Biodiesel producers have a new tool to analyze biodiesel economics. The Ag Marketing Resource Center rolled out its biodiesel profitability spreadsheets in its June newsletter. “We put together what we think is a ballpark or typical biodiesel plant in Iowa to give an overview where the industry is going,” explained Don Hofstrand, co-director of the AgMRC, an online center hosted by Iowa State University Extension Service.
The biodiesel profitability spreadsheet plugs in the figures for a hypothetical 30 MMgy biodiesel plant based in Iowa including fixed and variable costs and product prices. With the launching of the spreadsheet, the Iowa-based prices for biodiesel, soybean oil, methanol and natural gas will be updated monthly. “We don’t do monthly updates for glycerin because we couldn’t find a good data series for glycerin in Iowa,” Hofstrand said. He was a bit surprised to see how small of a factor glycerin was in the overall biodiesel profitability analysis, he added.
The Biodiesel Profitability Chart is available for downloading at www.agmrc.org under the renewable energy heading for biodiesel profitability.The Excel spreadsheet is designed so that a biodiesel producer can change the basic values on the “Economic Model” tab to reflect a plant’s actual fixed and variable costs and efficiencies to see how those play out throughout the tables and charts. The nine charts built upon data entered in the economic model include analyses of returns per gallon of biodiesel and per pound of soybean oil, breakeven purchase cost for soybean oil and sale price of biodiesel, return on equity, return over variable cost, among others.