US-headed advanced renewable fuels and biochemicals company Aemetis Inc. has announced that its Universal Biofuels subsidiary in India has completed the construction of an advanced biodiesel pre-treatment unit to process the low-cost feedstocks to be provided to the plant under the BP Singapore Pte Ltd (BPS) supply agreement into low carbon high-quality distilled biodiesel.
According to a statement, the new pre-treatment unit allows the use of high Free Fatty Acid waste feedstocks by Universal Biofuels while meeting the biodiesel quality standards set by international fuel standards. The advanced biodiesel pre-treatment unit was built to supply biodiesel to the EU and US under the three-year supply agreement signed with BPS in May of 2017.
The completion of the advanced biodiesel pre-treatment unit enables the team to focus on commissioning and processing BP’s low-cost feedstocks provided under the BPS supply agreement to produce and sell low carbon high-quality biodiesel into international markets. We expect to receive feedstock and begin production in April with shipments to BPS to begin in the second quarter of 2018, stated Eric McAfee, Chairman and CEO of Aemetis.
The Aemetis plant in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India has a capacity of 50 million (US) gallons (≈ 190 million litres) per annum and is the first and only India biofuels producer approved under the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) for delivery of biodiesel into California. In April 2017, Aemetis filed a patent on process technology developed at the Kakinada plant for the conversion of a wide range of waste feedstocks into biodiesel.
