Imperium Renewables has sold its original biodiesel plant -- a five million gallon facility located near the 1st Avenue South Bridge in Seattle -- to General Biodiesel. The deal gives General Biodiesel a fully permitted facility from which to immediately start producing fuel from recycled cooking oil and animal fat.
Yale Wong, the chief executive of General Biodiesel, said they have hired a former plant manager of the facility and plan to start producing fuel there soon.
Imperium spokesman John Williams said that Imperium is consolidating its R&D operations at its massive 100 million gallon facility in Grays Harbor. The company will continue to be based in Seattle, but Williams said it made sense to sell the smaller plant since very little work had been done there since last year.
“It’s great to see our site being put to continued good use as a biodiesel production facility," John Plaza, who founded Imperium in 2004 and built the Seattle plant under the name Seattle Biodiesel. "We are happy to have General Biodiesel as the new owners of our original facility."
General Biodiesel owns another plant about one mile away, but it has not yet received permits to operate it. Wong said the company -- with about a dozen employees -- also is eyeing two other biodiesel plants outside of Washington state.
He said they want to ramp up and build a larger-scale facility in the future.
The purchase price was not disclosed, though General Biodiesel recently raised capital in conjunction with the facility purchase.
Wong declined to say how much they raised, though a filing with the SEC from June 15th indicated that the Seattle company had pulled in $1 million in financing. Prior to that round, the company had raised $2.6 million.
In an interview, Wong said that they have raised additional money beyond what was reported in the June 15 SEC filing.
Swiftsure Securities assisted with the latest financing, and as part of the deal Gordon Gardiner of Swiftsure will join the company's board.
Imperium, which has fallen on hard times in the past two years as the biodiesel market crashed, contracts fell apart and financing dried up, is very different from General Biodiesel since it produces fuel from feedstocks such as soy or canola oil.
General Biodiesel, on the other hand, attempts to recycle waste products such as cooking oil from local restaurants.
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