Comstock Inc. announced the demonstration of breakthrough cellulosic fuels pathways to produce renewable diesel, marine, sustainable aviation fuel (“SAF”) and gasoline from woody biomass at dramatically improved yield, efficiency, and cost in comparison to all known methods, thereby enabling a massive new renewable fuels feedstock capable of neutralizing more than 40% of America’s mobility emissions well before 2050.
Fuel Plantations
Renewable fuels provide a critical opportunity for decarbonization, however, most of the existing U.S. renewable fuel refineries draw from the same limited pool of constrained feedstocks. Comstock technologies resolve that constraint by unlocking abundant woody biomass feedstocks that are not used today and leverage the Earth’s natural carbon cycle and create extraordinary financial incentives for the entire ecosystem to shift away from releasing long cycle fossil carbon to recycling short cycle renewable carbon – to burning “carbon-neutral fuels” in balance with growing more feedstock.
“There is an abundance of wasted and unused forestry and sawmill residues available now to start impacting this dramatic decarbonization and we will also use our technologies to enable an extremely valuable new “soil to oil” ecosystem that uses vast new “fuel plantations” to capture and use carbon dioxide to produce massive amounts of highly scalable and rapidly replenishable renewable fuels feedstocks,” said Corrado De Gasperis, Comstock’s Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “By unlocking woody biomass, now and in the future, for use in producing drop-in renewable fuels, including for the difficult to decarbonize long haul trucking and aviation sectors, Comstock’s technologies demonstrate that the U.S. can strike and sustain an immensely profitable new net zero balance between the Earth’s living systems and domestic mobility emissions.”
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab has published estimates that the U.S. produces upwards of 100 million tons per year of sawmill and forestry residuals alone. That readily available biomass is sufficient to produce more than 8 billion gallons per year (“BGY”) of drop-in fuels by utilizing Comstock’s technology. Further, just 140 million acres of short rotation trees, such as bamboo, willow and hybrid poplar, would yield enough feedstock biomass to permanently neutralize 40% of America’s mobility emissions with Comstock’s cellulosic fuels processes.
Shovel Ready
Based on current performance data, Comstock projects best-in-class renewable fuel yields exceeding 80 gallons per dry ton (on a gasoline gallon equivalent basis), with lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions reductions well exceeding 80% over petroleum.
By unlocking a massive new sustainable feedstock source, Comstock’s proposed pathway is capable of squarely addressing the goals and objectives of the Biden Administration while creating high-quality jobs, invigorating America’s rural communities, and making a material contribution to achieving the Biden Administration’s objective of delivering net-zero emissions by 2050.
