Sundrop Fuels announces its hybrid solar biomass refinery

Talk about biofuels has waxed and waned over the past decade.  On one hand, people are excited about an alternative fuel to gasoline or diesel.  On the flip side are concerns about the amount of energy it takes to produce a barrel of biofuels.  Add into the mix the idea that taking corn off our plates and into our fuel tanks may not make the most sense!

Sundrop Fuels has come up with a way to address these issues, with its hybrid solar biomass refinery.  The New-Mexico based company plans to produce bio-ethanol using concentrated solar power (CSP) technology.  Instead of the end-product being solar electricity, biofuel is the product created by superheating plant scraps and woodchips with parabolic reflective mirrors.

Solar power is the key component to Sundrop Fuels’ reduction of energy consumption at the refinery.  Using a SurroundSun reactor, the technology borrows heavily from the CSP process that is used to generate solar thermal electricity.  However, there is an important difference.  Whereas concentrated solar power generally focuses solar heat on water and/or molten salts, the hybrid solar biomass refinery will “blast organic materials with super high temperatures…tearing apart the materials at the molecular level…which creates a synthetic gas that can be formed into gasoline or diesel,” said Sundrop CEO Wayne Simmons.

A typical concentrated solar power plant

Using the new technology, Sundrop Fuels claims that it can save up to 1/3 of its energy costs in producing bio-ethanol at the solar biomass refinery.  Another downside of biofuel production – competition with food supply – is also addressed through the use of plant scraps and wood chips that would otherwise be burned or discarded.

A call for investors has been made so that Sundrop can build a demonstration project in the next 2 years, by 2012.  That one plant alone could create 8 million gallons of alternative fuel each year!  The balance of the decade would be devoted to expanding into foreign markets that have demonstrated to be ideal solar power markets (North Africa, China and the Middle East).