Inventure Renewables and CPM|Crown team up to expand reach of SimplEster tech
producers worldwide, paired with CPM|Crown’s established sodium methylate systems. The partnership is anchored by a proven commercial installation at Western Iowa Energy, LLC (WIE) located in Wall Lake, IA, where SimplEster was commissioned in 2024 as the platform’s first U.S. deployment.
At WIE, the SimplEster add-on integrated directly into an existing sodium methylate transesterification system without replacing it, increased plant capacity by approximately 15%, and produced on-spec biodiesel. It ensures acid value below 0.5 mg KOH/g, and, because the process is tunable, it can be configured to hit a range of acid-value targets, as low as 0.2 mg KOH/g, depending on a producer’s existing infrastructure, process, feedstocks, and finished- fuel requirements. That flexibility matters for producers who need to stay under the 0.5 mg KOH/g acid-value threshold for finished fuel, as they may lack certain downstream processing equipment.
Western Iowa Energy’s 45MM gal/yr biodiesel facility in Wall Lake, IA was already processing lower-carbon-intensity feedstocks, recovering free fatty acids through conventional steam-strip distillation, much of which was historically sold off at commodity prices. The SimplEster add-on lets WIE capture that value internally instead, converting those fatty acids into on-spec biodiesel within its own process rather than selling them downstream.
Building on that result, Inventure and WIE are now evaluating additional side streams through the SimplEster unit, including black esters recovered from the sodium methylate glycerol decanter recycle loop; this is a reflection of the technology’s robustness across a wide range of feedstocks (Used Cooking Oil, Tallow, Distillers’ Corn Oil, Poultry Fat, etc) and of the two companies’ ongoing collaboration.
Category: Fuels
