Louisiana Green Fuels Fund Updates > LGF Technology Set Update

LGF Technology Set Update

The Sierra Biofuels plant (developed by Fulcrum Bioenergy) and Louisiana Green Fuels plant (developed by Strategic Biofuels) are using near identical technology sets at similar scale to produce renewable fuels. The Sierra Biofuels plant was mechanically complete a few months back, they got their feedstock processing facility up and running recently, and we wanted to highlight that this week they confirmed they are now producing SynGas. This is the most difficult part of liquid fuel production, as from here is it is just a series of basic chemical processes to convert the SynGas to liquid fuel.

There are a few key differences between the Sierra Biofuels plant and Louisiana Green Fuels plant. Sierra Biofuels is converting municipal landfill (a more complex feedstock to process than the homogenous waste-wood feedstock used for the LGF project) and Sierra Biofuels will produce Sustainable Aviation Fuel (so a lower yielding fuel than the Renewable Diesel produced by LGF). In addition, Sierra Biofuels does not incorporate carbon capture and sequestration, so Sierra Biofuels will generate significantly fewer carbon credits per gallon of fuel produced compared to what can be monetized by LGF.

The U.S. Department of Energy has a Technology Readiness Level (“TRL”) rating system which is a metric used for describing technology maturity. It is a measure used by many U.S. government agencies to assess maturity of evolving technologies (materials, components, devices, etc.) prior to incorporating that technology into a system or subsystem. TRL 9 is the highest (most mature) rating. As you can see below, all the systems in the Louisiana Green Fuels technology set are graded either TRL 8 or TRL 9.

  • TRL 8: The technology has been proven to work in its final form and under expected conditions.

  • TRL 9: The technology is in its final form and operated under the full range of operating mission conditions.

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