Presque Isle firm employed to work on $100M biofuel venture
A Presque Isle agency will design and lead building on a Louisiana firm’s $100 million renewable gasoline plant.
Delta Biofuel of Jeanerette, Louisiana, has chosen Participant Design Inc. to assist engineer and provide a facility that can flip sugarcane residue — referred to as bagasse — into gasoline pellets that might be used to provide electrical energy.
The Louisiana plant is anticipated to be the primary in North America to make use of bagasse to create such a gasoline for business, in response to Participant Design.
Louisiana was the nation’s high sugarcane producer in 2022, harvesting almost 500,000 acres, in response to the US Division of Agriculture’s Nationwide Agricultural Statistics Service. For comparability, that’s about 10 instances the potato acreage Maine harvested final 12 months.
A few third of the sugarcane finally ends up as fibrous waste, or bagasse, in response to ScienceDirect. Some firms use the waste to make compostable packaging to switch plastics. Delta Biofuels will flip that bagasse into pellets to gasoline electrical energy vegetation.
Delta Biofuel selected the Presque Isle agency to produce the dryers and power system, however then requested the corporate to do all of the engineering, procurement and building work for the $100 million venture, in response to Tyler Participant, mechanical engineer and firm proprietor.
Building is underway, and when full, Delta’s plant will end up an estimated 340,000 metric tons of bagasse pellets a 12 months, Participant Design officers mentioned.
Tyler Participant additionally operates Ok-Pel Industrial Providers in Fort Fairfield and MaineFlame Inc. in Ashland. Earlier this 12 months MaineFlame introduced plans for a $7 million growth of its compressed log enterprise in Ashland.
Participant Design makes a speciality of biomass and renewable power, and builds power techniques that use a number of different fuels in addition to specialised rotary drum dryers for pellet manufacturing, in response to its web site.
Used for energy era, the bagasse pellets will price much less and produce much less greenhouse gasoline than different biomass fuels like wooden pellets, in response to Delta Biofuel.
Neither Participant nor Delta representatives had been instantly accessible for remark.
In an announcement on the Louisiana web site of Gov. John Bel Edwards, CEO Phil Keating mentioned the brand new plant would resolve sugarcane waste issues and lower down on emissions.
