Houston Biodiesel Holds Groundbreaking Ceremony for Seabrook, Texas Biodiesel Plant

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas). Houston Biodiesel, LLC (Seabrook, Texas) and partners TexCom Resources, Incorporated (Pinksheets:TEXC) (Houston, Texas) and US Renewables Group (Santa Monica, California) held a silver shovel groundbreaking ceremony yesterday to commemorate the beginning of construction on a new biodiesel plant located within LBC Houston’s Bayport Industrial Complex in Seabrook, Texas. For background information see related October 3, 2005 news article - TexCom Selects Site for 30 Million-Gallon per Year Gulf Coast Biodiesel Plant.

Plans call for the creation of a $28.4 million biodiesel plant that will process both soybean and palm oil into the clean burning renewable fuel. The project consists of the main transesterification reactor and purification systems, a large 50,000-barrel storage tank, two smaller 25,000-barrel storage tanks, and about a dozen 15-10,000-gallon tanks along with supporting equipment and utilities.

The company selected Lurgi, Incorporated (Memphis, Tennessee) as the design-build contractor for the project and the firm expects to begin mobilizing equipment and staff to the site around late January or early February 2007.

Construction is expected to take a year to complete and the new plant will create about 23 local jobs.

Click on the image at right to view the photo.

Lou Ross, President of TexCom said, “The plant will have the capacity of producing 35 million gallons of pure B-100 biodiesel annually and 140 to 160 million gallons of biodiesel blends B-2, B-5 and B-20.” Along with the biodiesel, roughly 8% of the plant’s capacity will generate glycerin, a by-product of biodiesel production.

TexCom has contracts with the Lansing Trading Group to supply the soybean and palm oil feedstocks and Murex to provide the methanol supply. Markets for the end products include fuel distributors and trading companies, retail truck stops, bulk terminals, federal, state, county and municipal fleets, mass transit authorities as well as state universities, colleges and independent school districts.

Attendees at the groundbreaking included Lou Ross, President & Chairman of the Board for TexCom, Michael McKinney, CEO of LBC Houston, Kurt Torster, CEO of Lurgi, TexCom Executive Vice President Britt Brooks and Houston Biodiesel project manger, Jay Charles. Jay Brunson, Industrial Info’s VP Alternative Fuels was invited and attended the event as well.

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 290 plants under development. It also covers 32 operational biodiesel plants and 75 biodiesel plants under development.

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