How Bioheat® is Using Soybeans to Heat Homes in the Northeastern US This Winter

We all know soybeans are pretty incredible and can be used for a lot of things—including biodiesel for your trucks and heavy equipment. But you may not know there’s also a soybean biodiesel product that’s being used to heat homes across the northeastern U.S.

It’s called Bioheat®, and it’s produced by a company based in Erie, Pennsylvania called HERO BX. The product is a blend of 80-percent heating fuel with 20-percent renewable biodiesel—which is made from by-products that would otherwise be wasted, like soybean oil, inedible corn oil, animal fats, canola oil, and used cooking oil.

Bioheat® is being manufactured and used in areas throughout Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and other parts of the Northeast.

Andy Bensend is a soybean producer from Wisconsin, and he says he saw firsthand how soybeans were being used as Bioheat® during a recent trip to New York City.

“It was kind of a surprise to me when I first learned about demand for Bioheat®,” says Bensend. “But apparently, the Northeast has always traditionally been an area where a lot of the heating – home heating, in particular – was done with fuel oil. So, as the air quality concerns became more prevalent in some of those higher-populated areas, the biodiesel started to catch on, and the ‘bioheat’ significantly improved the emissions perspective.”

He says the Bioheat® industry has become a solid market for soybean producers.

“It’s caught on well, as is very popular. People love it, and there’s a whole industry developed around it now, about what modifications and so forth are done to the heating plants of furnaces, if you will, the boilers, and so it’s pretty neat, and it’s become a nice demand center for our soybean oil,” he says.

Soybean oil rapidly became the preferred feedstock for Bioheat®.

“It burns cleaner. It has fewer carbon deposits. It has a lot easier maintenance. It has natural lubricity, which of course, when we took sulfur out of our petroleum-based products, we lost a lot of lubricity, so there’s a lot of built-in advantages and that’s what they like about it,” he says.

Learn more about Bioheat® at MyBioHeat.com.

CLICK BELOW to hear Hoosier Ag Today’s radio news report on the use of soybeans to heat homes with Bioheat®.