A Joint Venture
Genesis O’ahu intends to revolutionize how we handle our garbage on this island. We want to put a stop to the enormous pollution caused by burning and landfilling our waste. We will turn 1000 tons a day of refuse into 20 million gallons a year of renewable diesel, helping reduce our dependence on oil imported from half way round the world.We plan to build our near-zero emissions plant on a Department of Hawaiian Homelands-owned site, zoned for industrial use, at the end of the runway at Kalaeloa airport. The plant will require 250 full-time, skilled jobs for which we will provide the training.
Conceptual Rendering of Proposed Facility
Oahu’s garbage disposal system is heading over a cliff
O’ahu faces a huge crisis. Half the capacity of the City’s H-
Power incinerator will be obsolete within five years. Replacing
that capacity will cost $750 Million. Even if taxpayers could find
the money, H-Power still wouldn’t be able to handle things like
wastewater sludge, automobile shredder residue, and asbestos,
and the incinerator will continue to produce about 120,000 tons
of toxic ash every year. The ash and the materials that can’t be
burned together amount to more than a quarter of a million tons
per year that have to be dumped into a landfill. The Waimanalo
Gulch landfill permit will expire in less than two years. A new landfill will cost $200 million, but the city has found nowhere to build one.
The answer to this crisis is the Genesis O’ahu Total Recovery Facility, built around pyrolysis.
The Process Video
Podcast
The problem with H-Power is not just the cost to replace the aging machinery. H-Power is the largest source of industrial airborne pollution in the state of Hawai’i. Here’s a partial list of what H-Power produces every year - this is what pollutes the air that West Side residents breathe:
Carbon Dioxide & Equivalents ~686,798 tons
Nitrogen Oxides ~1,723,110 lbs
Particulate Matter ~204,275 lbs
Fine Particulate Matter ~177,439 lbs
Hydrochloric Acid: ~37,400 lbs
Sulfur Dioxide ~4,688 lbs
Mercury ~ 15 pounds
Let’s look more closely at just the smallest of these emissions. 15 pounds of mercury is equivalent to 6,804 grams. Scientists have found that as little as 1 gram of atmospheric mercury deposition per year is enough to heavily contaminate the fish in a 20-acre lake. So those 15 pounds are likely poisoning 15,000 acres of land along the Waianae Coast. At the moment the Trump administration is not requiring H-Power to scrub those pollutants. But most observers expect that at some point in the future the federal EPA will act. And the Department of Environmental Services, which is responsible for Municipal Solid Waste on O’ahu, estimates the cost to install pollution scrubbers at $800 million. So, together with the cost to upgrade H-Power and the cost of a new landfill, keeping our current waste disposal model going for another 25 years is likely to cost taxpayers close to $2 Billion.
THE PROBLEM
This is how the Genesis O’ahu process works:
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First we remove the water - because about 25% of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is water. 1000 tons per day of MSW will produce about 9 million gallons a year of R1 quality water that we will offer to farms on the Waianae coast for irrigation.
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The waste then passes through a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) operated with robotics and AI to remove 99% of all recyclables. (See the video below)
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Then we dry, homogenize and pelletize the MSW to produce a fuel that doesn’t leach or smell, and that can be stored. You could think of it as a sort of clean coal, though we don’t like to be compared with that dirty fuel- but like coal, the pellets are dry, solid, stable and energy-rich.
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The fourth step is to feed these pellets into the pyrolysis chamber. There, the pellets are heated to 1200 degrees celsius until they turn from a solid into a gas. In the process, the material is broken down to the molecular level, thus neutralizing toxins. The chamber is air-tight and contains no oxygen. This means there can be no combustion, no flame, and none of the smoke or pollution associated with burning. That’s why we don’t even have a smokestack.
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The final step is to cool the gas and distill it into a liquid. That liquid is Renewable Diesel. It is chemically the same as the diesel that you buy at the gas station -what the EPA defines as ASTM D975- but it 65% to 95% cleaner than regular diesel.
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If the need arose we could further refine the liquid to produce Sustainable Aviation Fuel or hydrogen. For the scientifically inclined, an important note is that we don’t use the finicky and time-consuming Fischer-Tropsch system.
Pyrolysis is a process that has been around for more than 100 years. It’s a thermal chemical process. When something is heated to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen, it forces its molecular structure to fracture and break down, releasing syngas, liquid and biochar. During World War II, gasoline and diesel were severely rationed for civilian use in Europe; petroleum products were prioritized for the war effort. As a result it is estimated that more than a million vehicles were converted to pyrolysis. They typically used wood chips as fuel. Iconic London double-decker buses towed pyrolysis plants behind them. Some people even converted motorcycles to pyrolysis.
Pyrolysis is used to handle waste in many countries, Japan, Germany, Spain, China, India, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Chile and others. In this country companies are increasingly investing in pyrolysis plants especially for treating plastics. For example ExxonMobil has invested in a plastics pyrolysis plant in Baytown, Texas.
The only byproducts from our pyrolysis process, apart from the renewable diesel itself, are wood vinegar and biochar. Wood vinegar is useful as an eco-friendly soil enhancer, pest repellent, and natural preservative. Biochar is very valuable to improve soil quality, it can also be used as a carbon sink, and an environmental filtration medium. Biochar can also be refined into graphene which is increasingly in demand for composite materials, energy storage, electronics, and thermal management. With graphene Genesis O’ahu could generate export revenues for Hawai’i.
Most importantly: Our pyrolysis process produces no waste that needs to be landfilled.
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The project is privately financed so it will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
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The project has near-zero emissions so it will improve the air quality and the health outcomes of residents of the Waianae coast.
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The project does not require a landfill.
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As more pyrolysis plants are brought online, we can help O’ahu evolve into a community that does not require a daily landfill. (The Department of Health will always require a landfill for emergency purposes - primarily for hurricane debris).
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The project will provide 250 full-time jobs. The jobs are skilled and semi-skilled, so they are well paid. We will recruit in the community. We have already discussed with Leeward Community College setting up a technical course to train employees. The jobs will be long-term. We attach a detailed list of the jobs below.
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At full capacity, the plant will produce more than 20 million gallons a year of renewable diesel. That is about half the amount that is consumed on O’ahu’s roads every year. Potentially, O’ahu has a need to construct four (4) pyrolysis plants to replace what goes into H-Power, Waimanalo Gulch, and the PVT landfill. So our process could make a huge dent in the effort to meet the state’s deadline of 2045 to be carbon negative.
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Our Renewable Diesel will provide a secure fuel supply, unaffected by world events. As recently as five years ago, we were getting most of our petroleum from Russia and Libya! Instead of sending hundreds of millions of dollars overseas to pay for fuel imports, that money will stay in our community.
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Genesis O’ahu has pledged a percentage of its profits, more than a million dollars every year, to be distributed to Hawaiian Beneficiary groups.
THE SOLUTION
What is Pyrolysis
The Benefits
These are examples of pyrolysis-fueled veichles.
This is the proposed location adjacent to Kalaeloa Airport
Location
This map shows the tax map key, (TMK)
The plant will operate 24 hours a day, so we will require three shifts of these employees and groups of employees, bringing the total number of posts to be filled to 250.
Job Opportunities
Genesis O’ahu is a joint venture between Blue Marble Innovations LLC and Energy 3 International Inc
Blue Marble Innovations is a community-based development company led by Tim Newberry, Anthony Aalto, and Steve Owen.
Energy 3 International, or E3I, is a technology company that holds the patents to the MSW-to-Renewable Diesel process. E3I technology has been successfully operating plants in Tennessee for more than ten years. E3I will shortly start construction in the Dominican Republic of a 1000-ton-per-day waste-to-fuels plant that is the twin of the plant proposed for Kalaeloa.
Who are we?
Tim has proudly called Hawaiʻi home for more than 35 years. Alongside his wife, a lifelong kamaʻāina, he has built deep roots in the islands and raised their family here. Their daughter was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, reflecting the family’s strong connection to the local community, culture, and values. Throughout his career, Tim has been committed to supporting Hawaiʻi’s growth and infrastructure, most recently contributing to the development of the Skyline rail project with HART. He is currently in Seattle on a temporary assignment with Sound Transit, helping advance a major regional transit project. While working on the mainland, Hawaiʻi remains home, and Tim and his family look forward to continuing to serve and invest in the communities they have been part of for decades. Tim often volunteered for the 1998 B.I.A. Parade of Homes
Former volunteer on the University of Hawaii Lab School Capital Improvements Committee. He was a Former Volunteer on University of Hawaii, Faculty Senate Committee Provided Pro Bono design services to Institute for Human Services (IHS) through a project sponsored by Caldwell Banked Pacific Properties “Agents of Change” program
Tim Newberry
Anthony Aalto
Anthony has lived on O’ahu for more than 20 years. He is a documentary filmmaker. His films include the Emmy-nominated No Room in Paradise about our homeless crisis, and the three-part series A Climate For Change about the impacts of the climate crisis on Hawai’i. He was for six years Chair of the Sierra Club on O’ahu and for the last five years has served on the Board of Directors of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART). He grew up on the beautiful island of Mallorca which he calls ‘the O’ahu of the Mediterranean” where he witnessed its rapid transformation by tourism and the influx of mainlanders which has created an affordable housing and cost of living crisis which is forcing locals to move to the mainland.
Patrick Saty
Patrick Saty – Chief Operations Officer E3i, Partner/Director Genesis O’ahu: For more than 40
years Mr. Saty has been a senior executive with several of the largest international
technology and services companies in the world. As a member of the Executive Board,
Mr. Saty helped form the landmark joint-venture between Bell Atlantic (BA, the
nation’s largest Regional Bell Operating Company, NYNEX) and GTE, now merged as
Verizon Communications Inc. As Verizon’s first Director of Internet Services, he helped transition the
company from a traditional Telcom to one of the leading technologies, communications, information,
entertainment, product and mobile services companies in world, with annual revenues of $128.3b. Patrick still has family residing in Hawaii.