The biofuels industry boomed over the last five years and is only projected to increase in terms of production. While soybeans are the main contributor to this clean fuel, other feedstocks are being explored to meet demand.
Kerry Fogarty is the quality control manager at Incobrasa Industries, a soybean processing and biodiesel manufacturing company in Illinois that got off to a slow start. The company started in 1997 as a soybean crusher but only for a year.
“We had to back off, because there just wasn’t a market for the oil,” Fogarty says. “We started back up and built a refinery and a packaging plant, and we were still struggling trying to maintain our own market shares.”
But once it focused on producing biodiesel in 2006, Incobrasa has been able to crush at full capacity.
“Ever since then,” Fogarty adds, “we’ve had our foot on the gas [and] expanded the biodiesel production pipeline from 30 [million] to 45 million gallons of biodiesel.”
Soybeans amp’d up
Lucas Lentsch, CEO of the United Soybean Board, says that changes in the industry have fostered the growth in biofuels.
With the higher demand for soybean oil, a once low-value product, innovations have been made on the seed side to increase the amount of oil produced from each bean.
“Year over year, improvement on seed technology adds up to about a half-a-bushel-per-acre growth across the country,” Lentsch says. “It opens up opportunity.”
Still, as the demand for oil rises in the biodiesel industry, new suppliers are needed.
Soybeans are not the only feedstock that gets transformed into a fuel. Animal fat from rendering also has the capacity to be converted into fuel.
Lentsch says 80% of soybeans comes in the form of meal, which is fed to the industry’s top consumers — poultry and pork. Adding value to it comes through the rendering process that includes beef and dairy.
Kent Swisher, president and CEO of the North American Renderers Association, has firsthand accounts of the sustainability animal fats have on the industry.
“We were, at one time, called the original recyclers. At another time, we were called the hidden industry. And we have been hidden for many years,” Swisher says. “In the U.S. or in most developed countries, about half the animal is not eaten. So we take the other half of that animal, which is water, protein and fat; put it through a cooking process; and separate the protein fat.”
While it was common for most of the rendering product to go toward pet food or chicken feed overseas, biofuels have created a new use for this byproduct domestically.
“I spent my whole life exporting or trying to get markets to export, but this domestic market came at a good time,” Swisher says. “And speaking on behalf of the renders, we love the biofuel sector. We have a low-carbon, intense feedstock that fits in quite well.”
Oil innovations on horizon
As the clean fuels industry looks to expand on different feedstocks that can be used to create biodiesel, investments in infrastructure and innovations in feeds aid this cause.
Oilseed cover crops like canola are being explored as a clean-fuel option. Such crops that are processed similarly to soybeans are not only an ultra-sustainable fuel source, but also another way that farmers could lower their carbon intensity scores while finding a use for their cover crops.
And many soy crush facilities are looking to retrofit their current infrastructure to make crushing new oil-heavy crops a reality. This industry continues to see a demand as companies using biodiesel daily are committed to a sustainable future.