Houston-based Frontieras North America, Western Fuels — owner and operator of the Dry Fork mine — and Western Fuels Association, a not-for-profit fuel supply cooperative have entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to jointly develop a mine-mouth FASForm processing facility at Dry Fork in Campbell County, Wyoming.
Dry Fork is an open-pit coal mine located eight miles north of Gillette, in the Powder River Basin.
The MOU establishes a framework for the parties to negotiate long-term agreements covering a ground lease for a facility site at or adjacent to the Dry Fork mine; a coal feedstock supply agreement for Wyoming sub-bituminous coal, contemplated at up to approximately 2.7 million tons per year initially and up to approximately 5.4 million tons per year at full build-out; a diesel offtake agreement under which Western Fuels would purchase ultra-low-sulfur diesel produced at the facility for its mining, haul, and member operations; and a logistics arrangement that could engage Western Fuels Association’s rail and transportation capabilities to move FASForm’s product streams.
The agreements are each expected to carry an initial 30-year term.
Frontieras North America is commercializing its patented FASForm Solid Carbon Fractionation technology, which, rather burning coal, disassembles coal in a reducing atmosphere through a continuous, closed-loop, zero-waste process, separating it into clean solid carbon (FASCarbon), ultra-low-sulfur diesel, naphtha, and other high-value products, the company said.
Under the MOU, FASCarbon produced at the Wyoming facility could be railed to WFA’s member utilities under separate commercial terms or transacted into international markets, making WFA and Frontieras a new global supplier, Frontieras North America said.
As the nation’s largest coal-producing state, Wyoming is the anchor for the company’s plan to scale FASForm technology across the West — both through standalone mine-mouth facilities and through FASGEN, Frontieras’ co-location platform that integrates FASForm units directly into existing coal-fired power plants, it said.
The Dry Fork Mine sits within the Gillette mine-mouth generation cluster, where more than 1,200 megawatts of coal-fired capacity operate within a few miles of the resource.
Frontieras said a facility at Dry Fork Mine would position it at the logistical center of one of the densest coal-power corridors in the country, positioning the company to extend its co-location strategy to the coal-fired utilities that power the region — and a fast-growing share of US data-center and industrial demand.
“Frontieras shares our conviction that coal has a real and lasting future, and its FASForm technology gives us a way to transform Dry Fork mine production into fuels and products our members and the market genuinely needs,” Western Fuels CEO Adam Anderson said in a news release.
“We are looking ahead to determine opportunities that expand this relationship across the full Western Fuels cooperative — broadly serving our member utilities and their communities,” Anderson said.
“Wyoming produces more coal than any other state, which makes it the natural place to prove this resource can be commercialized — not just mined,” Frontieras North America chief commercial officer Andrea Moran said. “A mine-mouth site at the Dry Fork Mine puts a FASForm facility directly on top of that feedstock — no rail, no barge, no distance between the coal and the finished fuels and products we make from it.”
Those are the economics that make commercialization work at scale and pairing them with Western Fuels’ operational strength is exactly how we intend to grow this platform across the West,” Moran said.
