Grön Fuels selects HydroFlex, H2bridge technologies for renewable diesel project

Photo: Haldor Topsoe

Fidelis Infrastructure’s Grön Fuels biorefinery—a large-scale, multiphase project at a site leased from the Port of Greater Baton Rouge near Port Allen, Louisiana—has chosen Haldor Topsoe’s HydroFlex hydrotreating process technology to produce renewable diesel, with an option to also manufacture sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). The two companies are working together to design the plant to be able to produce “renewable arctic diesel” whose cloud point would be as low as minus 40 degrees without additives.

In addition, the facility will utilize Haldor Topsoe’s H2bridge technology to generate its own renewable bio-hydrogen equivalent to the production of a 1,000-megawatt hydrolyser plant “at a fraction of the cost,” according to Haldor Topsoe.

Hydrogen is necessary in the hydrotreating process to refine renewable diesel from feedstocks to be used at the Grön Fuels plant, such as soybean oil, canola oil, distillers corn oil, tallow, used cooking oil and more.

Grön Fuels will sell any bio-hydrogen not used for its own renewable diesel production on-site, which can be shipped by the roughly 600 miles of hydrogen pipelines located near Grön Fuels’ site.

“Haldor Topsoe’s people and proven technologies have been instrumental in the development of the Grön Fuels facility as an on-purpose, low-carbon intensity renewable fuel production facility utilizing bio-hydrogen rather than fossil-based hydrogen in the hydrotreating process,” said Bengt Jarlsjo, partner and co-founder of Fidelis Infrastructure.

The process design of Grön Fuels will also include bio-carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) to pursue negative carbon intensity renewable fuel production, if Fidelis Infrastructure chooses to pursue this. This would involve an option to capture 1 million tons of CO2 per year for sequestration in deep saline aquifers below the project site.

A final investment decision for Phase 1 is expected in 2021 and, provided funding and approval, completion of Grön Fuels’ Phase 1 is expected in 2024. Phase 1 production capacity is scaled at more than 900 MMgy.