Bosnian Biodiesel Factory - You’ve Come A Long Way Baby!

A biodiesel factory in Bosnia?  It seems like just yesterday, but it was in 1995. That was the year I crossed the Sava River from Croatia, into Bosnia, and entered a country that would change my life forever.

Three different armies had killed hundreds of thousands of people, (including an ethnic cleansing campaign waged by Slobadan Milosevic and Radovan Karadzic) casting the country into the dark after the power went out.  This was a world where people had to run down “Sniper Alley” to get fresh drinking water in Sarajevo, and rural farmers resorted to eating the bark off  trees.

A Nuclear reactor, near where I patrolled in my Hummer, sat silent and cold as enterprising people cut down dead power-lines to sell the copper in them. Families held off the cold winter by huddling around burning furniture and tires.

It’s now 13 years later and Bosnia is rebounding, and one of the signs of its new prosperity its new biodiesel factory, about to open near Banja Luka.

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The company responsible for this new factory is System Ecologica (LLC), founded by Nenad Kokanovic and Borivoje Vukadinovic. This plant will serve as a model for additional plants in neighboring Eastern European countries as well as in China.

System Ecologica will manufacture biodiesel utilizing a variety of feedstock such as rape seed oil, cotton seed oil, used cooking oil and animal fat (chicken fat ). The Company intends to be profitable from the first month with an initial production of 30 tonnes a day of biodiesel to be sold locally.  System Ecologica plans to purchase its feedstock through arrangements with existing feedstock suppliers locally and from other regions of Eastern Europe such as Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Georgia.

Now that the landmines have been cleared from the fields, the lights have been turned back on and the threat of violence is over, rural farmers can return to doing what they do best, growing crops. This time for fuel for tractors instead of feed for the horses that they have been using to pull their plows.

Source: System Ecologica
Photo courtesy of PNP, via Creative Commons License

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