Energetica India Magazine May-June 2021

NEWS BIOFUELS NextChem Wins Engineering Contract from Total Energies for a BioJet Plant in France Greenjoules Raises $4.5M in Series A Round from Blue Ashva Capital Maire Tecnimont’s subsidiary Nex- tChem has been awarded a contract by TotalEnergies to carry out a FEED and supply its technological know-how to implement a Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) plant in Grandpuits, France, capable of processing 400,000 tons/y. The project is part of the plan to con- vert the Grandpuits Refinery into a ze - ro-crude platform that will include a Bio Refinery, where NextChem is already engineering Europe’s first plant to pro - duce compostable and biodegradable plastics, with a capacity of 100,000 ton/y. The BioJet plant, due to be operation- al in 2024, will strengthen NextChem’s role in TotalEnergies’s net-zero strategy as a major part of the Grandpuits Refin - ery zero-crude platform development, known as “Projet Galaxie”. The “Projet Galaxie” will produce Bio- Jet fuels by treating animal fats from Europe and used cooking oil. This new unit will be aligned with France’s road- map for sustainable aviation biofuels, which includes a target of 2% by 2025 and 5% by 2030. SAF (or BioJet) technological know- how is one of NextChem’s key com- ponent of its green-tech portfolio that makes Maire Tecnimont Group an en- abler of the Energy Transition. Contrib- uting to a sustainable mobility through solutions to produce green, low carbon and biofuels is one of Maire Tecnimont Group’s priority goals towards 2025, within its sustainability strategy. Greenjoules Pvt Ltd, a Pune based green energy technology company, has raised its Series A round of USD 4.5M (Rs 33 crore) from Blue Ashva Capital through its Blue Ashva Sam- pada Fund. The funds raised are a combination of equity and debt and will be utilized to setup commercial scale waste to energy plants and invest into new R&D initiatives. The company was founded in 2018 and is led by V Radhika, VS Shridhar, S Vir- araghavan and R Sethunath. The man- agement team has a strong corporate background, having worked with Indi- an and Global multinationals for over two decades. Greenjoules specializes in making re - newable Biofuels, commonly recog- nized as “Drop-in Fuels” or 2nd Gen. Biofuels. These are curated entirely from agricultural residue and renew- able wastes from agro processing in- dustries. The fuel can be used for in- dustrial applications (to power Boilers, Gensets) and commercial applications (in Diesel powered vehicles). Although Biodiesel technology has been around for some time, one of the key barriers for adoption is that it de- pends on food products like edible oil, oil seeds etc. as raw material. Greenjoules Biofuels on the other hand use non-food and non-feed wastes as feedstock to manufacture Biofuels. The fuel is manufactured to the BIS1460 Standards that Petroleum Diesel fol- lows. It can be used without any modi- fication with the current Diesel engines, Gensets or Boilers in use. This makes Greenjoules Biofuels a direct replace- ment for Petroleum Diesel. The company is currently serving sev- eral large enterprise customers from its biorefinery in Chakan, Pune. It now plans to significantly scale up produc - tion by setting up a large facility near Pune to cater to the increasing demand of green diesel. 33 energetica INDIA- May-June_2021