WM joins investors in new conversion technology

Waste Management, Inc. and Terrabon, L.L.C., announced an agreement by Waste Management to invest in Terrabon’s unique waste-to-fuel conversion technology.

Waste Management joins Valero Energy Corporation which also invested in Terrabon in April 2009 and recently increased its investment in Terrabon. This investment from Waste Management and Valero will be used by Terrabon to advance the scalability of their technology.

Waste Management will also assist Terrabon in securing organic waste streams, which Terrabon will use to produce high-octane gasoline using its MixAlco technology. MixAlco is an acid fermentation process that converts biomass into organic salts.

The resulting non-hazardous organic salts, or bio-crude, would be then shipped by truck, rail or pipeline to a Valero refinery or other centralized processing facility where it would be converted to a high-octane gasoline that can be blended directly into a refiner’s fuel pool, avoiding many of the blending and logistics challenges presented by ethanol. Terrabon recently successfully completed the production of gasoline from sorghum biomass at its advanced biofuels research facility in Bryan, Texas.