SBIR/STTR Award attributes
The growing challenge of plastic waste accumulation in the US, and throughout the world, requires an immediate and innovative solution. A solution that would help to mitigate the ever growing plastic waste problem, while utilizing the abundant latent energy in plastic waste to produce liquid fuel, would not only help the US with its plastics reuse capability, but would add to the $5 Billion oil market. Under the proposed project, Altex Technologies Corporation will develop a novel process, system design, and catalyst, to convert all types of plastic polymers, rubber, composites, and paper, to refinery grade crude oil. Altex will demonstrate end-to-end plastics to liquid-fuel production, in a continuous mode, at prototype scale, and will produce a process design. The test data will be used to produce a Technoeconomic and Life Cycle Analysis for a 500 TPD plastics feed plant. The proposed Low Cost Feed Flexible Plastics Reuse (LCFFPR) technology is particularly innovative, because it is feed flexible and can handle all types of plastics, targets a high liquid fuel yield, and applies an innovative single step process approach, resulting in minimal unit operations. These features enable low capital cost and easy scalability. The LCFFPR technology uses combined thermochemical conversion and contaminants pretreatment, with a novel product stabilization process, to produce a liquid fuel similar to crude oil, which can be put through refinery distillation towers, to produce gasoline, jet fuel and diesel.
