Recently I had a chance to visit with one of our awesome customers that runs a commercial Biodiesel plant in the Philippines. The company is called Eway54 Ecodiesel and they make Biodiesel from used cooking oil that they collect locally. Ricky Cuenca, their director of Oversea’s Networks (read–he sources oil from all over), is our contact for their Biodiesel facility and shared some cool information about their plant recently.
Plant History:
They started the Biodiesel plant in October 2008 right before the big drop in oil prices. Because of the timing, they said that it really helped them understand the volatility of the oil market & made them focus on being as efficient as possible in the plant.
The plant started out making 50 gallons a day but is now up to 3,000 to 4,000 gallons a week depending on how much oil they’re able to collect. On average they collect about 4,000 gallons of oil locally but are working on getting access to even more oil (hence Ricky looking to source oil from other countries as oil is extremely competitive to come by in the Philippines).
Growing Like Crazy
They currently have extremely high demand for the Biodiesel they produce so they’re looking to ramp up to being able to produce 25,000 gallons by mid June 2012 and then depending on technology and feedstock availability, they would like to be able to one day produce up to 100,000 gallons a month.
How It All Got Started
Behind every Biodiesel plant is an interesting story and Eway’s is no different. Ricky said that he started the plant back in 2008 due to losing his job in the US. He wanted to learn something that he could do with his bare hands, get dirty & learn from the ground up and making fuel from Vegetable Oil fascinated him. From there it became a calling, a spiritual mission if you will, that he feels he was led to by the man above based on circumstances and situations that have allowed him to grow it to where it is today. And grow it has! Ricky now has more than 20 people involved in Collecting Oil, Logistics, Production, and Administration keeping the plant going.
To produce the Biodiesel, they use common farm tanks; think home-brewing on steroids! They perform a 2 stage base/base process, water wash the Biodiesel and dry it out all in heavy duty cone bottom HDPE tanks with pumps connected to everything. The tanks & pumps were imported from the US and built into the plant they use today. As they continue to grow, they’re continuing to explore new ways to produce the fuel more efficiently, in a better manner, and keep quality high!
What Their Biodiesel Powers
Most of Ricky’s clients are running B100 in a variety of vehicles from the Philippine Jeepney to cars & trucks. The owners of the local Jeepney’s absolutely LOVE the Biodiesel! The Biodiesel cleaned up the black smoke they used to belch and it even keeps the Jeepney’s cleaner! Ricky say’s it’s one of the gratifying parts of supplying Biodiesel locally; knowing that it’s contributing to cleaning up the air in the cities! One of the most cool vehicles they fueled was a 157 foot yacht. They blended the Biodiesel to 20% and filled it on up!
We look forward to hearing more about their Biodiesel success story! If you’d like to learn more about them, stop by their website at http://www.eway54.com
Check out this great promotional video they just released!
Check out this great article that was written about their operation!
Be sure & check out all the great pictures they sent in below!
Great write-up. We would love for you to come visit our biofuel facility and take the tour.
We are always excited about anyone promoting biodiesel and biofuels in Utah.
Helping save money and the air quality is what Utahns need. We are located in Plymouth, Utah and would be happy to show you around.
Washakie,
I’ll definitely take you up on that!
I am very much interested in your biodiesel production especially in providing used cooking oil. May I know how much you will buy in every barrel/gallon/liter of every cooking oil that I provide. I will provide for the travel cost. thank you.
Hello Mr. Gatus,
Can you contact our company for that too? We’re looking for used oil suppliers for biodiesel production (Philippines).
Thanks
Oliver