Page 71 - INC Magazine-November 2018

a Rotten BUSIneSS
Fulcrum BioEnergy turns organic
waste—like these long­past­their­sell­
by­date oranges that now host various
other life forms —into jet fuel.

apart under intense pressure
and heat—basically the same
process the earth used to make
petroleum, minus the dead
dinosaurs and a few hundred
million years of processing
time. (This gasification process
is licensed from yet another
investing partner, Thermo-
Chem Recovery International.)
Gasification converts the
carbon and hydrogen in gar-
bage to a full-fledged hydrocar-
bon, the chemical basis of oil
and natural gas. The synthetic
fuel—“syngas”—that is pro-
duced, scrubbed of sulfur and
particulates, is then refined
into jet fuel. Currently, Ful-
UP crum is using investor partners
next/ to handle that last step, but it
just broke ground on its own
eneRGy refinery, also in Reno.
Macias was becoming a
cReatInG dinosaur of sorts himself:
SoMethInG agement and Waste Connec- He worked for PG&E for two
We need tions on the front end, and decades. But rather than go
fRoM jet-fuel customers United extinct, he evolved, joining
Airlines and Cathay Pacific
independent power producer
SoMethInG on the back. For the airlines, Calpine at the dawn of electric-
We don’t Fulcrum hedges against rising ity deregulation in the 1990s.
fuel costs. For the Department There, he helped founder Peter
of Defense—which awarded Cartwright stamp out a fleet of
p a gallon. Even for this notori- Fulcrum a $70 million grant— efficient power plants across
ously challenging sector, that it offsets supply risk. the country using a standard-
math works. At Fulcrum’s first large- ized design. He’s following a
A
A common thread runs common thread runs Fulcrum, which is based in scale feedstock-processing similar blueprint with Ful-
through the history of the Pleasanton, California, didn’t facility, near Reno, Nevada, crum. Having searched far and
waste-to-energy business: set out to build a better mouse- trailers offload redolent cargo wide for the best processes, in
Investors get the sequence trap, says co-founder and into large bays where special- every phase, to create the ideal
w
wrong. Entrepreneurs’ energy rong. Entrepreneurs’ energy president-CEO Jim Macias. It ized equipment strips out waste-to-energy plant, he aims
gets expended, and capital is set out to assemble all the best inorganic waste—think plas- to quickly scale by using its
converted to waste. Fulcrum available mousetrap parts—and tics. It’s sort of reverse recy- design to build cookie-cutter
BioEnergy took a different de-risk the business model. cling. Fulcrum uses municipal plants.
tack, by spending $100 million, “We’re the only company that’s solid waste as a source because Fulcrum has plans to build
and a decade, figuring out not tied to a single piece of its supply is more predictable— plants in Chicago—where
exactly what works best. In technology,” he says. “Our indeed, its supply is inevi- United Airlines is headquar-
2019, it will be gathering financial partners took a differ- table—than that of biomass tered—as well as Houston and
municipal solid waste—which ent approach—that the better sources typically used by com- Seattle and in the U.K Airline
costs next to nothing—and business model is to be an parable companies, such as traffic is forecast to double by
c converting it into Jet A, the onverting it into Jet A, the integrator.” Macias is a pretty corn or switchgrass. 2036. You might say Macias’s anZenberger agency
fuel that powers airliners and good integrator himself: His The organic material goes business is ready to take off.
currently sells for about $5.20 investors include Waste Man- into a vessel, where it breaks —BILL SAPORITO

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