Aemetis, Inc. (AMTX), a renewable fuels company focused on negative carbon intensity products, announced that the Universal Biofuels subsidiary of Aemetis in Kakinada, India has agreed to acquire a site to construct a tallow oil refining facility. The refining facility is designed to supply feedstock to the existing Aemetis 50 million gallon per year biodiesel plant located on the East Coast of India and provide future feedstock supply to the Aemetis 90 million gallon sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable diesel (RD) plant being built in Riverbank, California.
In addition to the feedstock pretreatment unit already operational at the Aemetis biodiesel plant in Kakinada, the new feedstock refining facility will expand the range of feedstocks that can be used for biodiesel, SAF, and RD production to include crude tallow oil. Recent regulations adopted by the Indian Government encourage oil refiners and fuel distributors to purchase biodiesel for blending into petroleum diesel. The new feedstock refining facility will expand access to India’s renewable oil feedstock for existing and future Aemetis renewable fuels plants in India and California.
Aemetis built, owns, and operates the Kakinada biodiesel plant with an installed capacity of 150,000 metric tonnes per year, equal to about 50 million gallons of biodiesel production annually. The Aemetis Kakinada plant is one of the largest biodiesel production facilities in India and is capable of processing a variety of vegetable oils, animal oils, and waste oil feedstocks into biodiesel that meets international product standards.
The Kakinada biodiesel plant has been upgraded to convert the crude glycerin byproduct from the biodiesel refining process into refined glycerin for pharmaceutical and industrial customers. DeSmet-Ballestra, a leading biodiesel production technology company based in Europe, supplied the design and engineering for the Kakinada plant.