Soy and Bio Diesel

According to the National Biodiesel Board, biodiesel is the name of a clean burning alternative fuel, produced from domestic, renewable resources. It can be used in compression-ignition (diesel) engines with little or no modifications. Biodiesel is simple to use, biodegradable, nontoxic, and essentially free of sulfur and aromatics. Biodiesel is made through a chemical process that creates two products — methyl esters (the chemical name for biodiesel) and glycerin, a useful product commonly found in soaps, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and many other products. Washakie Renewable Energy is opening its Plymouth, Utah biodiesel plant soon and I talked with Jeff Peterson, government affairs director who said roughly 400,000 acres of farmland will be needed to support the plant. Peterson says he would like to buy from Idaho growers so soy might make a very sensible rotation crop. "A lot of our feed stock we use is soy oil where we just bring in the oil by rail. We bring in soy oil and our company is pretty big so I am trying to be vertically integrated so we thought we could actually make more money if we start crushing our own soy beans. They started construction on the crush plant at the end of last year and it will probably be completed in the fall. We will have a crush plant that will be set up to run primarily on soy and canola. Does soy provide a fairly good plant to energy transfer? Yes, it is probably one of the highest for biodiesel. It is the highest energy yielding oil crop that we could use for biodiesel."