Van Dyk Recycling Solutions equips Nevada waste-to-fuels plant

Norwalk, Connecticut-based Van Dyk Recycling Solutions says it has completed the installation of waste processing equipment and systems for the Fulcrum BioEnergy plant in Sparks, Nevada, near Reno.

That plant has been designed to convert municipal solid waste (MSW) into what Fulcrum calls “low-carbon, low-cost, transportation fuels,” including jet fuel and diesel. Van Dyk calls the plant the “first commercial-scale plant of its kind” in the United States, including both a feedstock processing facility and a biorefinery.

Fulcrum’s feedstock processing facility is located adjacent to the Lockwood Landfill, operated by Houston-based Waste Management Inc. MSW bound for that landfill is now separated at the processing facility, where organic material from the waste is recovered to be prepared as fuel.

The processing facility creates a feedstock that will be trucked to Fulcrum’s nearby biorefinery, where it will undergo Fulcrum’s process of gasification and conversion into liquid fuel. The biorefinery has been designed to convert approximately 175,000 tons of MSW into 10.5 million gallons of “synfuel” each year.

According to Fulcrum’s website, the synfuel produced is “transported to a Marathon Petroleum refinery to be further processed into transportation fuel.”

The Fulcrum feedstock processing facility has been in operation for 16 months and recently completed a facility expansion utilizing equipment and systems provided by Van Dyk Recycling Solutions. The new equipment, says the firm, will “increase capacity, improve system efficiency, yield and recovered feedstock” at the facility.