Crimson Renewable Energy to Pause Production at California Biodiesel Plant

Biodiesel producer Crimson Renewable Energy plans to pause production at its 37.3 million gal/year plant in Bakersfield, Calif., President and CEO Harry Simpson said on Sunday.

After Crimson finishes December production, the company will not produce biodiesel in the first half of 2026, “because of the continued poor margin environment,” Simpson said. In November, Crimson laid off “significant numbers of staff” as a result of the decision but also kept a sizeable operations team at the facility so production can be resumed “with fairly short notice when we get the right market and policy signals,” Simpson said.

“We will not resume biodiesel production until such time that this market allows us to operate profitably and with some degree of consistency, and we see some certainty and forward visibility with respect to critical policy mechanisms such as the RFS Renewable Volume Obligation (RVO) and RFS Small Refinery Exemptions (SREs) and the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard,” Simpson said.

The Bakersfield petrochemical terminal affiliate, Delta Trading, will continue to operate, Simpson said.

Crimson began operations in 2011 and underwent subsequent expansions to boost output capacity, making it the largest biodiesel facility in California, according to its website.

In 2021, Crimson and Austria-based BDI-BioEnergy jointly completed commissioning of an expansion at the Bakersfield facility using BDI’s “RepCAT” process technology, enabling the pretreatment of high free fatty acid (FFA) feedstocks like sewer grease and used cooking oils before the transesterification process to produce fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) biodiesel.

In January 2023, Finnish refiner and renewable diesel producer Neste acquired Crimson’s SeQuential Biodiesel assets, including used cooking oil (UCO) collection, aggregation and processing business units such as SeQuential Environmental Services LLC and Pure LLC, and a 12-million-gal/year biodiesel production plant in Salem, Ore.

Simpson currently serves as a member of the Governing Board of the national trade association, Clean Fuels Alliance America.

–Reporting by Bryan Sims, bsims@opisnet.com and Adam Spolane, aspolane@opisnet.com; Editing by Jordan Godwin, jgodwin@opisnet.com