Biofuel burns bright on Hamilton Harbour
Turning animal fat and old cooking oil into clean-burning diesel fuel
From its launch on Hamilton Harbour in 2005, Biox quietly became one of the world’s fastest growing biofuel players with a refinery that turns animal fat and old cooking oil into a clean-burning diesel fuel alternative.
It was founded by an ex-military officer who grew frustrated by the effort to defend petroleum-rich regions of the world.
“I was very disappointed that we were making huge oil-based policy decisions and sending people off to war,” said Oakville’s Tim Haig. After a battle with leukemia that kept him from returning to the British Army, he got an MBA in London and pursued the renewables market.
Inspired by the University of Toronto’s creation of a molecule that mimics the traits of a hydrocarbon in diesel fuel, Haig purchased that intellectual property and ran a pilot project in Burlington before opening the Hamilton plant.
Biox went public in 2010 and ramped up to producing 67 million litres before it was taken private and merged two years ago with Boston-based World Energy in a $345 million (US) deal — the largest in the emerging biofuel sector.
Though Biox now operates within World Energy as one of six plants from Ontario to California, Haig maintains a share in the new company and has shifted his focus to finding newer methods of knocking the economy off its petroleum foundation with a renewable diesel.
He is not interested in fuel alternatives for cars, preferring to focus on sustainable alternatives for jets and trucks, whose long-distance hauls make them more difficult to power by battery.
“You can’t electrify a plane, and it’s hard to electrify a truck,” Haig said.
The Hamilton plant produces biodiesel, which Haig describes as a having a fatty acid methyl ester molecule that mimics a hydrocarbon.
A short pipeline connects the refinery to the Shell tank farm next door, where the biofuel is mixed with traditional diesel to conform to federal and provincial mandates for sustainable fuel in the mix.
It might seem daunting to go toe-to-toe with petroleum, one of largest industries in the world, but Haig says his aim is to compete in the separate and distinct biofuel market driven by government legislation.
“I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun the other biofuel guy with a cheaper product,” Haig said.
Current rules in Ontario require five per cent ethanol in gasoline, and a four per cent bio-based blend in diesel. The provincial threshold for ethanol in gasoline is slated to rise to 10 per cent next year and 15 per cent in 2025.
With the plant’s proximity to the Shell terminal and the recycled nature of its ingredients, the Hamilton-made fuel has a good carbon intensity score, said World Energy plant manager Bozena Milivojevic.
Vegetable oils are other natural ingredients in the biodiesel recipe. Sources include soybean crops grown in southern Ontario whose oil is extracted by processors such as Bunge, a global agrifood operator on Hamilton Harbour.
In addition to gathering, exporting and processing soybean and other locally grown grains, Bunge is a big player in the biofuel market.
As one of the four agrifood giants in the ABCD group — Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfuss — Bunge is well positioned to divert oilseed byproducts from its processing plants in 40 countries for biofuel production, but Haig maintains that oilseed feedstock sources will continue to be more expensive than his recycled sources.
And Haig is bringing other new technologies and fuel recipes to market as well.
Through another company called Forge Hydrocarbons, he is developing a more advanced “renewable” diesel, which does more than mimic the qualities of diesel — it replaces the hydrocarbon molecule with an organic substitute.
Forge licensed a lipid-to-hydrocarbon (LTH) process developed at the University of Alberta to produce renewable diesel through a simple process — without the need for hydrogen and oxygen in more complex methods used by competitors.
“They use a sledgehammer where we use the process of a watchmaker,” he said.
He is scouting properties along the harbour for a spot to build this renewable diesel refinery, ideally close to the Shell fuel hub.
Through a Nova Scotia company that extracts omega-3 fatty acids for other commercial application, Haig is also building the means to extract the raw materials from algae to feed renewable diesel refiners.
His partner in Dartmouth-based Mara Renewables is John Risley, who pioneered fish oil as as a health supplement and sold his Ocean Nutrition Canada for $540 million in 2012.
Mara is working to lower the price and raise the volume of algae-based molecules that can be created in the same way as ancient sea creatures and other organic materials were compacted in the earth’s crust and emerged an eternity later as fossil fuel, Haig said.
“Petroleum is simply algae or fat that was captured in the earth’s crust 50 million years ago,” Haig said.
“The combination of growing lipids at Mara and converting them into a fuel through Forge is my way of skipping 50 million years.”