Pushing Plants Harder Reduces Costs More Than We Thought

May 23, 2019

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Dennis Zeedyk (Glycerin Traders, LLC/Lee Enterprises Consulting) ... Glycerin Traders LLC takes in waste raw glycerin from multiple biodiesel plants around the country. It acidulates the raw glycerin to remove the fats for sale to multiple industries. It also strips off methanol and some water that is then further distilled to nearly 100% purity. This is sold back to biodiesel plants as reclaimed methanol for them to use in the transesterification process. The remaining “processed glycerin” is typically 80% glycerin, 1% methanol, 10-12% water, 5-7% salts and remaining MONG (material organic non-glycerin). The flagship operation is based in Defiance, OH. Our company strives to never let a biodiesel plant get tank-locked with raw glycerin so that they can do what they do best, which is to produce quality biodiesel.

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... the Defiance plant has gone from producing 14.5 million pounds/year of end-products (reclaimed methanol, fatty acids and processed glycerin) to 29.3 million pounds/year. This was a 95% increase in production. When we began making the changes in our production lines, we anticipated an almost linear increase in electricity and natural gas usage. You can imagine our surprise when we discovered that our monthly bill for natural gas dropped from an average of $17,230 to $13,320 – an 18% decrease. More analysis indicated that our natural gas usage increased by 12%, but gas prices dropped more, so our total annual gas cost decreased by 18%. At the same time, our total cost for electricity increased by 7.1% from 2014 to 2018.

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The important takeaways from this article are the following:

Putting un-used assets (like our biodiesel and feedstock lines) into production helped us to increase revenue by more than doubling our finished glycerin production. Surprisingly, the boiler and vacuum pump handled the increased production with no problems.
Learning to run each line more efficiently (like our methanol line) was a big improvement. Using the same boiler, same column and a new improved feed pump and pre-heater allowed us to increase our methanol production by 50%. We still think there is a possibility of getting 10% more out of the column, but this is not yet proven.
Making sure we are pulling as much steam condensate as possible back into our boiler reduces our city water usage. It also helps us keep our natural gas usage to a minimum as we pull hot water back into the boiler, not cold water, while preventing temperature shock to the boiler.

The nature of our company is to continuously increase production and decrease costs. If we can increase production and keep some of our costs the same, we still reduce our costs per unit. We put into production unused assets to help increase our total production and then apply what we learn running these systems over time to maximize the output over time. With valued input from some of our close partners like Harvest Energy, D.A. Dodd, Power Plant Services, Enyart Electric, and Fremont Water, we have been able to push our system harder and operate more efficiently than we ever thought possible. This allows us to take in more raw glycerin from biodiesel plants, produce more finished products, cut costs on a per unit basis, increase revenue and grow as a company. READ MORE

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