The Department of Energy will no longer provide funding to Bluefire Renewables, which is developing a cellulosic waste facility (pictured) in Fulton, Miss., the biofuels company says in an 8K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
In the Dec. 23 filing, Bluefire says it received noticed that the DOE was pulling its grant funding because it failed to comply with DOE deadlines related to providing information about the company’s future financing arrangements for the Fulton project.
Bluefire says it is seeking to re-establish funding under the DOE grant and has initiated the appeals process: “the company shall exhaust all options available to it in order to reverse the DOE’s decision.”
If its attempt to appeal the DOE decision is unsuccessful, Bluefire says it will devise a new financing strategy for the project.
The Fulton project would produce more than 18 million gallons per year of denatured ethanol from about 700 metric dry tons per day of cellulosic materials, primarily wood wastes. The DOE’s share of the $320 million facility was about 27 percent.
A February 2013 report by Lux Research named Bluefire as a leading alternative fuel developer in the pretreatment category. The report reviewed 156 companies across eight fields in the broader alternative fuels industry: pretreatment, crop modification, algae, gasification, bioprocessing, pyrolysis, torrefaction and catalytic conversion.
