Is Waste Where It’s At?
Late last week, Waste Management announced it was joining Valero in investing in Terrabon, a company commercializing a technology to produce biocrude from waste using its MixAlcoTM technology. MixAlco is an acid fermentation process that converts biomass into organic salts. The resulting non-hazardous organic salts, or bio-crude, would be then shipped by truck, rail or pipeline to a Valero refinery or other centralized processing facility where it would be converted to a high-octane gasoline that can be blended directly into a refiner’s fuel pool and presumably would qualify as an advanced biofuel under the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2) program.
Assuming the process is commercially scalable, it could be an interesting win-win-win: Waste Management would probably get carbon credits under a looming cap and trade scheme; Valero gets an advanced biofuel that it can process and blend directly into the gasoline pool, avoiding some of the logistics issues blending ethanol can present, capturing an opportunity to sell valuable advanced biofuel renewable identification numbers (RINs) on the market and allowing it to more easily meet Low Carbon Fuels Standard (LCFS) obligations; Terrabon gets rich. There would be no food v. fuel issues, sustainability concerns or complicated lifecycle analyses on land use change (LUC) with which to contend. The very fact that there wouldn’t be LUC issues makes the product especially attractive. Is waste where it’s at?
Tags: advanced biofuel, bio-crude, biocrude, biofuels, Ethanol, gasoline, land use change, LCA, LCFS, lifecycle analysis, Low Carbon Fuels Standard, LUC, MixAlco, renewable fuels standard, RFS2, sustainability, Terrabon, Valero, waste, Waste Management
