Fulcrum BioEnergy squeezes fuel from garbage

September 3, 2009 | Camille Ricketts2 CommentsFulcrum BioEnergy claims it can derive commercial-scale ethanol from municipal waste — and it just ran the first demo that proves it, the Pleasanton, Calif. company says. Already, it’s moving on its planned Sierra BioFuels Plant, a facility that could turn 90,000 tons of garbage into 10.5 million gallons of ethanol every year, and one of the first of its kind.

To give you some context on the size of the plant — slated to be built 20 miles outside of Reno, Nev. — 90,000 tons of waste is the amount produced by a city with 165,000 residents. If you extrapolate the technology out to a national level, it could one day produce more than 1 billion gallons of ethanol annually. And the company, already benefiting from its other ethanol business using different feedstocks, says the price of the fuel produced could be as low as 50 cents a gallon.

Fulcrum uses an engineered catalyst to convert synthesis gas into ethanol suitable for running cars. It says that its demo facility, called the TurningPoint Ethanol Demonstration Plant, produced the same results consistently over hundreds of hours of testing. The company now plans to use the plant to fine-tune its processes, hopefully upping efficiency and yield.

Interestingly, it licensed the technology for its entire process. It took the gassification half from InEnTec, a company that raised $150 million last year. And it took the catalytic half from the Nipawin Biomass New Generation Cooperative and Saskatchewan Research Council, which still owns half of the technology. Fulcrum simply put it together, tested it, and had the resources to bring it to market.

To support these efforts and the estimated $120 million Sierra BioFuels Plant, Fulcrum says it will raise a round of equity and debt over the next six months, reports the Cleantech Group. The plant should be up and running by 2011.

While the company will certainly be one of the first to make waste conversion a commercial reality, it has some pretty tough competition in Coskata and Rentech — the latter of which just signed a deal to provide 1.5 million gallons of synthetic diesel fuel made from sewer sludge to power ground equipment for eight airlines at LAX. Terrabon, another waste-to-fuel enterprise, is backed by Valero Energy and Waste Management.

Fulcrum says its municipal waste process could also be used to make synthetic diesel, butanol or electricity, but that it decided to focus on ethanol because it’s the most lucrative segment.

The company is backed by US Renewables Group, one of the country’s largest equity firms focused exclusively on renewable sources of energy, and Rustic Canyon Partners.

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