Fulcrum’s Near, Ensyn’s Back: Hopeful Hours in the Big Heavy

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... Fulcrum: Fuels before Christmas, maybe by Hallowe’en -- When we last touched on the Fulcrum story in depth, in May, the company had commenced syngas production, but we had not yet heard that the intrepid Fulcrumites had reached the summit of their Everest, which is the commencement of fuel production at their Sierra Biofuels project near Reno, Nevada. As we noted last May, “the hour is late, the winds are fierce, oxygen bottles may be in short supply. Fears begin to grow, unvoiced, that our mountaineers are lost.”

Good news, a voice has come crackling over the radio, CEO Eric Pryor gave us an update this week, and stated, “We are in the process of commissioning and operating the many systems and pieces of equipment throughout our process and expect to be in a position to produce our first gallons of syncrude from landfill waste in the next month or so. As you know, this will be a tremendous milestone for Fulcrum as well as the renewable fuels industry.”

That’s good news, it appear it will be a happy Christmas in Nevada and elsewhere in the bioeconomy amongst the company’s many fans.

As reported in July, SK Innovation made a $20 million equity investment in Fulcrum.

Over at Ensyn: overproduction at BioÉnergie AE Côte-Nord Canada

The other bright light of the Big Heavy has been Ensyn, and there we have had even more public and encouraging news this year. In May, ArcelorMittal Mining Canada and BioÉnergie AE Côte-Nord Canada inked a three-year agreement for the delivery of 16 million litres of pyrolytic oil per year to the ArcelorMittal iron pellet plant, the fuel is produced using Ensyn technology.

The introduction of pyrolytic oil, a renewable fuel produced from wood residues, will allow an annual reduction of 57,600 tonnes of CO2 equivalent at the Port- Cartier pellet plant, which corresponds to removing 14,000 vehicles from the roads each year. Let us recall that the ArcelorMittal Group has made the commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 25% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Sourcing? BioÉnergie is sourcing wood residues of Arbec Lumber, another affiliate of Groupe Rémabec. The agreement announced today also includes the use of ArcelorMittal’s railway by Arbec, based on 80 trains per year to transport wood from its forest camps to its Port-Cartier sawmill.

And there was follow up in mid-summer that biofuel production levels have exceeded expectations. After a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Bioénergie AE Côte-Nord restarted production on June 27, and, in two weeks, produced 700,000 litres of fuel. That’s already past the 16 million liter per year rate needed to meet the ArcelorMittal offtake requirement.

Why the surge in production? Optimization work reduced the frequency of downtime that caused production stoppages. Plant spokesman Tommy Chabot noted that “In the past, we had an average rate of 60% of the production capacity. Over the latest two weeks of operation, we had an average of 85%”. The production filled the 700,000 litres of storage the company had on site — so, now, it’s on Arcelor to expand its capacity to absorb the new fuels — quickly. READ MORE