Salem's biodiesel plant set to flow

July 7, 2005

Salem's biodiesel plant set to flow

By Susan Palmer
The Register-Guard

Salem will get the state's first sniff of Oregon-produced biodiesel fuel today, thanks to Eugene entrepreneurs, who are pre-empting their own plan to build a production facility in Portland later this year.

Gov. Ted Kulongoski and Salem Mayor Janet Taylor will be on hand to turn the spigot at a newly assembled plant in Salem, although they may well be upstaged by a taped message from country music legend Willie Nelson and a traditional Hawaiian ceremony courtesy of Pacific Biodiesel.

The Maui-based company and Nelson joined forces with SeQuential Biofuels LLC to create Sequential-Pacific Biofuels, Oregon's first producer of the vegetable oil that can fuel diesel engines.

The renewable resource can be made from used cooking oil or virgin oils made from soybeans, peanuts or canola, and runs with little or no modification to existing engines.

SeQuential announced a month ago that it planned to build a plant in Portland with groundbreaking scheduled for August and fuel production online by November, but the building permit process is taking longer than expected, SeQuential partner Tomas Endicott said.

"This was an opportunity to install equipment on a more temporary basis and allowed us to get into production sooner," he said.

Endicott, who started SeQuential with his brother, Josh, and partner Ian Hill in Eugene in 2001, pushed for a quicker start date in light of the growing competition for the growing market.

In June, the farming cooperative Pendleton Grain Growers announced it would build both a canola crushing facility and a biodiesel plant.

According to a Capital Press report, the co-op plans to obtain canola from Umatilla County farmers.

The Pendleton group plans to produce furnace oil rather than diesel for automobiles, but there also are other firms with production facility plans in Oregon and Washington that are spurring SeQuential to move quickly, Endicott said.

"We're throwing our hat in the ring first," he said.

The Salem facility takes up 6,500 square feet on a 10-acre parcel at an industrial site at the corner of Kuebler Boulevard and Turner Road on the southeast edge of the city, and will be capable of producing a million gallons a year.

It will be about a week before the plant begins production, Endicott said, but when it does it will immediately lessen the amount of oil being imported from Midwestern states.

"I would anticipate that it will get absorbed right here in Oregon," he said.

Kettle Foods, a snack food producer in Salem, will provide the spent oil used to make the fuel.

Biodiesel fuel, which can be mixed in varying amounts with regular diesel, is particularly attractive to agencies and businesses that operate fleets of cars.

In Eugene, Rexius/Grants Landscaping Services recently converted its vehicles to B20, a mix of 20 percent biodiesel with 80 percent regular diesel, and is likely to use about 100,000 gallons a year, Endicott said.

"It doesn't take very many big customers to push the market pretty hard," he said.

In Washington state, for example, which has a biodiesel plant in the Seattle area, King County officials announced that they would switch to a biodiesel mix, with an expected consumption of about 500,000 gallons a year.

Last year, about 30 million gallons of biodiesel were sold in the United States, and this year, some experts expect the amount to double.

It's still not much compared with the 55 billion to 60 billion gallons of petroleum diesel consumed annually, however.

In addition to the Salem facility, SeQuential-Pacific also is still moving ahead with plans for the Portland plant. When it's up and running, the company will decide whether to continue production in Salem, Endicott said.