AltAir Paramount LLC has filed a California LCFS Tier 2 application for converting North American tallow to renewable naphtha; the company calculates a carbon intensity of 39.75 gCO2e/MJ.

AltAir operates a Renewable Diesel (RD) plant in Paramount, California, which produces RD and Renewable Naphtha (RN) using a mixture of animal tallow and small quantities of other non-edible vegetable oils.

Tallow is fed into the pretreat reactor along with small quantities of vegetable oils/fats. After removal of particulates and trace contaminants, oxygen is removed from the feed in deoxygenation reactor.

Light gases are removed from the first stage product in the stripper. The overhead gases removed in the stripper are used as fuel gas. The effluent from the stripper tower is mixed with hydrogen and hydrocracked in the reactor before the distillation stage.

Through distillation and fractionation, all the feed is converted into a combination of four products namely, renewable diesel (RD), renewable jet fuel (RJ), renewable naphtha (RN), and renewable LPG (RLPG).

The RN is used to blend with a petroleum-based blending component purchased separately to produce CARB-compliant gasoline.

The renewable propane is used on-site as process fuel and small amounts are exported to a process burner.

The proportion of petroleum blending component to renewable naphtha blending component is determined primarily by the Reid Vapor Pressure (RVP) and octane number of both components to achieve specific target values.

The gasoline blend is required to receive a “Pass” using the current CARB Predictive Model v3.0 specification. AltAir Paramount has several approved CARB Predictive Model formulations that will work with renewable naphtha/petroleum component blends.