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our history

March 2013 | Sundrop Fuels President and CEO Wayne Simmons is named Board Chairman of the Advanced Biofuels Association (ABFA).

February 2013 | Sundrop Fuels finalizes the purchase of 1,213 acres off Interstate 49 northwest of Alexandria in Boyce, Louisiana for the company’s inaugural facility.  The 15,000 barrel per day plant represents the first phase in the company’s path toward becoming a large-scale provider of renewable, drop-in biogasoline.

December 2012 | Sundrop Fuels purchases the 27.5-acre property, formerly known as “Cowboy Town,” adjacent to its future Louisiana facility to serve as the location of the company’s regional headquarters, research laboratories and biomass warehouse facilities.

Sundrop Fuels, Inc. is a privately-held advanced biofuels company with corporate headquarters in Longmont, Colorado. The company is preparing to launch construction in Central Louisiana of its inaugural fuels facility, a production plant representing the first phase in Sundrop Fuels’ path toward becoming the nation’s premier mass-scale provider of renewable, drop-in biogasoline.

Unlike other biofuels production methods that typically burn considerable amounts of feedstock to generate the heat necessary for conversion, Sundrop Fuels adds hydrogen and heat from clean-burning, American natural gas to create a process that converts virtually all of the biomaterial used into actual liquid fuel. This ultra-efficiency positions Sundrop Fuels to compete directly with petroleum products by delivering to the market an ultra-clean, renewable advanced biofuel for an estimated unsubsidized cost of about $2 per gallon.

As importantly, Sundrop Fuels’ product lifecycle reduces significantly the amount of greenhouse gas released into the atmosphere as compared to today's petroleum-based fuels.

For these and many other reasons, the Sundrop Fuels’ approach to renewable, immediately-useable transportation fuel production represents the best possible use of the nation’s critical energy, economic and environmental resources.

Sundrop Fuels is backed by its strategic partner, Chesapeake Energy Corp., and by two of the world’s premier venture groups, Oak Investment Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. The company’s management team is led by recognized, highly accomplished industry veterans from the energy, chemical, manufacturing and technology fields.

At the center of its advanced biofuels production is the Sundrop Fuels proprietary, ultra-high temperature pressurized bioreforming system.  Inside a specially-designed thermochemical reactor, biomass is quickly converted, then combined with hydrogen from clean-burning natural gas to create a renewable feed stream – the key ingredient for biogasoline that is 100 percent compatible with today’s combustion engines and transportation fuels infrastructure.  Sundrop Fuels first converts this renewable feed into methanol using a syngas-to-methanol process, then creates “green gasoline” using a commercially-established methanol-to-gasoline (MTG) fuels synthesis. 

Sundrop Fuels’ innovative bioreforming production method is unique from conventional biomass gasification in that it uses indirect radiation heat transfer to rapidly drive the extremely high temperatures needed to create the renewable gas feed, which is then processed to create liquid advanced cellulosic biofuel.  Using natural gas, temperatures inside the Sundrop Fuels radiation-driven bioreformer reach more 1,400 degrees Celsius (2,552 degrees Fahrenheit) – hotter than lava flowing from a volcano.

By steadily maintaining these ultra-high temperatures to drive the endothermic bioreforming reaction, the Sundrop Fuels process operates at an extraordinary high-efficiency, producing more yield of renewable liquid fuel per ton of biomass feedstock than any other production method.

As importantly, the Sundrop Fuels biogasoline production path significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions as compared to the production of conventional petroleum fuels. Every gallon of Sundrop Fuels drop-in cellulosic advanced biofuel will generate RIN credits under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).

Sundrop Fuels is currently in engineering design stage for its inaugural production facility located just outside of Alexandria, Louisiana – the first operational milestone in the company’s path toward becoming a mass-scale provider of renewable, drop-in biogasoline.  When fully operational, Sundrop Fuels’ first facility will produce 15,000 barrels per day of finished, 87-octane gasoline.  It will also represent the world’s largest commercial production of cellulosic advanced biofuel using methanol-to-gasoline (MTG) technology, which was originally demonstrated as a commercially available process in the 1980s.