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Thursday, July 17, 2008

New Energy Company, Solid Recovered Fuel, Offers Combined Energy, Waste Solutions

BUSINESS WIRE--As businesses and governments struggle with the twin challenges of energy costs and solid waste disposal, a new company headed by leaders in the energy and solid waste industries offers technology and expertise to turn waste into energy.

Solid Recovered Fuel (SRF), headquartered in Atlanta and led by former CEOs of Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas and Southern Company Gas, and the president of a leading waste management company, will design, build and operate facilities to convert municipal solid waste (MSW) to clean, efficient, renewable synthesis gas, called syngas.

Ronald Bertasi, former president and CEO, Southern Company Gas, and former president and CEO, Southern Company Energy Solutions, is CEO of the new business and serves on its board. Simon Rich, who is former chairman and CEO of Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas, former president of Louis Dreyfus Holding Corp. and currently chairman of Fuqua Rich Weeks private equity firm, is chairman and serves on the board along with Norbert Hector, president of MRR Southern, a Raleigh-based solid waste management company.

Other investors and SRF board members are: Ray Weeks, chairman of Weeks Robinson Properties; Rex Fuqua, president and CEO of Fuqua Capital; Ed Weisiger, Jr., president and CEO of Carolina Tractor; and David Griffin, Jr., CEO of D.H. Griffin Wrecking Co., Inc.

SRF takes a technically advanced yet pragmatic approach to converting MSW into cost-efficient, cleaner energy. By utilizing 70% of the MSW stream, the SRF process greatly reduces the need for landfill capacity while producing a clean, renewable fuel.

Market conditions are driving innovation in waste to energy conversion and applicability, said Bertasi. We put the pieces together to give a business, utility or a public facility the ability to convert MSW, including its own waste stream, into syngasa form of energy that is adaptable to a range of uses, and is also carbon neutral. This system is good for companies because it reduces their costs and helps them reduce their carbon footprints, and its also good for the environment because it recycles waste while replacing fossil fuels.

The SRF solution:

  • Receives and processes MSW at a material recovery facility;
  • Recovers recyclables from the waste stream;
  • Creates a low-cost RDF as loose or pellet feedstock;
  • Converts RDF to clean-burning syngas using a patented, proven fluidized bed gasification technology;
  • Supplies syngas to customers new or existing facilities for co-firing with other fuels or firing on a stand-alone basis;
  • Provides a carbon-neutral, renewable fuel;
  • Reduces fuel costs substantially relative to natural gas and syngas produced from coal or biomass;
  • Produces syngas that can also be utilized as a feedstock for downstream production of chemical products, synthetic natural gas or liquid fuels.

Environmental and business benefits

By eliminating 70% of the MSW entering a landfill, SRFs process greatly reduces landfill emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and dramatically reduces the need for landfill space. SRFs process captures all recyclable material from the waste stream for re-use. Syngas produced by SRF is renewable and carbon neutral, and when replacing fossil fuels greatly reduces emissions of carbon dioxide.

SRF gives businesses access to energy at much lower cost than natural gas or syngas produced from other sources, such as coal, sawdust, waste wood or other biomass. In addition, SRF can provide long-term, fixed price contracts, eliminating the price volatility of fossil fuels. Customers gain the benefit of an environmentally sound fuel at reduced cost, with price certainty.

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