It all started in a garage. Joe Renwick, cofounder of family-owned, South Carolina-based Green Energy Biofuel, recounts the 2007 story that set the path of the company in motion. “I met a guy who knew a guy who knew how to make biodiesel,” he explains. “He taught me how to make biodiesel in my garage, and I built my own dual-reactor processor and I got bit by the bio-bug, as they say.”&nbsp;Renwick was regularly making fuel from waste cooking oil recycled from the local tapas restaurant, The Bee’s Knees, in downtown Augusta, Georgia, and had made eight batches of fuel when he lost his job as an account executive at the bank he was working at. Meanwhile, his wife, Beth, was finishing up her residency in emergency medicine.Renwick took a job selling pharmaceutical drug manufacturing equipment, gaining valuable experience as a salesperson and fluid process design. Unfortunately, the sole owner of the company passed away and he found himself out of a job again. “I moved back home (to Winnsboro) with my tail between my legs, unemployed, and ran into an old friend from college from The Citadel, and the two of us decided to start a biodiesel company,” Renwick says.That partner was old football teammate Brandon Spence, and the duo started Midlands Biofuels LLC in 2008. Renwick understood the biodiesel part of the business, while Spence, who had worked as a small business specialist at the U.S. Department of Commerce, knew the intricacies of starting a new business.The initial equipment the two acquired—which was bought by maxing out credit cards and a loan against Renwick’s pickup truck—is still in operation today. “By 2009, we were ASTM certified and making fuel; the only biodiesel company in the state of South Carolina, running unopposed for years,” Renwick says, explaining it was the year that saw the first loss of the dollar-per-gallon blending credit and that forced seven other active biodiesel plants in the state of South Carolina to go bankrupt and close.Midlands Biofuels itself saw a lack of support from the government to keep the industry alive, but weathered the storm and found opportunities, producing biodiesel for on-road use for years. “We continued to grow the business; I was doing the sales, collection and oil processing in-house, so we hired a driver to take some of the work burden off my activities,” Renwick says.A New Path&nbsp; The company came upon an opportunity to build a plant with a five-year contract with US Foods, and by 2010, had built a second plant for the company to process 100% of all the oil collected from its food delivery clients. That’s when the two partners would split the business—with Spence keeping the contract with US Foods, and Renwick focusing on the oil process and biodiesel production side of the business. That’s also when Beth Renwick came in as a new business partner as the majority owner, making the company the only woman-owned biofuel company in the U.S. “By then, the training wheels were off and we knew what our future was, and it did not lie with 100% biodiesel production being the only way to run the company,” Renwick says, explaining that the company transitioned from solely an oil recycler/biodiesel company to a large-scale waste processor of products coming from the biodiesel industry itself.A few years later, the biodiesel industry took a downturn, and unfortunately, the US Foods contract was canceled early. This forced the plant, like many others in the industry, to shut down. Subsequently, Renwick purchased the shuttered plant’s equipment and used it to outfit his own plant for the next scale of growth. “We brought that equipment into our facility to increase our capacity, and that allowed us to grow,” Renwick says.By 2016, Midlands Biofuels expanded its business area to Tennessee by acquiring a kitchen oil collection processing plant in Knoxville, going outside of the South Carolina market for the first time. With this growth came the decision to change the name of the company to Green Energy Biofuel. “We tried to not seem so small and regional as we moved from South Carolina to servicing eastern Tennessee and some parts of North Carolina as well,” Renwick says.One of Green Energy Biofuel’s first big contracts was with Tyson Foods, where it processed all of the company’s waste for nearly four years. “This changed our focus again from being a biodiesel production company to being a feedstock processor,” Renwick says. “For us, it was better to be more on the support side of the biodiesel industry than the production side. But it prevented us from being any sort of a real player in the biodiesel market in South Carolina.”The company became a service provider for all the biodiesel processors in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, and began hauling its waste to the plant for further refinement, finding opportunities to help biodiesel companies get feedstock that they desperately needed. “Due to our advanced processing capabilities that they didn’t have, we could take waste, recover from that waste, and then provide it back to them at the next waste pickup,” Renwick says. “It really shifted our focus as to how to put a dent in the industry, make some profits and grow the company.”That gave the couple the confidence to buy its third plant, a former biodiesel plant in Warrenville, South Carolina, that went bankrupt seven years earlier, and retrofitted it to become a feedstock facility with three unique processes in it that Renwick characterizes as “the good, the bad and the ugly. That plant is a monster, and we invested millions of dollars bringing it back on line,” he says. “It has a rail spur that is next to a rail switching yard, which is really unique. We have a 10-car, private rail spur and we can actively load or unload five rail cars at a time.”The plant, which is the biggest feedstock plant on the East Coast, has seven centrifuges, a large steam boiler for heating, insulated tanks, and can process hundreds of thousands of gallons per day. The company also has a wastewater pretreatment permit as well, which was no easy feat—it took five years to get approved. “We have a very robust process that allows us to bring in fat, oil or grease, in any condition, and we can spit it out as a finished product,” Renwick says.&nbsp;The most recent significant change in the company occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We had the opportunity to buy a composting company, as we were spending about $400,000 a year in landfill fees for disposal of our solid waste,” Renwick says. “By buying that, we now have a home for all our waste to go. We have retooled and invested a lot in this composting business and it’s awesome.”This venture has created an opportunity for the company to get access to oil it would otherwise not have known about. It also paved the way for Green Energy Biofuel to purchase a depackager, a piece of equipment that removes food waste from its packaging every day of the week. Foods that contain oil go into the feedstock process; the rest is composted at ReSoil. “We bring in tractor-trailer truckloads of expired waste, run it through the machine, and it separates all of the packaging—all the cardboard, the plastic into one container, and all the food waste into another container,” Renwick says. “It allows us to be a zero-landfill solution for other companies to bring their waste. We have thousands of restaurants we service.”Today, Green Energy Biofuel can provide services to individual restaurants, chains and industrial food companies alike. &nbsp;Services include grease trap pumping, used cooking oil collection, pressure washing, line inspection, line jetting, waste oil and wastewater processing, depackaging and composting. &nbsp; This is one of the things Beth Renrick is most excited about—the rethinking sustainability aspect. “We are advocates on how to live more mindfully and help the environment,” she says. “Being able to offer industrial companies and small mom-and-pop shops the ability to get rid of things in a more mindful manner is meaningful.”The company also does services for industrial partners, such as big tank cleanings, pressure washing and other things that have helped Green Energy Biofuel diversify. “All we’ve done in our 15 years in business is meet a roadblock based on industry market factors, and reinvent ourselves over and over to get to where we are now,” Renwick says. “We have four locations, service the mid-Atlantic, and are finding opportunities to grow.”The company has been recognized by Carolina Recycling Association as Recycler of the year, voted by employees as one of the Best Places to Work in South Carolina for two consecutive years, and in 2022 was named the No. 1 High-Growth Small Company by SC Biz News.Education Matters, Looking Ahead&nbsp; The Renwicks both strongly believe in the importance of education, and have started two programs designed for the future of biodiesel. The first has Green Energy Biofuel working with colleges and universities on internships, with the hope of bringing some of them into the fold upon graduation. More than 100 internships have been awarded over the years.The second is Bio4Edu, which aims to support local schools by supporting their bus fleet, making donations to schools and school projects, and providing students with educational opportunities about the importance of environmental sustainability.For Green Energy Biofuel, the future isn’t so much about what else it has to do to reinvent itself, but to grow market share. “We have a plant capable of processing crazy volumes of material, and now we need crazy volumes of material coming in,” Renwick adds. “Our intentions and plans are to expand into Georgia, to expand further into Tennessee and further across North Carolina. Our ability to grow is exponential, and it’s just sitting around the corner for us.”Contact: Anna Simet&nbsp; asimet@bbiinternational.com&nbsp;

2023-12-19 - The Value in Diversification (Biodiesel Magazine)

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Continually pivoting to stay competitive and grow since its founding in 2008, Green Energy Biofuel has no intentions of stopping.

The Value in Diversification

The Value in Diversification

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