Axens Selected for Large Biodiesel Plant in Malaysia

Mission Biofuels Limited has awarded a turnkey construction contract to build a 250,000 metric tons per year (tpy) biodiesel plant using Axens’ Esterfip-H™ technology. The plant will be the largest of its kind. The new facility will be built at a site adjacent to the current 100,000 tpy plant in Kuantan Port, Malaysia, which is near completion.

Esterfip-H is Axens’ innovative heterogeneous catalyzed technology for the production of fatty acid methyl esters (FAME). Esterfip-H does not require caustic or mineral acid utilization. The glycerin byproduct is of high technical grade quality, above 98% purity.

The first commercial Esterfip-H unit was put on-stream in March 2006 by Diester Industrie in Sète, France. A second plant was completed in May 2007 at Perstorp's Stenungsund, Sweden chemical complex. Six more Esterfip-H plants are at various project stages around the world for a cumulative capacity of 1.3 million tpy. This value exceeds the total installed capacity of the conventional Esterfip process, which was a pioneering development of the early 1990's.

The Mission Biofuels unit is planned to run on palm oil. However it will benefit of the ability of the Esterfip-H units to operate on multiple vegetable oils.

Axens is a leading provider of clean fuels technologies. In addition to the Esterfip-H and Esterfip technologies which produce renewable diesel fuel, Axens is well known for its conventional clean fuels technologies. Prime-G+ is the leading gasoline desulfurization technology with over 150 licenses; Prime-D is a benchmark ultra low middle distillate desulfurization technology. Other technologies which produce high quality clean fuels are: DIH isomerization (one of several configurations provided to meet high octane gasoline demand), Hy-C10™ ( mild hydrocracking with simultaneous diesel quality improvement), and Octanizing™ (CCR reforming to produce hydrogen and high octane gasoline from naphtha).