The big bio fuel plant?

[wd9]

Cowman, what does that Bowden refinery do?

[cowman]

wd9: It was actually mothballed for a couple of years, but is back up and running...I believe they are doing something with reconstructing used drilling mud?
That refinery wasn't really a refinery for crude. They actually refined condensate(the heavy hydro carbons in natural gas)? At a gas plant the natural gas is dried and has all the heavy hydrocarbons knocked out of it before it enters the NOVA transmission lines. The propanes, butanes, pentanes, hextanes etc. All the dried gas left enters the NOVA transmission lines and goes to either Empress or Cochrane to the cracking plants where the ethane is split off from the methane. The ethane goes to Joffre/Fort Saskatchewan to be converted into polyethalene and the methane enters the NG fuel lines, either for domestic use or export.

[rain]

What size of plant are they looking at, in bushels used per year?

[wd9]

New York – Riverstone Holdings (Riverstone), The Carlyle Group (Carlyle) and Dominion Energy Services LLC. (Dominion Energy) today announced plans to expand their existing relationship by building up to 300 million gallons of bio refining capacity in Alberta, Canada. The bio refinery will consist of a combined 100 million gallon ethanol facility, a 100 million gallon canola oil crush facility and a 100 million gallon bio diesel facility.

In Canadian speak, 100 milion gallon is 385 million litres. 10 litres in a bushel of canola, 38.5 mbu. 10% glycerine, so around a million to 1.2 million tones of canola seed.

Interestingly 1 bushel of wheat makes about 10 litres of ethanol, so 38.5 million bushels or around 1.2 ish million tonnes.

Wonder what is going to happen with about 50,000 tonnes of glycerine? Sounds like an opportunity.

[rain]

wd9 what is the glycerine used for?

[wd9]

Ahhh, the $10 million dollar question. traditionally everything from soap to cough syrup. Abundant supplies will push the value very low putting the traditional suppliers out of business.

But, on the brightside, with a cheap input product new products can and will be developed. Sugar alcohols and environment friendly anitfreeze to name a couple. ADM makes polyols (sweeterners) out of the glycerine in the US.