Carlyle Group Gets a Piece of Biofuels

My good friend Joey Hundert was on CJSR today, talking about biodiesel (you can listen HERE). In his interview he discusses what he thinks of the net energy loss in different kinds of biofuels production, but what struck me was a comment he made about the ownership of biodiesel production.

If a biofuel plant is owned by a conglomerate in New York, then the multiplier effect of biofuels production is lower. This is because a portion of every dollar proceeds out of the community to a company headquarters in New York. It sorta runs counter to what any good hippie is trying to acomplish.

This is exactly what seems to be happening, right here in Alberta.

Canada.com Biofuels Refinery in the Works

Led by Dominion Energy Services, LLC — a Florida-based group with pioneering ties to Calgary’s natural gas marketing sector — investors that include $45-billion US private equity fund The Carlyle Group LLC and affiliate Riverstone Renewable Energy Infrastructure Fund I, LP have finalized plans for the facility, to be announced from New York today.

“There’s nothing like this, that we know of, in North America,” said Dominion Energy president and CEO Curtis Chandler, who helped to build the Edson-area Alberta Hub natural gas storage facility. “We’re coming home.”

The Alberta bio-refinery will include a canola crushing plant, a biodiesel refinery and an ethanol refinery, each capable of producing up to 100 million U.S. gallons, or 374 million litres, per year of product. Construction is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2007 at one of three short-listed sites.