Solid Energy enters biodiesel market with plans for big expansion

Solid Energy has acquired Canterbury Biodiesel and plans to increase annual production to 70 million litres within three years which will meet more than half the Government’s 2012 target for biofuels.

Solid Energy chief executive officer, Dr Don Elder, said that entering the biofuels sector “is a logical, but significant step from our already established market position in bioenergy with our wood pellet business, Nature’s Flame.

“We identified some time ago that we wanted to build a diversified portfolio of energy businesses alongside our existing coal mining operations,” he said.

The business will operate as a division of Solid Energy, trading as Biodiesel New Zealand. Paul Quinn, who founded Canterbury Biodiesel in 2005 and has 15 years experience in the automotive industry, has been appointed general manager.

Biodiesel New Zealand currently produces about 1 million litres of biodiesel a year from its plant in Addington, Christchurch, by converting used cooking oil collected from restaurants and other food processing businesses in the South Island and has expanded used oil collection into the North Island.

The company is also investigating the potential for producing biodiesel from energy crops such as canola. Biodiesel’s current customers are operators of fleets, including bus, trucking and earthmoving companies which operate very high ratio blends made up of 60 to 100% biodiesel.

Solid Energy will also assess the use of biofuel in its own operations which currently uses about 15 million litres of mineral diesel a year with its contractors using an additional 25 million litres.

In underground mines biodiesel also offers safety advantages over mineral diesel due to lower emissions, the company said.

Solid Energy holds a number of petroleum exploration permits for coal seam gas and is piloting development of the gas as a source of energy by extracting coalbed methane gas from deep coal seams in the Waikato.

Source: Solid Energy