With diesel prices going up, there's been a lot of interest from folks trying to save a buck with our Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) systems. Amazingly, Anchorage has a SVO-friendly grease collection company, Alaska Mill and Feed. They have been selling SVO drivers 55 gallon drums of filtered, dewatered, used (sometimes heavily used) cooking oil, known on the commodities market as "Yellow Grease."It's been priced at 75 cents a gallon for a few years, but recently they raised the price to $1.00 a gallon. I've heard rumblings in the local vegoil community that maybe Mill and Feed is just trying to squeeze us a little, since diesel prices are so high. This couldn't be further from the truth.
A quick check at the USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service's Bioenergy Portal leads us to the National Weekly Ag Energy Round-up. Yellow Grease is commanding an amazing 33 cents a pound on the open market.
Since Yellow Grease runs about 7.6 pounds per gallon, at 33 cents a pound, the market rate is just over $2.50 a gallon! Those 35 pound (about 4.5 gallon) cubies of old fryer oil are now worth $11.55, double what grease was selling for a year ago!
Even with shipping costs to the lower 48, Mill and Feed is losing money by selling grease at the low local price. Mark, the plant manager, has done a great job cleaning up their oil and keeping costs low for Alaskans. We're lucky to have such a great business supporting Alaska biofuels.
2 comments:
Will:
Thanks for keeping the rest of the state up to date on info related to wvo. In Homer, the wvo supplies are getting a little tighter, since more people are interested. It is good to know that AK Mill and Feed is still providing filtered grease at a good price. Are they charging any fuel tax on top of that?
Dale
No, they are not charging tax (and remember no sales tax in Anchorage). They are selling bulk yellow grease, not "fuel." In my discussions with the state Department of Revenue, we've agreed that when I re-filter (from 10 to 2 microns) the SVO it "becomes" fuel, so I pay the tax as a in-state "biodiesel" refiner. Yeah, it's not really biodiesel, but I explained SVO to them, and calling it biodiesel works for tax purposes.
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