Posted December 9, 2009

The World Economic Forum, a nonprofit organization that holds its annual meeting next month in Davos, Switzerland, has given an award to a biodiesel company for the first time. BiofuelBox Corp. is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and turns wastewater sludge into biodiesel.

"The World Economic Forum recognizes companies they feel have the potential to change the world," said Rick Reddy of BiofuelBox. "There are five 'pillars' WEF uses to evaluate different enterprises-energy, climate change, water, education and healthcare-they saw that what we are doing fits into to three out of five of those categories."

BiofuelBox manufactures skid mounted 1 MMgy processing units that can be deployed virtually anywhere. "Any industry that produces wastewater-ethanol, timber, municipal sewer treatment, food manufacturers-we provide them with the ability to convert their waste into biodiesel, and use it in their fleets or whatever application might be beneficial to them."

What separates BiofuelBox from the dozens of other biodiesel enterprises and their technologies is the ability to process an incredibly impure feedstock. "It's 90 percent to 95 percent water," Reddy said. "After we extract that, and other solids and impurities, [before transesterification] the remaining oil is 90 percent free fatty acid and wildly high in sulfur."

Despite all of those challenges, BiofuelBox's technology still produces ASTM quality biodiesel. "This is not U.S-centric or Midwest-centric or California-centric-we can bring this system anywhere and anticipate building and selling hundreds or thousands of these units over the next few decades," Reddy told Biodiesel Magazine.

BiofuelBox installed its first unit located in Idaho, in September, which is processing trap grease and is producing a premium, low sulfur, ASTM compliant biodiesel for on-road use.