Waste-to-Fuels

How Juniper can help your company in the Waste-to-Fuels market

We are continually assessing which technologies are – and are not – capable of providing a viable, cost-effective method for recovering useful resources from waste.  We conduct techno-economic analysis and advise clients on market trends and commercial opportunities.  We help clients to select processes and partners.

Juniper has been advising clients in this arena for over fifteen years, including:

• Corporations seeking to move their carbon management and waste management onto a lower cost, more sustainable basis
• Investors seeking greater exposure to this growth market opportunity
• Technology providers requiring advice on market positioning and external validation of key technical claims
• Public authorities wanting an independent assessment of the environmental benefits of particular pathways
• Waste management companies concerned about incremental risk associated with more complex technology platforms
• Due diligence reviews of technical risk, market dynamics and the business plan for funders and co-investors

Recent consulting projects conducted for international clients include:

• Conducting a critical appraisal of a European technology on behalf of a US corporate client;
• An options appraisal for a 50MW biomass plant on behalf of a multi-national client;
• Due diligence advice to a Private Equity fund on a planned investment in a continental European process engineering company
• Market analysis of opportunities for processing specific types of biomass in a region of the UK

Case Studies (follow this link for further examples of our project work)

BIOFUELS: A Decision Maker’s Guide to Opportunities for Converting Biomass
and Wastes into Transport Fuels
Published April 2009. In this publication we concentrate on summarising the current status of the technologies, identifying key players and segmenting the market ... MORE INFO ...

Market Drivers

The Waste-to-Fuels sector is attracting new levels of interest from investors and environmental professionals alike. 
This interest is being driven by:

• The need to find more sustainable solutions for wastes that maximise resource recovery
• A desire to reduce the ‘carbon footprint’ of energy production
• The search for new technology concepts that conserve the embedded carbon values and chemical energy within a fuel and avoid low efficiency conversion mechanisms
• Increasing energy costs
• The increasing value of carbon (either through carbon trading or avoided carbon costs)
• The gate fees (tipping fees) associated with waste derived fuels rather than the costs associated with clean biomass or fossil fuels

With correct positioning, developers can synergistically combine the added value associated with three market drivers:

There are numerous technology platforms that seek to convert a variety of wastes into a range of fuels including: vehicle fuels, such as ethanol, bio-diesel; SRF (solid recovered fuel) and other types of RDF (refuse derived fuel); pipeline quality gas (bio-methane) for injection into the gas grid or as a substitute for CNG or LNG.

Juniper has been analysing these various technology platforms from a techno-economic perspective to derive advice for clients on value-added, technology risk and market opportunity in the context of providing strategy advice and due diligence reviews.

Our recent work has identified more than 70 technology pathways that are at varying stages of commercialisation around the world. Each of these seek to combine a locally available biofuel with a particular conversion technology to derive an added-value biofuel. Juniper has assessed each of these pathways to derive a unique knowledge base on the merits of each from a business, technical and environmental perspective.

Juniper has also identified and assessed over 100 companies from 23 countries that are developing proprietary processes for biofuel applications.

Together, these resources allow us to advise clients quickly and effectively on which pathways are worth considering for their particular project and who are the leading technology providers in each specific market niche.

Examples of our services:

• Help in selecting the right technology for processing particular types of waste into particular forms of energy (electricity, heat, biogas, vehicle fuels, etc.)
• Techno-economic appraisals;
• Strategy advice, including identification of investment opportunities;
• Market studies to confirm demand.