CIB provides $277 loan to Varennes Carbon Recycling project
Summary
The Canadian Infrastructure Bank on March 27 announced it will provide a $277 million loan to a joint-venture partnership between Shell, Suncor, Proman and the government of Quebec that will enable construction of a large-scale biorefinery based on Enerkem technology. The $1.2 billion facility, known as Varennes Carbon Recycling, will include an electrolyzer that will supply clean hydrogen and oxygen to convert more than 200,000 metric tons of non-recyclable waste and residual biomass into biofuel using Enerkem’s proprietary thermochemical waste-to-methanol process. Development of the VCR project was initially announced by Enerkem and its partners in late 2020. Earlier this month, Accelera by Cummins, a business segment of Cummins Inc., announced it has been selected by VCR to supply a 90-megawatt (MW) proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzer system for the facility. According to Cummins, each HyLYZER-5000 utilizes 25 MW of electricity and can produce up to 10 tons of hydrogen per day.