Biodiesel Plant Comes Back to Life in Beatrice, Nebraska

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--The former Beatrice Biodiesel LLC, located in Beatrice, Nebraska, has come back to life after seven years of promise of producing biodiesel in Gage County. The plant originally started construction in 2008, was never completed, and never produced a drop of biofuel.

In 2011, Flint Hills Resources LP (Wichita, Kansas), a subsidiary of Koch Industries Incorporated (Wichita, Kansas), one of the largest private U.S. companies, acquired the Beatrice biodiesel plant out of bankruptcy. In May 2013, Flint Hills Resources announced a joint venture with Benefuel Incorporated (Irving, Texas) to retrofit the unfinished plant with Benefuel's ENSEL process biodiesel production technology and restart production.

The recently completed plant is now producing again under the name Duonix Beatric LP (Beatrice). The plant has the capacity of producing 55 million gallons per year of biodiesel utilizing low-cost, high free fatty acid (FFA) feedstocks such as animal tallow, unrefined oils, used vegetable oils and distillers corn oil. The latter is generated by the ethanol industry.

Surprisingly, the Beatrice plant is currently the only operating biodiesel production facility in Nebraska. Horizon Biofuels Incorporated operated a small plant in Fremont, Nebraska, but it caught fire in May 2014 and never re-opened. Northeast Nebraska Biodiesel LLC operated a 5 million-gallon-per-year plant in Scribner, but closed the facility in November 2009 due to high soybean prices and low fuel prices.

An additional six biodiesel plants were in planned to be constructed in Nebraska, but plans were cancelled or put on-hold due to market conditions in the biodiesel industry, and construction never even scratched the dirt.

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