Baytown businessman could hold the solution to the nation's energy crisis
06/19/2008
By: JOSH HARDWICK,
The joke around the office at Sustainable Power Corp. these days is what Chairman John Rivera likes to call the, "Liars Club." Why?
"Anyone you tell about this will call you a liar," he said.
In an economy that has been held hostage by oil prices rapidly approaching the stratosphere, this Baytown-based alternate energy company has found a way to make substantial amounts of crude oil from farm waste.
Now Rivera must convince potential investors that his trade secret - 21 years and $31 million dollars in the making - isn't just a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
The "Rivera Method" - takes such agricultural refuse as cracked soy beans, rice and cotton seed hulls, grain sorghum, milo and jatropha and turns them into bio-crude oil. This crude - or Vertroleum, as Rivera calls it - can then be refined further into everything from gasoline to jet fuel and just about every petrochemical in between.
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