Q&A: A Model for Low-Carbon Fuels in the Global Energy Transition

by Alan P. Mammoser (Biodiesel Magazine) Biofuels will likely play an important role in a hoped-for transformation to a low-carbon economy. According to the International Renewable Energy Agency, they will need to play a large role in the direct application of renewables to decarbonize heavy transport including road freight, shipping and aviation. IRENA calls for specific mandates and financial incentives to scale up biofuel consumption sustainably, raising it fivefold from 130 billion liters per year (34.3 billion gallons) today to more than 600 billion liters per year in 2050.

A lot of innovation will be required to reach this level sustainably. A notable entrepreneur in the field, specifically in the heavy-truck sector, is Karl Feilder. The Dubai-based executive is chairman and CEO of Neutral Fuels, which has pioneered the commercial adoption of advanced biofuels.

The company supplies low-carbon biodiesel from waste vegetable oil (WVO) that is fully substitutable with diesel fuel in trucks.

There are many large corporations saying something about our climate challenge, but in terms of innovating solutions most of them don’t actually have the spare capacity to really focus on climate-related innovations. A guy from [Volkswagen] said to me privately, “When we build an engine plant, it’s got a 10-year life expectancy, so you can’t come to us halfway through that 10-year depreciation cycle and say you want to replace all the diesel engines with electric.”

So how do you become independent of something that you’ve become dependent on? I mean we are utterly addicted to fossil fuels, for good reasons—they are the most energy-dense form of fuel that we could possibly have.

It’s taken us nearly a hundred years to get to being completely dependent on fossil fuels, and it’s going to take apparently only two decades for us to become independent of fossil fuels, if you follow the argument that we need to keep below 1.5 degrees Celsius (global average temperature rise as called for in the Paris Climate Agreement). And the logic behind not making the transition doesn’t stack up. I haven’t met anybody yet who says, “Actually, I don’t want to save the planet—I think I’ll go and find another planet to live on.”

Now, if we’re right, then this is the world’s biggest economic opportunity—to reinvent the global economy in two decades with new technology. We’ve got to replace everything. We’ve got to replace power plants, manufacturing plants, buildings, vehicles, aircraft—everything has to change.

The current model that we have, where everybody is very embedded in what they decided to do five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and where everything is driven on constantly making more profit, more product, and consuming more every single quarter in order to support more corporate reporting; that isn’t really going to work if we have to greatly reduce our consumption of fossil fuels. It’s going to be very tricky to achieve all of those things at the same time—maintaining the current economic model while transforming the economy.

On the other hand, I’m not arguing as many people are now doing, for redistribution of wealth and other sorts of Marxist principles. I don’t think this is an opportunity for everybody in the world to say we need to equal out the whole of society and we need to fix all of the other complex problems in society.

I think this is an opportunity for capitalists to reinvent capitalist economies, because pretty much everywhere in the world now runs on capitalist theory. So, I see this as a time when many entrepreneurs are now asking, “What do I need to do?”

It should be noted that we are not producing hydrogenated fuels and hydrocracking. We produce a plug-in fuel using transesterification of waste cooking oils with methanol as our main conversion. And we are pretty unusual in that. We’re producing fuels that run 100 percent swap-out with regular diesel in an unmodified vehicle and give exactly the same fuel consumption—except that it gives you about 50 percent less tailpipe emissions … We’re only producing from waste vegetable oils. We don’t use animal fats, we don’t use tallows, we only use vegetable oils, and the reason that we can segregate them is because we’re sourcing them locally, we know exactly where they’re coming from.

A: One of the challenges for the biofuels industry, when you adopt a large factory model—a large refinery model—is that you have to take feedstock from all over the place, in large quantities, in order to feed your big, hungry refinery. So, when you run a large refinery operation, you’re going to get a mixture of animal fats and vegetable and some palm and other stuff in there.

It’s not like with the oil industry where you can say, “Okay, this week I’m going to be refining Saudi crude and I know exactly what the spec is.” We’re dealing with waste materials here. So, if you take a 5 million-liter ship and fill it up with waste cooking oil, it’s going to have every permutation of vegetable and animal type in there, which means your efficiency of conversion at the other end is poor, in the refinery. And the end product has the minimum characteristics that you could get out of a blend of feedstocks.

In our model, we pick the feedstocks that we use, and because we can source them locally and we can source them specifically, we can use those to customize how our end fuel behaves.

Yes, you can run 100 percent of our fuel one day, fossil fuel the next day, our fuel the next day, and the engine won’t notice the difference. It will give you the same fuel consumption. Our biofuel will actually make the engine last a bit longer because it’s more slippery—it has a higher lubricity—and it’s actually got slightly more power. All of the things you read on Google as being wrong with biofuels we fixed eight years ago. READ MORE WATCH VIDEO