New Biofuel Plant Turns Waste Into Cash

We often hear how Americans need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, so a local businessman is doing his part.

Meet Royal Jones, who is converting waste and blending it with diesel fuel at a new biofuel plant in El Paso’s Upper Valley.

Jones took over the old Cotton SWIG plant and turned it into Global Alternative Fuels.

“This place was built in the 40s, but a lot of the things that we have here lend themselves to run a bio fuel plant,” Jones said.

Jones, the owner of Mesilla Valley Transportation and its 1,000-truck fleet, said starting a biofuel plant made sense.

“We’re always trying to do what we can trying not to burn so much fuel with our trucks,” Jones said.

In the plant’s lab, local chemists and engineers work around the clock to recover and reuse as much water and methanol from used vegetable oil as possible.

“It’s made from waste,” Jones said.

After four years in the making, the $20 million investment is now starting to pay off.

“We have a contract with a local refinery and they have pretty much said they will take everything we can produce,” Jones said.

Global Alternative Fuels currently produces about 5 million gallons of biofuel a year, which is only one-third of its capacity.

“We have a contract now with a friend of mine in Tucson who has a contract with companies like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, and he has people set up all over the United States to pick up used cooking oil from restaurants, etc.,” said Jones.

The company uses rail cars to bring in the used oil, and once it arrives, it moves through a high-tech filtration system.

The 12-hour process is monitored in a control room filled with computers to make sure the fuel is of the highest quality.

“A lot of people do biofuel up in the north, and then in the wintertime your fuel gels — diesel tends to gel anyway — our stuff won’t gel,” said Jones, who says he also gets to reap the rewards.

After selling his biofuel to a refiner, he ends up rebuying it as part of a diesel blend for his trucking company.

“We’re buying fuel at our terminal in El Paso, and we’re buying a blend of 5 percent right now, so we’ll be purchasing about a million gallons a year of just biofuel,” Jones said.

New Mexico and Texas require a certain percentage of biofuel in diesel. Jones says he hopes to increase production to 10 million gallons a year in six months.