Acciona Biocombustibles has opened a biodiesel plant in the port of Bilbao, Spain, with an investment of E25 million. The company has claimed that the facility will produce 200,000 tonnes of biodiesel per year, making a 27% contribution to the target figure for the penetration of biodiesel in Spain for 2009.
According to the company, the plant is located at Zierbena on a site in the port of Bilbao belonging to the agribusiness and food company Bunge, which has a 20% stake in the capital of the development company. It will produce biodiesel from previously refined first-use vegetable oils, mainly from Bunge’s seed crushing plant.
The company claims that the biodiesel produced annually in the Bilbao plant will avoid the emission of 496,000 metric tons of CO2 per year from conventional diesel fuel in transport. Acciona Biocombustibles has said that the project has led to the creation of 36 direct jobs, 24 of them in the plant itself.
In last January, 1st legislation on the obligatory nature of the use of biofuels in transport came into effect, which establishes that 3.4% of the overall energy content of gasoline and diesel fuel sold in Spain for transport in 2009 should come from biofuels, and 5.83% in 2010 (in the first semester of 2008 the percentage was 1.47%).
This applies to both biodiesel in relation to conventional diesel, and bioethanol in relation to gasoline, and the difference can be made up to a total of 3.4% with any of the two biofuels. For 2010 the minimum objective for each biofuel increases to 3.9% and the overall figure to 5.83%, said the company.Â
