Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded $100,000 to a veteran-owned, woman-owned Kailua company developing a way to turn construction and demolition waste into jet fuel, the agency’s first award to a Hawaii company in four years and only the second ever.
Simonpietri Enterprises’ Aloha Carbon project to create renewable jet fuel for the commercial aviation market is the first of its kind not only in Hawaii, but possibly in the world. The firm’s owner and president, Joelle Simonpietri, is a captain in the Navy Reserves who founded her consulting business in the Islands some 15 years ago and has worked on other renewable energy projects since, with the military, private companies and the University of Hawaii.
“I personally see it as my kuleana to do something better with trash than sticking it in the ground,” Simonpietri said. “It’s something that I know a lot about. We can divert some of the waste, we can recycle it by turning it into a fuel, and in so doing also, displace some of the petroleum that would otherwise be used to make that same fuel.”
Simonpietri served active duty in the Navy after graduating from Duke University and its ROTC program, and it was the Navy that brought her to Hawaii the first time. After leaving active duty, she earned a master of business administration from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
She was working for a startup in the San Francisco Bay Area when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks happened, and volunteered for mobilization, returning to Hawaii to work as a counter insurgency analyst for the U.S. Pacific Command, now known as the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, for two years.
It was working in venture capital at Waste Management’s Organic Growth Group on the Mainland where Simonpietri first worked on developing a waste-to-energy strategy.
“I’ve kept that sort of fascination with reuse of material and sustainability,” she said.
She moved to Hawaii and started her consulting business, worked as interim CEO of Kuehnle Agrosystems Inc., and was an advisor to Kolohala Holdings, putting Simonpietri Enterprises on pause to work as a senior military analyst at Pacific Command on its Pacific Green Initiative for Fuels Transition, or GIFTPAC.
That’s where the idea for turning construction and demolition waste, specifically wood, into jet fuel was born.
Her husband, Steve Brennan, is also a consultant with the company, working with small-business defense contractors in Hawaii on information technology and communications.
“This project, [using] construction and demolition debris to get fuel in a way that can actually meet all the certifications required for air worthiness and commercially viable and technically viable was incubated a fair amount with support from Par Hawaii,” she said. She also previously worked with PVT Land Co., which is the only construction and demolition landfill on Oahu.
In addition to herself and her husband, Simonpietri has five part-time employees working on the project, as well as a laboratory on the Mainland that is working on the process.
“[Over the past year] I’ve basically been in full-time startup mode with the actual technology development, project development, so less and less of my time is consulting, and more and more of my time is actually developing this capability.”
It’s been a challenge to establish not only the business, but a whole new industry.
“People don’t really realize just how thirsty Hawaii’s economy is — we get a tanker of crude oil every two weeks,” she said. “So it’s a small project in that sense, but it’s still going to be tangible, still going to be meaningful. And it probably will still be a first globally.”
The $100,000 grant from the EPA is for her company to “develop jet and diesel transportation fuel from construction and demolition wood, while safely sequestering arsenic from treated lumber.” The process separates such heavy metal contaminants as arsenic from the ash, which allows for the safe disposal of the ash.
The project recently passed the concept stage and is now in feasibility engineering. The grant will allow them another round of trials and to collect data on the environmental aspects of the process, Simonpietri said. She is also actively looking at sites in West Oahu where she can build the project and get started.
