| NextGen's biodiesel process technology utilizes innovative and proprietary process intensification techniques to accelerate and enhance traditional biodiesel reaction kinetics, thus decreasing process time, reducing energy and raw material needs, and increasing product quality. These benefits translate to reduced up-front capital and ongoing operating costs by as much as 50% versus traditional technologies. Additionally, NextGen's systems can be manufactured and shipped to customers in as quickly as 12-18 weeks from the time of order. NextGen currently offers turn-key biodiesel production plants rated for 5 million gallons per year and 10 million gallons per year, but the modular and continuous-flow aspects of the technology make scaling plants up or down easy and cost-effective.
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NextGen employs a number of chemical and physical processes (permutations and variations of chemistry, temperature and pressure) – in real time – to convert fats and oils at greatly reduced reaction times (minutes as compared to hours and days) in a true continuous flow operation. With the NextGen technology, the fats and oils noted above simply move through the process with no need to linger at any particular stage while a reaction is allowed to complete. In other words, the targeted fats and oils are reacted as they pass through the system.
This has several compelling implications for developers and operators of biodiesel production facilities:
- Greatly reduced equipment and related infrastructure needs – reacting the fats and oils as they move through the system versus at several stops along the away simply reduces the amount of tanks, pumps, controls, pipes, utilities, and square feet of floor space required to produce biodiesel.
- Process time – intensifying the chemical reactions involved in biodiesel production accelerates reaction rates. Increased reaction rates correspond to less time required to complete the process, less equipment to manage raw materials as reactions are completed, and overall less labor and other operating and maintenance expenses.
- Greater Native Feedstock Tolerances – standard biodiesel processing will require feedstocks to comply with a range of relevant material specifications – the chemical reactions involved in a conventional process will not produce the desired product quality if feedstocks are out of specification. Intensifying the relevant chemical reactions increases the tolerance of the process to a wider array of feedstocks and enables more liberal material specification requirements.
- These benefits translate to reduced capital and operating expenses and a broader feedstock market for the client – and equate to reduced financial, operational and market risk for the client and its stakeholders.
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Concentrations of risk in the feedstock markets correspond to concentrations of financing and operational risk for developers. These risks increase dramatically with the size of the production facility. Smaller plants simply have smaller risk profiles and are inherently easier for entrepreneurs to finance and operate.
The modular aspect of the NextGen technology allows developers and their financing sources to incur less financial and operating risk as they initiate production at, for example, a 5 or a 10 million gallon per year production facility, and then leverage their free cash flows to scale plant sizes up into their desired markets. An additional 10 million gallon system can simply be plugged into an existing plant with reduced balance of plant costs.
Most standard technologies, regardless of size, are designed to process a specific feedstock at any given time. The modular aspect of the NextGen systems allows operators to dedicate process lines to specific feedstocks or blends of feedstocks (for example, the first 10 million gallon line would process fat based feeds while the second processes oil based feeds).
When a standard processing facility needs to be shut-down for maintenance or has a process upset, the operator’s whole business stops. Modularity enables operators to keep their business operating as lines are iteratively shut-down for maintenance or the like. Standardization with a modular process technology also has compelling regulatory permitting and other operating benefits.
Finally, modularity and reduced equipment and infrastructure needs also translate to rapid delivery cycles (12-18 weeks) and quicker site development (6-9 months) as compared to conventional technologies (18-24 months). |
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