Creating Gasoline With Solar Power, Biomass

POSTED: 5:26 pm MDT March 30, 2010 UPDATED: 5:49 pm MDT March 30, 2010

BROOMFIELD, Colo. -- These days, "green energy" is a buzz phrase, especially in Colorado. And while many companies are focused on creating alternative fuel, a local business has come up with a way to use green energy to produce traditional fuel, using two resources abundant in our state.

"No one in the world is doing what we are doing," said Wayne Simmons, CEO of Sundrop Fuels. "Using concentrated solar power to convert biomass to synthesis gas, and then on to diesel or renewable gasoline."

Sundrop Fuels' research and development facility in Broomfield may represent the future of green fuel production, made possible by harnessing the power of the sun. Here's how it works:

"We have about three acres of solar mirrors, and we are shining them up on the tower," said Simmons. "And inside the tower, there is a solar furnace."

"The temperatures inside the receiver are in excess of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit," said Richard Ridley, the facility manager for Sundrop Fuels.

The solar furnace burns biomass, which can be ground up rice hulls or even pine beetle kill, essentially bio waste.

"When you heat it in the absence of air, it doesn't burn, it just turns into a gas," said Ridley. "And the primary gas there is hydrogen and carbon monoxide."

"We can then take that carbon monoxide and hydrogen and use commercial processes to turn it into gasoline and diesel," said Simmons.

And this method produces the building blocks for transportation fuels, without consuming additional energy.

"Any other commercial process would burn natural gas or use electricity, we are using strictly solar power to generate the heat," said Ridley.

This revolutionary process uses green energy to create traditional energy, without creating new greenhouse gasses in the process.

Sundrop Fuels plans to build out a "solar park" complex of bio-refineries in the Southwestern U.S. The company anticipates the production of up to 1 billion gallons of clean gas and diesel fuel each year.

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