Sustainable Transportation Fuels (STF) Develops New Cost-Effective, Sustainable Biofuel Solution
Every form of transportation available today causes some environmental harm. Taking fossil fuel out of the earth and combusting it for transportation releases air pollution and greenhouse gases. Electric vehicles come with their own set of environmental problems, including electricity that is sometimes generated from fossil fuels, and the toxic elements that go into making the batteries. But what if transportation fuel can be made from biomass that captures and reuses the carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere?
Biofuels have been derived from agriculture plants for years, but until now, they could not be produced economically to compete with fossil fuels. These plant derived fuels have unfortunately competed with food production, using arable land, resulting in increased food prices. The newly developed, patent-pending process from Sustainable Transportation Fuels (STF) can extract biocrude oil from algae and Azolla plants, or other biomass, that is not a food source, on non-arable land. The process uses heat and pressure efficiently, resulting in a cost-effective and sustainable source of transportation fuel.
Through STF’s new patent-pending process, a combination of algae and Azolla plants or other highly productive biomass is mass cultivated in a concentrated space, using hydroponics and established vertical cultivation techniques to produce a biocrude oil to feed existing regular fossil fuel-based oil refineries. The refineries convert this biocrude into sustainable transportation fuels. These transportation fuels can then be used in the existing distribution networks and transportation fleets, and the carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere on combustion can then be recaptured again to generate more biomass, to create more transportation fuels. The new process is a unique combination of mostly established commercial processes that have been successfully integrated in a proprietary manner.
An independent evaluation by Boundless Impact Research and Analytics a company committed to impartiality and objectivity in their environmental impact analysis, industry research and operations evaluated the STF process and determined that following a comprehensive life cycle analysis (LCA) resulted in a negative footprint of -296 CO2 e/BBL of crude oil. The report states:
“…The conceptual process by Sustainable Transportation Fuels demonstrated the potential to significantly improve energy efficiency and reduce costs via system integration and technology innovations. The key to success is to achieve net zero energy input (excluding energy in biomass) and nearly zero waste output. With such assumption/goal, the LCA demonstrated a negative GHG footprint of -296 kg CO2e/BBL of biocrude oil from STF process, which is very encouraging and impactful…”
ABOUT STF – Founded in 2023 by engineer Arnold Keller, STF looks to displace traditional fossil fuel production. Keller has more than 50 years of experience in process chemical engineering working for major EPC companies and a vertical integrated oil company. He has been an independent process consultant since 2009.
“It is wasteful to render all our existing vehicles and fuel infrastructure obsolete. It would require immense expense to replace them all with electric vehicles, and to build the additional power grids, charging stations and infrastructure to support an incomplete solution,” says founder Arnold Keller. “With our new process we can minimize fossil crude oil extraction, while still keeping our existing planes, trucks, cars, gas stations, and all other oil-based infrastructure in place; forever recycling the carbon dioxide that’s already in the atmosphere, without having to add more carbon dioxide that would further heat our planet.”
While there are many efforts to identify paths to transportation becoming fossil fuel-free, some research suggests that a total overhaul of the transportation system from fossil derived crude oil to electricity could be worse for the environment than the continuation of the current fossil fuel-based economy. By using renewable natural resources, fuel from STF’s new process could be combusted in the same engines that currently use fossil fuels, and the carbon dioxide that is released can be recaptured from the atmosphere time and again, in an infinite cycle, significantly reducing the amount of new fossil fuel extracted from the earth.