Greenstar Recycling and Vadxx Energy Partner to Turn Recycled Plastics to Oil
HOUSTON and CLEVELAND (June 24, 2011) – Greenstar Recycling (Houston, TX) has signed a Memorandum of Understanding to form a joint venture (JV) with Vadxx Energy, LLC (Cleveland, OH) to convert recovered plastic into synthetic crude oil. Through this JV, Greenstar and Vadxx will work together to provide a domestic fuel, and benefit the environment by repurposing recovered plastic products.
“Vadxx will help us recover plastics from the material stream and repurpose them as feedstock for the production of oil,” said Matt Delnick, Greenstar CEO. “This JV will help us better serve our municipal customers by providing a more consistent market value for their plastics that are otherwise largely unmarketable. It will increase recovery rates by pulling more plastics out of landfills.”
Using proprietary processes, Vadxx manufactures synthetic crude oil and natural gas by using raw material feedstock consisting of petroleum-based plastics in a process called thermal depolymerization. Greenstar chose Vadxx as its partner in plastics to energy because of Vadxx’s potential to scale to commercial size and capacity based on Vadxx’s continuous feed process, flexible design and expandable system. “Plastics are made from oil, and Vadxx has figured out how to create the lowest sulfur content crude oil in the world, from a commodity that might otherwise occupy space in landfills,” stated Jim Garrett Vadxx CEO. “We are thrilled to partner with Greenstar, one of the top recyclers in the U.S. The Vadxx equity partnership with its feedstock suppliers is a key component of our business model, which features a low capital investment compared to the expected return from oil sales.”
Greenstar and Vadxx expect that the JV will begin producing crude oil in mid-2012 with the target location for the project in Ohio.
ABOUT GREENSTAR RECYCLING
Greenstar is one of America’s recycling leaders providing sustainable recycling solutions in the recycle processing, commodity upgrading, managed services and commodity trading sectors of the solid waste market. Greenstar launched its North American operations in 2007 and has grown quickly to become one of the largest recycling companies in America. The company handles two million tons of recyclables per year, servicing over 12 million customers through a network of 14 processing facilities with over 10,000 managed services locations.
For more information visit www.GreenstarRecycling.com.
ABOUT VADXX
Vadxx has developed proprietary processes that transform discarded petroleum based products, including plastics, tires, other polymer-based products and oils, into synthetic crude oil and natural gas. The oil is sold through an energy marketer who sells the crude to oil refiners to produce gasoline and other products. The gas is utilized to generate electricity. Vadxx operates a crude oil production demonstration plant at its Akron, OH facility.
For more information visit www.Vadxx.com.
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About Christopher DeMorro
Changing World Technologies claimed to be able to do this same thing, using thermal de-polymerization, back in 2002, if memory serves. But even with a high energy feedstock like turkey guts/offal, they weren’t able to do it at a profit unless the feedstock was free. In the wake of the mad cow outbreak in the UK it was thought that offal would not be allowed to be fed to animals but it is still being sold as feed so CWT went out of business, or they have been awfully quiet about their Carthage plant anyway.
I wonder if these two companies are going to be paid to dispose of plastic trash rather than having to pay for their feedstock. If they are paid to take the trash out, or simply don’t have to pay for it, they might make a profit relatively quickly.
Don’t forget, ladies and gentlemen, that energy cannot be created or destroyed: it merely changes form. This means that we’re going to be spending the same amount (or more) energy to make these synfuels as we will receive from them.
We’re going to have to burn a lot of coal to power that oxygen removal, mechanical action, and heat!
Doyle, I don’t think that the TDP process requires much, if any, outside energy source. At least it didn’t with turkey guts. They harvested diesel fuel, fuel oil and methanol and the idea was that they would sell the diesel and fuel oil and use the methanol to power the plants operation. It was something like 70% efficient, so if they got guts with 100,000 BTU’s in feed stock, they would get 70,000 BTU’s worth of diesel, fuel oil and methanol. Of which they would sell 50k BTUs of diesel and fuel oil and use 20k BTUs of methanol to operate the plant. Part of the appeal was that they didn’t have to re-heat the next load of feed stock from scratch, they were using the energy from the load before that they harvested when the released the pressure. But it wasn’t profitable because the feed stock wasn’t free.
Obviously using offal for energy instead of feeding it to cattle or chickens has costs inherent in it, but using plastics that are being tossed out might be a better use of the process.
I suppose that is true. I was still operating under the premise that they’d have to supply some of the fuel energy. In fact, they could probably make a profit on simply disposing of this waste – I know that is part of the Solena business model.
Thanks for the coverage and the easy to understand diagram. We are excited to launch this innovative technology in Ohio with Vadxx.
Keep those plastics out of landfill and turn it into oil!