They’re back up and running at Imperium Renewables’ Grays Harbor, Washington biodiesel plant.

This company press release says Imperium re-opened the facility after a glycerin tank rupture idled operations last December:

“We are thrilled to be producing again,” said John Plaza, founder and CEO of Imperium Renewables. “We have replaced the damaged equipment and re-designed the glycerin neutralization system to ensure such a rupture won’t happen again.”

The first of more than 40 rail cars containing millions of gallons of vegetable oil from canola grown in the Northwest arrived yesterday at the Imperium Grays Harbor facility. Imperium will convert the oil into biodiesel, which has been shown to reduce carbon emissions by 78 percent compared to petroleum fuel. The fuel will be distributed and consumed within the Pacific Northwest as well, embodying the preferred approach recently recommended by President Obama’s Biofuels Interagency Working Group.

The re-opening comes just in time as nearby British Columbia had a new biodiesel mandate go into effect at the beginning of this year, while in the U.S., biodiesel prospects have brightened in the wake of the U.S. Senate’s passage of the $1-a-gallon federal tax incentive and the EPA’s issuance of the new Renewable Fuel Standard, better known as RFS-2, which mandates the consumption of 1.15 billion gallons of biodiesel nationally in this year.