Manitoba growers supply Toronto plant | The company hopes to build a facility in Manitoba
Jon Dwyer is defying conventional wisdom in the biodiesel industry by using an unusual feedstock to fuel a plant in an unusual location.
“A lot of people have told us that what we’re doing is crazy, but crazy makes money. You can’t do the same thing everybody else is doing,” said the chief executive officer of Flax Energy.
The company opened a biodiesel plant in downtown Toronto in 2012 that processes western Canadian flax into biodiesel, edible oil, flour and animal feed.
“We wanted to prove that you can have an agricultural input in the downtown core of the largest city in the country, and we’ve successfully done that,” he said.
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One of the goals of the project is to help bridge the substantial divide between Toronto’s business community and Canadian farmers.
“The Bay Street guys, they just simply don’t know. All they think about is mining and I believe there’s a lot of money and a lot of success to be had with Canadian agriculture.”
Dwyer anticipates Flax Energy will produce 3.2 million litres of biodiesel and another 120,000 litres of food grade flax oil in 2013.
The production of that amount of fuel and oil will require 10,000 tonnes of brown and golden flax, most of which will be bought from Manitoba suppliers.
The company has purchased flax from grain companies, but it wants to eliminate the middleman where possible.
“We want to get in touch directly with flax growers themselves. We want to be on the ground and purchasing direct as opposed to purchasing as a second party,” said Dwyer.
Brown flax is used when the company wants to produce an omega 3 animal feed sold to the horse, cattle, aquaculture and pet food industries. It switches to golden flax when it wants to produce omega 3 flour for the baking and pasta industries.
The plant plans to produce 1,600 tonnes of feed and 612 tonnes of flour in 2013.
The biodiesel it produces is sold to municipal trucking fleets in Ontario and will soon be used by a high profile customer.
“We’re going to be powering the Rogers Centre here in Toronto, which is the old SkyDome,” Dwyer said. “All their trucks are going to run on our fuel.”
He is also attempting to convince the City of Toronto to run its buses on the locally produced biodiesel.
“They’re buying the fuel from the United States and we’re right down the street,” said Dwyer.
The company has ambitious plans to expand beyond the Toronto plant and the 500,000 litre pilot plant it operates in Port Colborne, Ont., which makes biodiesel out of waste vegetable oil.
Those plans include building a facility in Jamaica and one in Western Canada.
“We are looking at purchasing land in the Manitoba area, and we do want to open a facility out there because we just think that’s going to help us eliminate a lot of the externalities associated with being in the flax business but not necessarily in direct flax country,” said Dwyer.
It is expensive to truck flax from rural Manitoba to the plant in Toronto. The company is trying to reduce that expense by encouraging production closer to home.
Flax Energy owns a 1,200 acre farm in Hamilton that supplies the plant with golden flax.
The difficult 2012 growing season was ideal for proving to Ontario growers that they can add flax to their rotations.
“It was like 33 C. It was hot when it shouldn’t have been. It was raining when it shouldn’t have rained and our flax grew fine. It was beautiful,” said Dwyer.
“It stood up to the feeds that we’re getting from out west.”
However, Flax Energy must first focus on reaching its Toronto plant’s annual capacity of 16.44 million litres of biodiesel.
