USSE In The Baytown Sun!!
Baytown company plans major splash on energy
By Kari Griffin
Baytown Sun
Published February 1, 2008
Members of the Central American Parliament, which represents countries in South and Central America, and the Caribbean, were in Baytown Thursday because of one man’s process of turning soybeans – among other things – into biofuel.
John Rivera, CEO of Sustainable Energy Corp. and winner of an International Engineering Conference award and inventor of the “Rivera Process,” has found a way to produce biogasoline from pyrolysis biocrude oil – and he’ll be doing it right in our backyard.
Located across from Pinehurst on Highway 146, Baytown Green Energy Consortium employees have been hard at work these past couple of months setting up the test facility where a 65-foot unit of four reactors will turn substances with a carbon chain into 737 fertilizer, heavy crude oil, light crude oil and synthetic gas in just under 9 minutes – a process that has taken Rivera 20 years to perfect.
Using a prototype to show his guests how it’s done, Rivera produced the biogasoline that burned clean until it was mixed with regular gasoline, which produced black smoke.
Rivera also pointed out that what remains of the processed soybeans is used to make a 737 organic based fertilizer and soil treatment that removes harmful chemicals from soil.
“We have zero waste byproducts,” Rivera said.
The Baytown Green Energy facility, (a joint-venture with U.S. Sustainable Energy), is capable of producing 6,700 gallons of a petroleum product in a 24 -hour period and will be making 24,000 gallons a day within 90 days, Rivera said. And the completion of a 500 mega-watt green power plant, (the largest of its kind in the world), is on the horizon.
If successful, Baytonians will not have to pay the fuel adjustment charges that can make up 30 percent of their bill, Rivera said.
“I’m going to be the power company in Texas,” he said.
Parlacen President Julio González Gamarra and H.D. Fernando Ricardo Luna Waldheim from the department of engineering of Central American Parliament were impressed with what they saw going on at the Baytown facility – so impressed they were willing to contribute $4 billion for Rivera to move the project to a bigger scale right away.
“This technology has a great future,” Waldheim said.
The market for this type of product is especially strong in underdeveloped countries, he said.
“It’s just a great opportunity for us to enter and to substitute the demand and to lower the energy costs in these countries where they don’t have crude oil, but they do have the agriculture to make a joint venture with us,” Waldheim said. “Instead of being energy dependent, they could be exporting crude oil. It’s a great opportunity for the democratic countries.
Right now, these areas are making ethanol and producing a lot of sugar cane, “but it’s not a substitute for petroleum products,” Waldheim said.
Once the 400 to 800 reactors are placed all in these countries, they will use their local feeds such as nuts and other carbon-based food stock to make their own energy and export the surplus said Scott Hoerr of Farmer’s Sustainable Energy International, which is working with Rivera on this project.
“We want to take it to the grass-roots level,” Hoerr said.
Baytown Councilman Brandon Capetillo learned a lot from the informative tour.
“There is a global market for biofuels,” Capetillo said. “The City of Baytown is very interested in this type of development.”
Almost as interesting than the process that Rivas created, Capetillo said, is the fact that “this can happen right here in Baytown.”
For more information about the process taking place at Baytown Green Energy Consortium, visit gec.sstp.us.
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