Enerkem Inc., a closely held Canadian biofuel company backed by Waste Management Inc. (WM) and Valero Energy Corp. (VLO), is seeking to raise $125 million through an initial share sale in the U.S. and Canada.
bloomberg.com 
Overview
We develop renewable biofuels and chemicals from waste using our proprietary thermochemical technology platform.
We intend to take advantage of the abundant supply of municipal solid waste, or MSW, which we expect to be paid to use as feedstock, to profitably produce cellulosic ethanol, a second-generation biofuel. We believe that our waste-based biofuels provide one of the most advanced solutions to the growing world demand for renewable sources of energy, while also addressing the challenges associated with waste disposal and greenhouse gas, or GHG, emissions.
Our proprietary technology platform converts MSW and other heterogeneous waste feedstocks, consisting of mixed textiles, plastics, fibers, wood and various other forms of waste, into a pure, chemical-grade synthesis gas, or syngas. This syngas is then converted into biofuels and chemicals through well-established catalytic reactions. We believe that our technology platform provides a key competitive advantage as compared to other thermochemical technologies because it utilizes a low-severity gasification process that significantly reduces operating and capital costs due to lower temperature, pressure and energy requirements to break down heterogeneous waste feedstock.
We are a development stage company and we have not yet generated any revenue from the sale of our products. While our primary focus is the commercial production of cellulosic ethanol, we also intend to expand to multiple products beyond ethanol by taking advantage of our ability to produce a pure, chemical-grade syngas that serves as a key intermediate for the production of renewable chemicals.
We have validated our technology over a period of 10 years using MSW from numerous municipalities, as well as a broad variety of other feedstock, such as wood and agricultural residues. Our pilot facility in Sherbrooke, Canada has been in operation since 2003 and has a throughput capacity of 4.8 metric tons per day. Throughput capacity refers to the volume of feedstock that can be processed by a facility. We have successfully increased, or scaled-up, our throughput capacity tenfold, or 10x, to 48 metric tons per day in our commercial demonstration facility in Westbury, Canada. The Westbury facility has a production capacity of 1.3 million gallons per year, or MMGPY. We believe that the Westbury facility is one of the largest thermochemical facilities to process heterogeneous waste material as feedstock. Our first standard 10MMGPY commercial facility is currently under construction in Edmonton, Canada. The Edmonton facility will entail a further 7x scale-up in throughput capacity from our Westbury facility with only an approximate 2x increase in gasification and gas conditioning equipment size. We believe this scale-up is the lowest to full commercial capacity to date by any cellulosic ethanol producer. We also believe the Edmonton facility is the first collaboration between a waste-to-biofuels company and a metropolitan center to address its waste disposal challenges.
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