Construction Starts this Week on Biodiesel and Canola Crushing Complex in North Dakota

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Reported by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). After two and a half years in the making, Dakota Skies Biodiesel, LLC (Minot, North Dakota), formally named North Dakota Biodiesel, is finally moving forward with construction plans to build a new biodiesel and canola seed crushing complex to be located in a new agro-industrial park in Minot, North Dakota. The Agri-complex will be created on a 110-acre plot of land and produce both 30 million gallons per year of biodiesel and crush 250,000 tons per year of canola seed and convert the 100,000 tons of oil produced into the biofuel.

Five buildings will be erected on the site and a continuous transesterification processing plant will be installed to turn the canola oil into biodiesel and glycerin. The canola seed crushing and extraction facility will be operated by Magic City Oilseed Products, LLC, a subsidiary of Dakota Skies.

Construction on the $75 million complex is expected to take twelve to fourteen months to complete and an official silver shovel groundbreaking ceremony is scheduled for August 18, 2006. Once operational, the complex is expected to create about 50 new jobs for the rural North Dakota community.

The plant will also mark the eighteenth biodiesel plant currently under construction in North America. As of today, 27 operational plants have the capacity of producing over 185 million gallons of biodiesel annually and once the next batch of plants currently under construction go into operation, domestic production is projected to grow to over 500 million gallons annually. Another 46 plants are in various stages of development that will add another 2.5 billion gallons of capacity by the fourth quarter of 2008 representing over $1.9 billion in capital spending.

Industrial Info's Ethanol Production Database provides a comprehensive outline of all current development activities in the emerging synthetic fuels market. This database covers 123 ethanol plants currently in operation and 234 plants under development. It also covers fifteen operational biodiesel plants and 41 biodiesel plants under development.

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