Biofuel producer Imperial Petroleum has said its newly-acquired biodiesel plant in Middletown, Indiana, is now on the way to becoming “highly profitable”.

The company bought the e-biofuels LLC facility back in May with the intention of converting it to its own technology (see this BrighterEnergy.org story).

Ahead of that process, Imperial said today that it has negotiated a series of feedstock purchase agreements and biodiesel off-take sales contracts.

The facility produced 1.2 million gallons of fuel in July 2010, generating $3.5 million in revenues.

Imperial said this looks to have increased in August to 1.4 million gallons and $4 million revenue.

Jeffrey T. Wilson, President of Imperial, said: “Expanding the plant throughput to its current capacity was one of our early goals for e-biofuels and a great deal of credit goes to the management of e-biofuels for their efforts and achievements thus far. August sales to date are on pace to exceed the July results.”

Capacity

The Middletown plant has a capacity of around 15 million gallons of biodiesel each year, but last year only produced about seven million gallons.

Oil and gas exploration firm Imperial, which has its head office in Evansville, Indiana, is aiming to expand the e-biofuels plant’s capacity to 25 million gallons a year once it has finalized the financing for its eBio subsidiary.

Mr Wilson said: “As a result of the mandates under the Renewable Fuels programs, e-biofuels has been in a unique position to take advantage of its certification as an advanced biofuels producer to rapidly increase its market presence. Our products are sold to some of the largest retail outlets and truck stop owners in the United States.”

As well as making the plant more efficient, the company intends to install a slow pyrolysis system to generate electricity for resale to the grid, and bio-oil for use in the biodiesel plant and for sale as renewable heating oil products.