Oberon Fuels, SHV Energy Partner up to Accelerate Renewable DME: Is This Tech a Carbon Removal Machine of Great Importance?

by Helena Tavares Kennedy (Biofuels Digest) In California, Oberon Fuels and SHV Energy are partnering to accelerate the use of renewable DME to reduce the carbon footprint of transportation fuel. For Oberon’s path to scale, the partnership will include funding to augment a recent $2.9M grant from the California Energy Commission grant to further develop DME fueling infrastructure and vehicle development. Also, SHV Energy technical resources will help test the use of rDME blended with propane, and SHV Energy’s extensive global distribution network will facilitate greater use of rDME in numerous energy applications worldwide.

I forgot what DME is – remind me

Under ambient conditions, rDME is a gas but can be stored as a liquid under moderate pressure, which makes DME ideal for blending with propane. DME’s easy handling properties also make fueling and infrastructure relatively simple and inexpensive. DME is approved as a renewable fuel under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Renewable Fuels Standard, making it eligible for RINs credits when made from biogas by the Oberon process.

The Big Attraction: The Carbon Score

Oberon’s focused on waste as a feedstock, and the carbon scoring is so extremely carbon-negative that what we have here is a planet-saving, carbon absorption machine in its own right.

If it were a temperature, you’d be on Neptune, and a carbon score of -278 is about as rare as a trip to the outer planets. Oberon’s technology is the Ironman Arc Reactor of carbon removal, a machine of immense potential, and even more so, because it’s a part of the here and now and not the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

How do they get a score like that? In essence, it’s a score built off the -150 score that’s handed out to renewable natural gas that utilizes dairy waste. The biogas there is a powerful greenhouse gas, and converting it away from a methane emission to a fuel is the first step in a big carbon reduction. In the case of DME, the process chews up even more methane, and that’s why it gets an even bigger carbon bump than straight RNG.

The Oberon Fuels backstory

Over $30 million in private funding has been invested in Oberon Fuels since its founding in 2010. Additionally, the State of California in 2019 awarded Oberon a $2.9 million grant to upgrade its existing DME pilot facility to demonstration scale and facilitate the first production of rDME in the U.S., with a target production capacity of approximately 1.6 million gallons of DME per year. Oberon sees this state-invested project as a key building block towards producing rDME statewide using California’s methane emissions.

Coming quite soon is a new feedstock, in this case a renewable methanol which is derived from a new process developed by a large Kraft Pulp milll operator, Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, to isolate methanol from pulp residues. It’s well known that pulp streams have methanol in them — that’s why methanol is called wood alcohol — to date, no one’s been able to extract the methanol and isolate it from the abundant sulphur that is also found in pulp streams and causes that traditional strong odor at pulp mills.

Alberta-Pacific’s had a technical breakthrough, pulp mills could use a new customer set, and there are 144 Kraft Pulp mills in North America to supply towards this process.

But for other countries — for example, India, Turkey and Brazil, the cost of energy remains the biggest issue with fuels such as propane, and the prevalent use of cooking, for example, emphasizes that it’s a slightly different user base than in, for example, the EU. A lot more customers in the consumer sector are highly exposed to economic conditions and sensitive to price.

D5 or D20 or higher blends?

Long term, think D20, shorter term we may see the same gallons of DME blended more widely, as a D5, to reduce the potential of price impact and also to take into account the smaller volumes that would be available in the early days of deployment. READ MORE