Defying the aforementioned theory of crude oil creation, Sustainable Power Corp. has figured out a way to do just that. Established by founder and Chairman John Rivera from its Natchez, Miss.-based parent company U.S. Sustainable Energy Corp. in 2006, Sustainable Power Corp. also goes by the name Baytown Green Energy Consortium. The company uses a proprietary catalytic process technology capable of producing between 6,700 and 24,000 gallons per day of both light and heavy fractions of its branded biocrude oil—Vertroleum—from its four-reactor demonstration facility in Baytown, Texas, using any type of hydrocarbon waste biomass imaginable.
“It took 20 years of research to come up with this technology,” says Rivera, a West Palm Beach, Fla., native who earned an honorary doctoral degree from South America. Rivera was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last year in Central America. “I’m against all academia,” Rivera says. “I’ve had scientists and engineers tell me that all crude oil comes from vegetation and 50 billion years later you get oil from the ground. This isn’t a
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production process; this is a ‘time machine.”
Before establishing Sustainable Power, however, Rivera’s journey to find prominence came with inherent challenges. Previously, he had been refining and developing an innovative catalytic pyrolysis conversion process while working for GWE Systems Inc., a start-up company that explored the conversion of tire scraps into oil and gas. In July 2003, the company initially pursued a proposed joint venture with a Mexican tire recycler to convert raw materials recovered from the tires in various subsidiary ventures, including a project to supply excess oil and gas to the Mexican power grid.
The Rivera and GWE Systems project went defunct, but Rivera later invested more than $500,000 to build his own 40-foot reactor to serve that same purpose. Being a hydrocarbon feedstock, he knew that if he could filter the microscopic tire particles that have been processed by mechanical means he could create a black carbon, a critical ingredient used for government print ink and acrylic paint for the marine industry and the military. Rivera also offered his carbon product to the automotive industry where he sold it as an agent in spray-on truck bed liner. After not finding profit in those industries, Rivera then had a notion to process soybeans in the reactors. He took 20 pounds of soybeans and produced 2 gallons of fuel, 1˝ hours worth of biogas and a solid carbon byproduct.
“At the time I thought I had made biodiesel,” Rivera says. He was wrong.
He sent his product to AmSpec Services LLC for further analysis. The testing company toured the Baytown demonstration facility to see how Rivera produced the peculiar organic product. For 20 years, AmSpec has independently analyzed and measured petroleum and petrochemical products at its Texas and New Jersey testing locations.
“They told me I’m an idiot,” he says. “They told me that I’m making a light petroleum distillate out of vegetation. It’s not biodiesel. I guess that’s how this whole thing started. It just kind of snowballed from there.”
Inside the ‘Rivera Process’
According to Rivera, Vertroleum is created by “chemical hydrolysis with a modified pyrolysis and the use of nano bacteria,” which he dubbed the “Rivera Process.”
Containing the same hydrocarbons as petroleum crude oil, Vertroleum is a mixture of hydrocarbons C-5 pentane and C-20 eicosane. When used in the same distillation process used by petroleum companies, Vertroleum can be further refined to produce a biogasoline (BG-100), a substitute for gasoline E85 in flexible-fuel vehicles, biokerosene (jet fuel), a diesel blendstock (OD-66), naptha (an octane enhancer), heating fuel, refined diesel, pharmaceutical grade glycerin, tars and plastics. The company’s biocrude oil can be refined into 69 other renewable fuels or chemical materials as certified by AmSpec. In addition, AmSpec verified that most of the bio-crude “cuts” meet or exceed ASTM standards whereby the product doesn’t need tier testing.
Sustainable Power can use a variety of cellulosic biomass feedstocks including palm waste, jatropha, milo, rapeseed, chopped soybeans, sunflowers, distillers dried grains and other raw agricultural waste materials. Before feedstocks enter its 60-foot reactor, Sustainable Power tests the feasibility of the feedstock by putting it through a mini reactor, enabling the firm to document data such as input volume versus yield, natural gas output and fertilizer output.
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