Longmont-based Sundrop Fuels, Inc. said Wednesday it has entered a partnership with engineering services company ThyssenKrupp Uhde on the nation’s first commercial “green gasoline” plant.
Uhde Corporation of America, a unit of ThyssenKrupp USA, will be responsible for the front-end design support for the plant, which will be located near Alexandria, La. Sundrop’s plant will yield up to 50 million gallons of renewable gasoline annually.
The plant will cost between $450 million and $500 million and employ 150 people, according to Sundrop spokesman Steven Silvers. The “green gasoline” — which Sundrop Fuels calls clean and affordable — is ready for immediate use in today’s combustion engines.
The facility will also serve as a proving ground for Sundrop Fuels’ proprietary biomass conversion technologies that will be used for future large-scale facilities, Sundrop said.
Silvers said the ground breaking is planned for December and the plant should be fully operational sometime in 2014 .
He said Sundrop Fuels will use forest residues — such as tree tops, branches, dead wood and younger trees that are being thinned under a thinning program — and combine them with a high temperature gasifier to make the “green gasoline.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com.
