Advanced BioFuels USA

by Ron Kotrba (Biodiesel Magazine)  The Renwicks of South Carolina, owners of Winnsboro-based Midlands Biofuels, persevere through the biodiesel industry’s instability with ingenuity, passion and teamwork. This is their story.
What do an emergency room medical doctor, gardening and a community-scale biodiesel plant have in common? The answer is “Bio” Beth Renwick, majority owner of Midlands Biofuels in Winnsboro, S.C. With production capacity less than 1 MMgy, big things are always happening at this small biodiesel processing facility in the Southeast. When the business started in 2008, Beth’s role was simply an investor—an investor in her husband “Bio” Joe Renwick’s 50/50 joint venture with former co-owner Brandon Spence.
“After Brandon and Joe parted ways in February 2013, we had many conversations and looked outwardly for other partners, investors and loans,” Beth says. “After the split, I assumed the role that Brandon’s wife, Becky, had performed—billing, invoicing, payroll, tax filings and anything that needed doing. As the inner workings of the business became clear, Joe and I were able to brainstorm together about all aspects of the company. Sometimes what you’re looking for is right in front of you. Fifty-one percent ownership was decided upon, and we are looking forward to the opportunities a woman-owned business may bring.”
…
When they met, Joe owned a landscaping business and Beth was on her way to becoming a medical doctor. She received her medical education at University of South Carolina School of Medicine, followed by a three-year emergency medicine residency at the Medical College of Georgia. Since July 2008, Beth has been practicing in the ER at Lexington Medical Center in West Columbia, S.C.
In 2006, Joe began home-brewing biodiesel in their garage for his own use, after meeting Mat Davis, a resident with Beth at MCG, who first showed him how to make biodiesel. “Within 30 minutes of leaving his house, I was buying pipe fittings and valves,” Joe says. He built his own dual-reactor processor with stand pipes and wash/dry tanks in addition to waste vegetable oil (WVO) processing tanks in the garage. “At first, I was cautious about a heated chemical reaction occurring in the homestead,” Beth says, “but I became a fan after we noticed the performance benefits in Joe’s truck.”
…
He installed an AgSolutions Boiler, which he acquired secondhand from a local biodiesel plant that went bankrupt years before. “This allowed us to eliminate 100 percent of our natural gas use and gave us an outlet for waste oils and off-spec fuel to be used to heat the plant,” he says. Over the years, Midlands Biofuels accrued thousands of gallons of bad oil, so the company hasn’t paid to heat its plant in more than 14 months since installing the boiler because it can use the off-spec oil. It also generates tax credits for alternative fuels being used as boiler fuel, equating to about 83 cents per gallon.
…
oe also designed a new process to refine the waste stream, to capture more value from the waste oil and glycerin processes. “We spent thousands of dollars on testing to refine our process and validate our new changes and techniques for reactions, methanol recovery, biodiesel purification and, most importantly, proving operating without water-washing could be done without process modifications while increasing biodiesel quality and stability,” he says. “Due to my sensitive nose for a deal, only $30,000 total was spent making these upgrades. Yields are up and our costs are lower than ever.”
…
The company has trained more than 50 interns over the six years it has been in business and renamed its biodiesel education program “Bio4EDU.”  Most recently, four local high school graduates were hired to work in South Carolina’s first “Green Summer” program. They will get more than 700 hours of training in the biodiesel industry over the next six weeks. The company also helped start the biodiesel program at USC and assisted in the acquisition of a mobile processor to demonstrate biodiesel production at schools and events around the state.
…
“It is like I am working at the forefront of a forgotten industry while listening to people talk about the need for finding a solution to the U.S.’s petroleum addiction,” he says. “The solution has been found, tested and proven to work, yet somehow we struggle to find someone willing to pay a price that is high enough to allow us to keep producing. There is very little money to be made in this industry without getting creative and finding new processing techniques and markets for biodiesel use.”
“… The scariest thing for me is that when the oil spill in the Gulf was happening, we saw very little surge in this industry. This begs the question, ‘Just how big an environmental or national security situation do we need to make people care again and demand alternative fuels?’”     READ MORE