Prime minister lays the first stone of the new Oleon biodiesel plant in Ertvelde

Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt lays today the first stone of our new biodiesel plant. The plant will have a production capacity of 100.000 ton biodiesel and has to be operational by January 2007. At the same time the fatty alcohol plant will be transformed to be able to produce another 40.000 tons biodiesel and the capacity of the glycerine distillation doubles to 60.000 tons. The total of these investments amounts to 28,5 million Euro.

 

With the laying of the first stone, the point of no return for Oleon has been reached. Now the legislation of the detaxation of biodiesel has been published in the Belgian Bulletin of Acts, Orders and Decrees, the legal framework is certain and Oleon enters as one of the important players the biodiesel market. Although the Belgian government still has to assign the biodiesel production quota, Oleon did not want to postpone this important investment since Oleon already was granted a quota of 40.000 tons biodiesel for the French market. Besides, it is the intention of the Belgian government to allow biodiesel on the Belgian market by end 2006. Everything seems to indicate that the biodiesel market will very quickly be saturated. With this important investment in Ertvelde, Oleon shows that it is ready to fill in a part of the available Belgian quota.

The European biodiesel market grows amazingly fast. In 2004 the production amounted to 2 million tons and end 2005 it increased with 60% to 3,2 million tons. As expected, this scorching investment pace will further increase.

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