resulted in us inventing a whole new technology in the process.” She had my attention. The plant did not have a pretreatment facility or a filter press to meet the cold soak requirements. It was only capable of running RBD soybean oil or palm oil. The addition of those assets would have cost $5 to $10 million for a plant of that size. The facility was trying to run crude degummed soybean oil, which has more gums than RBD. There were problems getting good reactions and washing difficulties due to the gums ending up in the biodiesel. The technical team struggled for months to find a solution to the problem. “Darcy Lefsrud, Brandon Gagliano, Mark Tarrien and I collaborated with the rest of our technical team, especially from the plant in Natchez, Mississippi,” Purdue says. “The Natchez plant has similar equipment but does not have the problems that we were seeing.” The 72 MMgy World Energy plant located on the Mississippi River in Natchez is operated by married chemical engineers Wanda and Rut Horne,
plant manager and process engineer, respectively. Al King is another engineer in Natchez who was instrumental in turning the former chemical additive facility into a biodiesel plant. Along with Greg Hopkins, technology services director from the Rome, Georgia, plant, this engineering dream team is like a Seal Team Six of biodiesel engineers. Rut had developed a new method for glycerin washing that created a reaction to cause the gums to fall out and go into the glycerin rather than the biodiesel. The team adapted this new method to optimize it for the Houston process. The breakthrough improved the reaction process and solved the washing and emulsification challenges. “We actually created a new technology that is a chemical alternative to adding an expensive pretreatment asset,” Purdue says. “It was an elegant solution that will allow us to invest in different optimizations at the Houston plant.” The Houston plant is a partial batch and partial continuous process. World Energy has plans to eventually make the whole process continuous.
“After deciding that we were going to transition to an all-continuous process, Darcy, Brandon, Mark and I loaded up and went on a little road trip to Natchez where we spent a week designing the Houston continuous washing upgrade based on the Natchez model,” Purdue says. “Going from batch to continuous is like going from a manual transmission to an automatic.” The Houston plant is now running successfully, servicing pipeline shipments and planning to double capacity. Improvise, adapt, overcome. Being in the biodiesel business is to be a problem-solver, and we seem to never have any shortage of problems to solve. Those happen to be the exact dynamics that inspire innovation. And while many days the biodiesel business feels like Heartbreak Ridge, a culture of constant innovation is a hallmark of an industry on the rise. Author: Joe Jobe Founder, Rock House Advisors LLC 573-680-1948 jjobe@rockhouseadvisorsllc.com
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