Eco Bio Fuels Industry, 95 per cent owned by fuel retailer Eco Petroleum, has unveiled plans to build a 51 MWt cooking oil-fed power plant near the town of Vidin, on the Danube, Dnevnik daily reported on April 29.

Bulgaria’s Energy and Water Regulation Commission has reviewed the company’s request for a 15-year electricity production licence but is yet to come up with a final statement.

While Eco Bio Fuels Industry is looking for preferential prices of its electricity output, the commission has no legal grounds to put the project in this bracket. Under the Renewable and Alternative Sources Act, an electricity producer may be given preferential rates if they derive energy from either renewable or alternative energy sources. Cooking oil is neither of the two.

The company, however, has already received a Class A Investor Certificate for its 200 million leva project from Bulgaria’s investment promotion agency InvestBulgaria.

The company needs the electricity production licence to attest to its creditworthiness with banks, the company said. The company plans to finance most of the project with banking loans. The financing scheme of the project envisages that 75 per cent of the project’s overall worth needs to be at hand to launch the project.

Meanwhile, the company is holding talks on selling 20 per cent of the project’s shares. Among the prospective partners in the project is Italy’s Merloni Progetti.

Apart from electricity, the power plant is intended to produce heating energy.