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Excellent Tacoma Biodiesel News...

· Posted Thursday December 27, 2007 by jamie

Just received word in the last few days that Tacoma will be getting it’s first neighborhood commercially-operated biodiesel pump this Spring!

Propel Biofuels recently signed a contract with the Shell Station at 19th and Stevens to sell biodiesel, with plans for a Spring 2008 opening. They plan to sell B99 (99% biodiesel, 1% petrodiesel…it may as well be B100, but the fuel must be blended with some percentage of petrodiesel to claim a very stupidly written tax credit). The fuel will be produced by Imperium Renewables, which has been in the news frequently for their mega-refinery being built in Aberdeen.

There are some definite concerns over the fact that Imperium may import some Malaysian palm oil for the new refinery, which has led to a great deal of concern in the Northwest biodiesel community for the impact this will have on biodiversity. Biodiesel can and should be locally produced, from the ground to the pump. Representatives from the company have stated that the biodiesel being sold at the new pump will be made from canola oil grown in Eastern Washington and British Columbia, so I certainly hope they can keep their hands clean on this. (But as an aside, I’ve seen waste oil collection barrels all over town from Oregon’s SeQuential Biofuels, and it would be great to see somewhere to buy commercially produced fuel from waste oil around here.)

Tacoma currently has one biodiesel station just off I-5 at Port of Tacoma Road, operated by Associated Petroleum Products, which is owned by the Xitco family of Masa/Asado/etc. fame. APP also sells B99 at a second location in Fife. This new pump should provide some good competition for that venture (which will hopefully show in the prices), and it is great to see something opening up in a more residential area.


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Comments:

  1. That’s exciting news! I definitely hope they keep the fuel coming from locally grown/discarded oil.

    Now where to get my ’72 Karmann Ghia converted over… ;)

    — KevinFreitas    Dec 27, 11:22 AM    #

  2. Nice. Thanks for the update Jamie.

    — sparkrobot    Dec 27, 02:20 PM    #

  3. The supplier you want is Standard Biodiesel. They have a triple bottom line approach and use a majority of used vegetable oil similarly to SeQuential.

    The guys a Propel have an interesting business model and a good team. They also offer an innovative software package that will track your CO2 off set by using biodiesel. Thought Propel’s approach isn’t a distriputive production model. Meaning they don’t have any plans to rely on locally sourced feedstocks from anything I’ve seen. Propel’s focus is moving biodiesel, Standard Biodiesel’s is to create a closed loop from producer to end user.

    — Mark Fitz    Dec 27, 10:36 PM    #