Biggest Biodiesel Plant Opened Monday

The nation's largest biodiesel plant opened Monday at the Houston Ship Channel, expanding Texas' lead as the biggest producer of the alternative fuel and helping chart a course for making it from nonedible sources.

The $70 million facility, owned by Grapevine-based GreenHunter Energy, will be able to produce 105 million gallons a year of biodiesel, boosting the nation's capacity to make the fuel by nearly 5 percent.

But at a grand opening event Monday, GreenHunter officials were just as eager to highlight the plant's flexibility to produce the fuel from a wide range of animal fats and vegetable oils, both edible and nonedible.

The design not only will help the industry move away from competition with food crops like soybeans but will prevent the facility from being too closely tied to one feedstock, which is by far the biggest expense of making the fuel, company officials said.

Many U.S. biodiesel producers have struggled to remain profitable amid higher prices for soybean oil, the chief feedstock used to make biodiesel in this country. Some have cut production, while others have temporarily shut down.

But GreenHunter plans to avoid that problem, Chairman and Chief Executive Gary Evans said Monday as he stood in the shadow of plant's freshly painted storage tanks.

Within a couple of years, however, he hopes to run the plant on oil extracted from jatropha, a nonedible plant that grows wild in India. The company has a stake in jatropha plantations in five countries, he said.