Dynamic Fuels LLC Catoosa demonstration facility in Oklahoma is finishing a first test batch of biodiesel from chicken fat.

“It’s not your everyday project,” says Ronnie Marks, manager of project control for the Philadelphia-based professional service and engineering firm’s Baton Rouge division. The plant will be built on the site of a former chemical refinery in Geismar, La. “It’s always a challenge when you’re doing something for the first time.”

The facility will be operated under the flag of Dynamic Fuels LLC, a 50-50 joint venture of Tulsa-based Syntroleum Corp. and Springdale, Ark.-based Tyson Foods Inc. When completed in 2010, the $126-million plant will use Syntroleum’s proprietary technology and Tyson’s chicken fat to produce 5,000 barrels per day of high-quality diesel fuel. One company executive calls it “the cleanest fuel on the planet.” The fuel has ultralow sulfur, low nitrogen-oxide emissions and up to 50% fewer particulates than regular diesel, says Jeff Bigger, Syntroleum’s senior vice president of business development.

The construction contract will be let in the next month, says Bigger, who is also leading the construction efforts for Dynamic Fuels. Construction is expected to begin later this year, and the company expects to be producing the synthetic fuel in 2010. Dynamic Fuels has ordered some long-lead-time items, including reactor vessels, but it has not announced which companies received those contracts.

The Geismar site was chosen because of access to roads, rail and the Mississippi River, Bigger says. A total of four Dynamic Fuel plants at other sites in the U.S. are slated to be built to take advantage of Tyson’s plentiful amounts of animal fat.

After the fat is brought into the plant, it will go through a washing process to remove contaminants. Then, in a reactor vessel, the company will use high-pressure hydrogen to reassemble the molecules so that they will perform like fuel, not fat, even at low temperatures. While biodiesel can also be made with animal fat, the patent-pending process makes the end product vastly different from biodiesel, Bigger says. For instance, the fuel will not coagulate at low temperatures like biodiesel, he says.

Syntroleum is finishing up a test batch of the chicken-fat-derived diesel at its Catoosa demonstration plant, near Tulsa, for the U.S. Air Force. Syntroleum has supplied the Air Force with synthetic diesel produced from coal and natural gas using a Fischer-Tropsch process. The fuel coming out of the Louisiana plant will be the same product chemically, Bigger says.

While there is ongoing research and testing on using things such as algae and chicken fat to produce fuel, Dynamic Fuels is furthest along in the industry in bringing new raw materials into the biofuels market, says Paul Winters, a spokesman for the biotechnical industry organization BIO, Washington, D.C.

The low cost of the animal fat gives Dynamic Fuels an edge over companies that are trying to produce ethanol from corn or biodiesel from soy, says Mike McDaniel, of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. “There’s been a sea change” in the biofuels market over the last year, he says.

The rising cost of food has led to the failure of some other biofuel projects, including a 60-million-gallon-per-year biodiesel plant that the Ralston-Iowa Renewable Energy Group was building in St. Rose, La. (see related story, p. 10). Construction on the plant was suspended after the company failed to get financing for the project. The company invested $47 million in the project and finished construction on storage tanks before halting work.