Bidding ends for $50 million Canadian biodiesel plant

The bidding period has closed for Great Lakes Biodiesel's (GLB) $50 million (€42.4 million) biodiesel plant in Welland, Ontario, Canada, but certainty over the future of the Dain City refinery has not been made clear.

Great Lakes Biodiesel (GLB) opened in 2012, but it never reached its full output potential of 170 million litres a year of biodiesel.

In October 2014, the plant went into receivership following a court action by Luxembourg-based investment company Heridge, as a result of the failure to pay all of its $20 million loan for Ontario, Canada.

The following month, all of GLB's assets, were put up for sale in an open auction.

When bidding closed on 7 January, Heridge was the only bidder that could be confirmed.

The plant is not currently in operation, but is being maintained to enable it to restart once a new owner injects more money into the business.

GLB had been due to receive $65 million in funding through Natural Resources Canada's $1.5 billion ecoENERGY fund, which was set up to kickstart the US's biofuel industry. The funding agreement was stopped however in 2013 without GLB receiving any investment.