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Cool Planet Energy Systems, a technology company producing green fuels and biochar products, has started building its first commercial facility in the US state of Louisiana.


Called Project Genesis, the new facility is designed to produce 10 million gallons a year of high octane renewable petrol blendstocks, as well as biochar, all made from sustainable wood residues. Permits have been received to begin earthwork and grading, with construction now scheduled to follow.


The plant will be located at the Port of Alexandria, on the Red River Waterway. This site was chosen because of the large availability of woody biomass there, as well as interstate and rail access and direct barge access to more than nine refineries.


'We could not have picked a better location to build our first commercial facility and start transforming the nation's fuel and food supplies,' says CEO Howard Janzen.


Cool Planet's technology turns biomass into green fuels and biochar and has the ability to be carbon negative. Its green fuels are to be blended directly into the current fuel supply to reduce greenhouse gases from the air without sacrificing performance or increasing prices at the pump.


The company's strategic investors include BP, Google Ventures, Energy Technology Ventures (GE, ConocoPhillips, NRG Energy), and the Constellation division of Exelon.

Cool Planet’s technology turns biomass into green fuels and biochar and has the capability to be carbon negative. The company’s green fuels are able to be blended directly into the current fuel supply to reduce greenhouse gases from the air without sacrificing performance or increasing prices at the pump. The biochar product sequesters carbon and delivers transformative benefits to industries as diverse as agriculture, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. As a soil amendment, field trials of the company’s Cool Terra™ biochar with commercial growers have shown yield improvements of more than 50% with significant reductions in fertilizer and water use.

Cool Planet's technology turns biomass into green fuels and biochar and has the ability to be carbon negative.

By 2030, 16 percent of Europe’s road fuel could come from biofuels produced using waste from farming, forestry, municipal garbage collection, and other sources.

That’s the finding from a new report by the European biofuel industry and other non-governmental organizations, which was picked up by the Guardian and BusinessGreen.

All told, agriculture, forestry, and municipal waste produces around 900 million metric tons of possible biofuel feedstock a year. But the researchers estimated only 223 to 225 million metric tons — about a quarter — can be diverted to biofuel use in ways that don’t ultimately add to greenhouse gas emissions. At the current rates at which biomass can be converted into biofuel, that would supply as much as 16 percent of the European Union’s road transportation needs by 2030. (Though in reality, the heating and electricity generating sectors would be competing to use the biofuel as well.) Road transportation is one of the few sectors of the European economy where carbon emissions have risen rapidly in recent years — it’s on track to become the EU’s biggest source of emissions by 2030.

The study considered three different methodologies for turning biomass into fuel: biochemical ethanol, which uses enzymes to break the cellulose down into simple sugars and then converts them into ethanol; FT-diesel, which gasifies the feedstocks and then converts them into diesel or gasoline; and pyrolysis, an alternative form of gasification. It then looked at various wastes — wheat straw from farming, slash residue from forestry, sawdust from the timber industry, and municipal solid waste (MSW) — and found they all avoided anywhere from 60 to almost 300 percent of fossil fuels’ greenhouse gas emissions.

Inevitably the calculations for biomass are more complex, since there are so many different possible types of feedstock, all with different calorific values and processing chains, and also may different forms of energy conversion, with different efficiencies. For some types of so-called ‘first generation’ biofuels, the EROEI ratio can be less than 1. Gagnon cites the EROEI ratio for power generation using biomass from plantations as 3-5:1, depending on the transportation distance. Newer types of more efficient bioenergy conversion and second generation biofuels may do better, and so should using already existing biomass: Gagnon cites the EROEI for biomass wastes as 27:1.