Terrabon triumphs in Transformational Technologies tourney final

In Florida, Terrabon became the winner of the 2011 Transformative Technologies tournament, 80-20 over Joule Unlimited in tournament final voting to date.

What made Terrabon special and transformational?

· Terrabon is focused on transferring “complete” technology solutions to the market to address major challenges in fuel and water.
· In the area of fuels Terrabon uses a  process modeled after  a cow that converts biomass to energy. Terrabon has modified the process to make a drop-in biofuel such as gasoline and JP-8 for the military. If you look at our process it resembles a waste treatment plant in the front, a skid mounted refinery in the back and a water plant in the middle.

What makes the MixAlco technology transformational?

· The focus of Terrabon’s technology is not creating a product to economically compete with fossil fuels; there are a lot of great companies pursuing that goal. The real enabling part of MixAlco is to allow environmental services companies (like our partner Waste Management) to fundamentally rethink the supply chain for their services so that they can provide more flexibility and reduced costs for their customers while meeting the national policy requirements associated with the Renewable Fuel Standard — thus reducing the United States’ dependency on foreign oil due to MixAlco®’s ability to produce a drop in bio-fuel such as gasoline and JP-8 from wet smelly garbage.

· MixAlco also minimizes the need to use other natural resources. Most plants require precious water to operate but since the feedstock used is already wet Terrabon leverages this characteristic in the fermentation process and therefore are water balanced to water long. Also, because Terrabon operates in non-sterile environments, nutrients found and used for fermentation are not from the traditional sources that would compete with the food chain, but from streams such as primary sewage sludge from waste treatment facilities or waste manure from cows, chickens or hogs.

· Finally, Terrabon believes in the long run that MixAlco is a “nexus point” where municipal wet waste and waste water can come together to make fuel and clean water for local communities. A point where a new model can be used to manage local environmental challenges with local resources. Terrabon’s goal is to not only utilize this technology in the United States, but worldwide.

More on Terrabon, here.
Transformative Technologies is a subscriber-voted, “knock-out” tournament which measures the impact of the competitor’s technologies on the bioenergy landscape. More than 400 pages of data on all the competitors (and more) is available here – also, individual match-ups include links to the most recent profiles submitted by companies for the 2011-12 50 Hottest Companies in Bioenergy, which is coming up for voting in the 4th quarter of 2011.

The complete tournament bracket, with the final scoring, is available for download here.