Carbon Recycling

Promote a circular economy with clean fuels and chemicals made from waste

This patented technology is an advanced thermochemical process that chemically recycles carbon molecules contained in waste into added-value products such as renewable methanol and ethanol. It takes waste in less than five minutes to produce synthetic gas, and convert it into advanced low-carbon transportation biofuel – enough to fuel over 400,000 cars on a 5% ethanol blend. In turn, biofuels also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 60% when compared to fossil fuel production and landfilling.

Feedstock preparation

The municipal waste used as feedstock is first sorted to remove recyclable materials and inert materials. The waste is then shredded for use. 

Gasification

The resulting material is fed to proprietary bubbling fluidized bed gasification vessel to break down the shredded waste into its constituent molecules, a process that is called thermal cracking. In the same reactor, these broken-down molecules with steam under specific conditions produce syngas. This is a patented technology that is capable of breaking down chemically and structurally dissimilar waste and plastic materials and converting them into a pure, chemical-grade, stable and homogeneous syngas. The resulting syngas is rich in hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which are key building block molecules used in modern chemical processes.

Cleaning and conditioning

The crude syngas, composed mainly of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, water, and hydrogen, is fed into a proprietary syngas cleaning and conditioning process which upgrades the crude syngas to chemical-grade so that it can be converted into liquid fuels and chemicals. It is through the combination of the bubbling fluidized bed gasification reactor and the proprietary syngas cleaning and conditioning process that the company is able to control the purity of the syngas and its composition.

Catalytic synthesis and product purification

The last component of the proprietary process is the catalytic conversion of the chemical-grade syngas into liquid methanol and then fuel-grade ethanol. A combination of in-process controls and quality analysis are used to ensure and confirm that all of the company’s products consistently meet the required specifications.