Brightmark Energy, a San Francisco-based waste and energy development company, announced the closing of a $260 million financing package for the construction of the nation’s first commercial scale plastics-to-fuel plant, which will be located in Ashley, Indiana.
The financing for Brightmark Energy Ashley Indiana includes $185 million in Indiana green bonds, which were underwritten by Goldman Sachs & Co. As part of the financing closure, Brightmark has become the controlling owner of RES Polyflow, an Ohio-based energy technology company that innovated the process for converting plastics directly into transportation fuel and other products.
The Ashley facility will be the first of its kind to take mixed waste single use plastics and convert them into usable products at commercial scale. The facility will initially convert approximately 100,000 tons of plastics into over 18 million gallons per year of ultra-low sulfur diesel and naphtha blend stocks and nearly six million gallons a year of commercial grade wax in a process that is expected to be 93 percent efficient. Ultimately, the output of this technology could also be used to produce the feedstocks necessary for manufacturing plastic again.
“We are excited about the market’s confidence in the validity of this technology to economically convert single-use plastics for new uses,” said Bob Powell, chief executive officer of Brightmark Energy and of RES Polyflow.
RES Polyflow’s plastics-to-fuel process sustainably recycles waste that has reached the end of its useful life – including items that cannot readily be recycled, like plastic film, flexible packing, styrofoam and children’s toys – directly into useful products, like fuels and wax.
According to analysis released this week by Closed Loop Partners, there is an existing $120 billion addressable market in the U.S. and Canada for plastics and petrochemicals that could be met, in part, by recovering waste plastics like those used as feedstock in the Ashley, Indiana facility.
Published in the June 2019 Edition