COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Mark Holtzapple is a professor at Texas A&M University in the Mcferrin Department of Chemical Engineering. He's spent most of his life creating a method to turn waste into essential fuels and chemicals.
"We use biomass as our raw material for making fuels, It's carbon neutral," Holtzapple said. "Our process can actually convert biomass into conventional gasoline and jet fuel. So you don't have any incompatibility issues. We already have a lot of infrastructure with automobiles and airplanes."
In about a month, Holtzapple can turn things like waste paper, sewage sludge, animal manure and crops into fossil fuels. He first adds the mass into a tank, then inoculates the mass with soil, which decomposes the biomass into organic acids that can then be turned into fuel.
"Believe it or not, about three and a half tones per day of waste food is thrown away from Sbisa dining hall," Holtzapple said. "We also use paper from the recycling center and chicken manure from Sanderson Farms. And so we actually converted these materials into gasoline and jet fuel."
According to Holtzapple for every dry ton of waste, they get anywhere from 70 to 80 gallons of fuel. Now you might think that this process may be expensive to do, making the price of the product rise but that isn't the case.
"One of the questions that comes up a lot is What do these fuels cost? The answer is it depends on what the raw material is," Holtzapple said. "In the case of municipal solid waste and sewage sludge, we can make gasoline for around $1.25 per gallon."
Bio-based ingredients company Bioveritas recently began using Holtzapple's process commercially. The plan is to produce 20,000 tons of product per year by 2025.