Advanced BioFuels USA

by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest)  From Canada comes news of several changes for Cielo Waste Solutions who you may know as the waste-to-fuel tech company. CEO and COO Gregg Gegunde resigned as did Chris Sabat as Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary. Anna Cheong, who was acting as interim Chief Financial Officer, returned to her position as Controller and an interim CEO and CFO have been appointed by the Board. But management musical chairs isn’t the only news – Cielo reports several Aldersyde production updates of interest too.

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Aldersyde production update

Speaking of Aldersyde, we haven’t heard much lately about that facility but there are some updates to report from there too.

Process heat from Inline electric heater – As the Aldersyde Phase 1 facility has continued to operate, Cielo has continued to modify and improve the design. Aldersyde Engineering, Operations and Maintenance have been making such improvements, and as a result are repairing the inline heater. The heater is expected to be available by June 20, 2022, at which time low-rate steady state operation is expected.

Waste management system – A change in feedstock dimension was recently implemented to further improve the process, which resulted in improved distillate quality but impacted solid settling characteristics. Operations strategy and piping modification was required to manage the waste stream due to changed solids settling characteristics. Interim operations have been positive, resulting in improved used motor oil recovery from reactor bottoms and reduced waste production.

Forecasted production – Aligned with previous news releases on May 12, 2022 and April 18, 2022, the primary focus of Aldersyde is to improve reliability, distillate quality, and better understand constraints so that learnings can be applied to the research facility design and future full-scale facilities. Moving forward, Management will no longer focus on or provide guidance on feed production numbers as the current Aldersyde facility is uneconomical and these numbers are not required to achieve the previously mentioned objectives.

Cielo’s plan is to achieve steady state production over a 10-day period followed by a planned outage to inspect equipment. Following each steady state production cycle, operations and engineering will evaluate the run, and apply learnings for future trial runs with modified process parameters.

Check out their latest slide guide “It’s all a bunch of garbage! You mean, valuable fuel: The Digest’s 2021 Multi-Slide Guide to Cielo Waste Solutions” here.

Back in May, Cielo announced a revised capital allocation plan to meet its commercial waste-to-fuel facility development goals.

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Cielo pointed out back in May that their corporate strategy continues to be the commercialization of its waste-to-fuel technology and the near-term focus is to profitably produce diesel, naphtha, and kerosene from multiple feedstock waste materials.  READ MORE

Trash to Treasure: The Digest’s 2022 Multi-Slide Guide to Cielo’s Waste-to-Fuels (Biofuels Digest)