Cortez Masto speaks on biofuel rule change at Northern Nevada plant
RENO — A facility that helps turns trash into jet fuel in Storey County may be the last place you’d expect to find a U.S. senator, but for Catherine Cortez Masto, who visited the biofuel plant Friday, it was the opportunity to see the culmination of more than five years’ work in action.
The future of Fulcrum BioEnergy’s Sierra BioFuels Plant, which turns garbage from a nearby landfill into a product that can be refined into fuel for airplanes, hung in the balance until a regulatory rule change from the Environmental Protection Agency a little over two months ago.
The change, which Cortez Masto began pushing for in 2019, is a win for more than the state, she said.
“It’s a game changer for the country and for our state leading in this new innovative technology,” Cortez Masto said. “It’s good for Nevada. It’s good for our economy. It’s creating over 120 jobs and then some. It’s good for the environment because it produces clean energy that helps to reduce our carbon footprint.”
The plant will be able to process 175,000 tons of garbage into 11 million gallons of biofuel each year, according to the company. It began operations in May 2022.
Previously, the EPA only allowed for the production of renewable transportation fuel by facilities that work to produce the biofuel at every stage of the process. The Sierra Biofuels Plant produces a “biointermediate,” which is then sent to another facility to be refined, placing it outside of the agency’s rule.
A fix to the rule was proposed in 2016 but took more than five years and two administrations to be approved. It was during then when Cortez Masto began advocating on the plant’s behalf at the federal level.
“It was exciting to see not only for it to come to fruition, but to see the potential that this has not just for the jobs it provides here in Northern Nevada, the benefit is to show that Nevada’s cutting edge in this technology, and then knowing that it’s right here in Northern Nevada,” she said.
Contact Taylor R. Avery at tavery@reviewjournal.com. Follow her at @travery98 on Twitter.
