Carbon Footprint

Synthetic fuels, chemicals and power facilities and products produced using Rentech's technologies have a lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based plants and products. Renewable fuels and power facilities using our technologies can have a carbon neutral footprint and even a carbon negative footprint with a sequestration solution.

Our technology enables us to design fossil-based synthetic fuels facilities that are "carbon capture ready." This design actually improves production efficiency while also capturing up to approximately 80% of all carbon dioxide generated during the manufacturing process. And rather than allow the CO₂ to be emitted, Rentech has aligned itself with other industries to turn this by-product into a saleable and valuable resource. For example, CO₂ can be used by the beverage industry in various consumer products, by the fertilizer industry to produce certain fertilizers, and by the oil and gas industry to increase oil production. The process used by oil and gas companies is called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). EOR has been successfully used for more than 30 years to increase production from depleted or underperforming oil fields. Studies are currently underway to explore additional uses of carbon dioxide such as for growth enhancement of biomass such as algae, which could be used as feedstock to produce ultra-clean synthetic fuels.

Carbon reduction studies can actually quantify the benefits of our process when compared to other fuel refining. By using carbon capture and sequestration, studies by the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory ("NETL") have shown that carbon dioxide emissions from synthetic fuels are lower than those generated from petroleum refineries and products (link to study). A Life Cycle Analysis ("LCA") shows that our proposed Natchez facility will produce carbon emissions that are 11-23% less than comparable facilities producing traditional products, ranging from Arabian Light, Canadian North Slope and Venezuelan refined crude. This figure can be reduced further with the addition of biomass as a co-feed at our synthetic fuels facilities.