Products
Using Pacific Renewable Fuels & Chemicals (PRFC) next generation process and catalyst technologies, the economical production of renewable fuels and sustainable chemicals can be achieved at distributed plants that have the ability to utilize a wide variety of feedstocks. The capability to economically produce fuels or chemicals at distributed plants allows the production facility to be located close to the resource, thus improving economics.
Products that are produced using PRFC’s technologies include:
Renewable Fuels: Terra™ Synthetic Diesel is a clean, direct petroleum replacement that has a high cetane value, no sulfur, and excellent lubricity. Terra™ Synthetic Diesel is not a “bio-diesel”, but a high quality synthetic diesel fuel that improves diesel engine performance and reduces emissions. Terra™ Synthetic Diesel has long term storage stability, is totally compatible with today's diesel engines, and can be blended at much higher levels than typical biofuels. Furthermore, Terra™ Synthetic Diesel is infrastructure compatible, meaning that it can be used in existing pipelines, tanks, and other infrastructure without requiring upgrades.
Terra™ Synthetic Diesel is produced using PRFC’s Terra™ Diesel Catalysts that have been tailored to produce a clean, high value diesel product directly from syngas. Terra™ Synthetic Diesel can be used neat or is an ideal blendstock. When used as a blendstock, Terra™ Synthetic Diesel improves engine performance and reduces emissions by increasing cetane, reducing sulfur, and improving lubricity.
When biomass is used as a renewable feedstock, average greenhouse gas reductions of 89% are achieved over traditional diesel. Using a 20% blend of Terra™ Synthetic Diesel can reduce the overall GHG content of traditional diesel by more than 17%, helping blenders, refiners, and other customers exceed EPA requirements and California Low Carbon Fuels Standards (LCFS). Moreover, when used in today’s diesel engines, Terra™ Synthetic Diesel produces significantly less particulate matter, NOx, carbon monoxide and other emissions over petroleum fuels.
Sustainable Chemicals: Ethos™ Chemicals products include higher alcohols, olefins, and waxes. Ethos™ Chemicals are high quality and sustainable chemicals that have superior performance for a variety of uses including detergents, surfactants, solvents, cosmetics, fuel additives, and many others.
PRFC customers and partners that produce Ethos™ Chemicals using waste biomass as a feedstock can achieve greater than an 85% greenhouse gas reduction over traditional, petroleum derived chemicals. Furthermore, our Ethos™ Chemicals do not have the negative environmental consequences of production from palm oil (“Oleochemicals”) that often result in massive deforestation.
The Ethos™ Chemicals are interesting to legacy chemicals companies since our processes reduce chemical production costs, enable the use of a renewable feedstock, and provide a way to economically compete with petroleum derived chemicals overseas.
Feedstocks that can be used to produce fuels or chemicals using PRFC’s technologies include:
Waste Biomass: Biomass is organic material from plants or animals that cannot be used for food, and is sustainable, renewable, and is in abundant supply worldwide. Examples include agricultural wastes (such as rice hulls, straw, or corn cobs), energy crops (such as giant king grass or switch grass), or forest residues. Since a thermochemical process is used, a wide variety of biomass feedstock can be used with varying sizes and moisture contents. This flexibility eliminates issues related to fluctuations in feedstock at commercial facilities and allows operators to switch between feedstocks in the event of changes in market prices. Biomass is first converted to a clean syngas with the ideal hydrogen to carbon monoxide ratio, and then to either fuels or chemicals.
Carbon Dioxide (CO2): When blended with natural gas, carbon dioxide from industrial point sources can be used as a valuable carbon feedstock and converted to syngas using PRFC’s CO2Reform™ process. This syngas is then converted to fuels or chemicals using PRFC’s Synergy™ processes and either our Terra™ catalysts (for diesel fuel production) or our Ethos™ catalysts (for chemicals production).These processes and catalysts can be used to convert carbon dioxide into high quality fuels and chemicals from industrial sources such as coal and natural gas fired power plants, natural gas processing facilities, cement and ethanol production plants, landfills, and other stationary processes that produce undesirable carbon dioxide emissions.
Stranded Natural Gas: There is a significant amount of stranded natural gas in the world that is easily converted to syngas using well known steam methane reforming (SMR), auto-thermal reforming (ATR), partial oxidation (POX), or other methods. This syngas is then economically and efficiently converted to fuels or chemicals using PRFC’s Synergy™ processes and either Terra™ or Ethos™ catalysts. The production of valuable liquid products at stranded natural gas sites allows the product to be easily distributed to markets, turning a low value feedstock into a high value product.
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