Red Hook Biodiesel Plant Gets City Funding

Time to dust off the wisecracks about how Red Hook is going to smell like a deep fryer. The biodiesel plant that has been proposed for a site near the Red Hook Ball Fields has gotten city funding. Crains reports that Tri-State Biodiesel, which will make biodiesel fule, will get $3.96 million in tax-exempt bonds and $5.2 million in real estate and sales tax benefits to build a 12,900-square-foot manufacturing and warehouse facility.

The enterprise will collect used cooking oil from restaurants and process it with methanol and petroleum to create diesel fuel. More than one million gallons of waste oil could be collected in Brooklyn every year according to a 2004 Cornell study. The fuel produces 78 percent less carbon-dioxide emissions than standard diesel.

The biodiesel people say the plant won't smell like rancid oil or cause Red Hook--which has seen its share of undesirable enterprises like waste collection stations--to smell like the exhaust of a McDonald's deep fryer.

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