Coming Full Circle

by Ron Kotrba (Biodiesel Magazine) Celebrating 25 years, the Hawaii-based company that has built biodiesel plants across the U.S. and Japan has gone back to its roots, focusing on sustainability and local energy independence for the archipelago.

Once a process technology-focused company that built 13 plants in Hawaii, Japan, Alaska and on the U.S. mainland, Pacific Biodiesel disbanded its construction division and went back to its roots, focusing on local sustainability and community-based recycling, agriculture and biodiesel production in Hawaii. One hundred percent of its operations and employees are now concentrated in Hawaii. While the Pacific Biodiesel of today remains true to its original sustainability-driven mission, the company has diversified tremendously to ride the waves and forge new paths and markets for its products—and its future.

Pacific Biodiesel was formed when Bob King, then owner of King Diesel—a company that maintained the generators at the Central Maui Landfill—proposed tackling the environmental and health concerns of used cooking oil being dumped into the landfill by converting the restaurant waste into biodiesel to fuel the generators. Bob was a diesel mechanic by training.

He connected with Daryl Reece of the University of Idaho and, with Reece’s help, built Pacific Biodiesel’s first plant, a 250,000-gallon production facility on Maui.

"... I think what’s exciting is when we come across people who are struggling in their own area to change the world and save the planet, and we come in and give them hope that there’s another way to do this. When I see that hope light up in their eyes, it’s really special. We’re making a difference. It’s real—not an exchange or a credit—but we’re making real fuel that’s making a real difference.”

Then the next bust came, Bob says. “There was not a plant to be built anywhere,” he says. “At that time, I began thinking used cooking oil will get expensive, so I started looking at even more degraded feedstock such as trap grease, brown grease and tallow. At the same time, with my background in diesel mechanics, in 2007 when new clean diesels started coming out, the technology was moving rapidly and our fuel had to keep pace, even if the specification didn’t, so we had to upgrade our fuel. Lower-grade feedstock and higher-quality fuel. We spent a lot of time on the process—on preprocessing and distillation—designing the plant that we built in Hilo. It’s a very technically challenging plant. We can’t just be cranking one like this out for every stock broker who wanted one.” The plant, Big Island Biodiesel as it was originally called, was built in 2012.

Bob says Jenna (daughter Jenna Long) was “always hanging around the company, listening to Kelly and me talk around the kitchen table and in the field,” he says. “She grew up in the industry. This was our thing, and we encouraged her to do what she wanted. She went off and tried this and that, but she always came back to liking the mission and what we were doing. She spent a few years working among the rank and file of the company here and there. And then a few years ago, we were looking for a director of operations to manage all our operations in the company. All the managers said the same thing: There’s only one person with the depth of knowledge of all aspects of the company—trucking, marketing, sales, operations—and that was Jenna. It wasn’t my preference, mainly because family can be a problem in business, but there was one person deserving of this, and she is family.”

The company has also made significant strides in making the Hawaii biodiesel production facility energy independent. Distillation bottoms are used as boiler fuel for process heat and the company has installed power generators on-site that run on its own biodiesel for electricity. “We always planned when we designed this facility to use distillation bottoms as boiler fuel, but it took a couple of years to adjust to this,” Bob says. “It’s heavier methyl esters, and it solidifies quickly, so we have to heat the tanks up well and keep it warm as it flows into the boiler. The whole facility is designed to use every bit of byproduct we can. Part of the reason is because it lowers our operational costs, but the other part is there are limited places to dispose of this material.”

With Bob’s generator knowledge and history, installing generators on-site to provide electricity for the plant may have seemed like a no-brainer, but this was a rather recent decision that was made just a few years ago. “We were paying more than 40 cents a kilowatt for electricity,” Bob says. “It was quite costly to run all our pumps and motors, so it was a financial decision to make our own electricity. And running them on biodiesel makes a lot of sense for us, and the same is true for our customers. Once we put ours in, other companies that also have high electricity costs run diesel generators and our biodiesel in them.” In 2016, the facility was the first in the world to be certified by the Sustainable Biodiesel Alliance.

Long says Pacific Biodiesel’s expansion locally depends on whether it can grow more crops in Hawaii. “If we have more feedstock, then we can produce more fuel,” she says. “It’s one of the driving pieces, so that’s why we’re getting more into agriculture in Hawaii. Because without local crops, we’re shipping in more waste from outside the state, which we can do, but it doesn’t quite meet our end goal to make here, grow here and sell here.

Pacific Current stepped up to the plate and signed a contract with Pacific Biodiesel to supply Pacific Current’s 60 MW combined cycle power generation facility, Hamakua Energy, with biodiesel to fuel the power plant. Pacific Current acquired the Hamakua Energy facility in 2017 and sells power to Hawaii Electric Light Co. under an existing power purchase agreement. The plant is capable of providing 22 percent of Hawaii Island’s generating capacity.

Long says her parents’ original model based on using waste has been carried on by the innovative projects in which Pacific Biodiesel has endeavored. “Using more and different kinds of waste—waste macadamia nuts, waste papaya, growing algae—consciously or subconsciously we seek out waste to reuse and make useful,” she says. READ MORE