May 4 2007
Southern Research Institute announced today that it plans to open its Carbon-to-Liquids (C2L) Development Center in the Research Triangle Region of North Carolina. This energy and transportation fuel research facility will facilitate the commercial acceptance of technologies that convert non-petroleum carbon resources into high value products such as clean diesel fuel, jet fuel, methanol, ethanol and electric power.
"The United States has one of the world's largest supplies of non- petroleum carbon resources including human and agricultural wastes, waste biomass, energy crops, coal, and others," said Stephen Piccot, director of Environment and Energy Research at Southern Research Institute. "If greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of carbon-based resources are reduced or eliminated, we could likely supply our nation's energy needs for at least the next 150 years."
Piccot said that because Southern Research has long recognized the growing need for basic and applied research and testing services in the energy and transportation fields to help advance alternative fuels, the center will serve as an independent research facility for technology developers and project engineers to implement, test and refine pilot-scale technology designs in a cost-effective manner.
The C2L Development Center is located on a 28-acre site recently purchased by Southern Research Institute in the Treyburn Commercial Park north of Durham, NC. It includes 30,000 square feet of industrial high-bay space for locating pilot facilities and testing them with a modular distributed control system and online analytical equipment.
"For some time now, the engineers at Southern Research, with the encouragement of our Board, have analyzed and planned for us to make a strategic move such as this to enhance our capabilities in environmental and energy-related research," said Jack Secrist, Ph.D., president and CEO. "Given the global demand to find new energy sources, and our own pre-existing strengths in this arena, and the availability of the right kind of facility in which to conduct this work, this is the right time for us to make this move."
Southern Research has conducted environmental and energy-related research projects for more than 40 years for government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Dept. of Energy, as well as numerous commercial electric power generating companies around the world. Southern Research also operates the Greenhouse Gas Technology Verification Center based in North Carolina - an independent testing facility initially developed in concert with the U.S. E.P.A. and designed to verify and validate technologies designed by vendors to mitigate the impact of greenhouse gas emissions in real world operations.