Meridian is a wholly owned operating subsidiary of AETE. Meridian refines biomass into end products such as transportation fuels, chemicals and plastics.

Meridian’s refining technology can accept a wide range of feed-stocks and process them into an equally wide range of end products. Alternative energy companies have suffered from a lack of flexibility when feed-stock prices or market conditions shift. Meridian is not locked in to producing a single fuel product such as ethanol or biodiesel. Meridian can adjust its refining process to produce ethanol, biodiesel, gasoline, heating oils, polymers, chemicals and lubricants – very similar to the product mix of a crude oil refinery.

It is the energy of the sun that is processed into the end product which powers your automobile. The energy we produce at AETE comes from this same source, The path taken from the sun’s energy to fuel for your car is very different, however.

Plants act as energy storage devices by transforming the sun’s energy into carbohydrates, oils and sugars. Carbohydrates – known as cellulose – are the most abundant plant material on earth.

Over millions of years, piles of plants accumulate on the earths surface in the form of humus. This plant material is transformed by time, pressure and heat into crude oil reserves which have fueled the petroleum economy of the world for the last 100 years.

Crude oil – the residue of plants from millions of years ago – is pumped from the ground and refined into hundreds of products used every day throughout the world. The most common include gasoline, diesel and plastics.

Meridian biorefining takes the same molecules used by nature to create crude oil and transforms these molecules into the same end products produced from crude oil by an oil refinery. The big difference – and it is a big difference -- is that we skip the 5 million year process used by nature to create crude oil. We take the renewable biomass and refine it directly into the end products that can be made from crude oil.

Creating renewable fuels will reduce the need for imported oil, contribute to America’s energy independence, and strengthen the role of agriculture and the environment in energy production.

Feedstocks: Meridian uses a flex-feed biomass refining processor that can accept a wide range of biomass feed-stocks. This allows the Company to adjust to market conditions and changes in pricing and gives it the ability to accept different feed-stocks in different geographic regions.

Preprocessing: Biomass feedstocks are fractionated into extremely small particles. These particles have high surface area and low density which allows for faster more efficient refining into end products.

Fractionating Cellulose and Lignan: Meridian can separate the cellulose (which will go into ethanol production) from the lignan (which will be used to make green gasoline). We can also leave these compounds together and process in biomass into biocrude oil.

Ethanol Production: Ethanol is produced in a two-step process. First the carbohydrates are converted into their component sugars using either acid or enzymes. The sugars are then fermented to produce ethanol.

Green Gasoline: Using an advanced cascade array, Meridian can refine the lignan content (often about 35% of the total mass of a biomass feed-stock) into gasoline. This gasoline can be blended with ethanol to produce fuels such as E85.

Bioplastics: By converting the biomass first into biocrude, it can then be processed into biopolymers which serve as feed-stocks for the bioplastics and biochemical industries.