Storey County biofuel plant touted at Vegas conference

LAS VEGAS — Plans for a $5 billion Tesla automobile battery plant upstaged an announcement Thursday that a Northern Nevada biofuel production plant would receive a federal loan guarantee for a little under 40 percent of its $266 million cost.

Federal Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid joined Fulcrum Sierra BioFuels chief executive E. James Macias as he declared his project ready for construction by the end of the year and touted military uses for the estimated 10 million gallons of diesel, maritime and jet fuel it is expected to produce by 2016.

“USDA support is going to bring real ... and sustained economic growth to the state of Nevada,” Macias said.

Vilsack called the $105 million U.S. Department of Agriculture loan guarantee “a huge step forward in the development of clean, renewable, job-creating American fuels.”

Macias said construction on the $200 million plant Sierra BioFuels Plant in Storey County, the first of its kind in the state, will begin this year and take two years. It will be in the same McCarran, Nevada, industrial park where carmaker Tesla plans to build its factory to produce its electric vehicle batteries.

The officials noted that Cathay Pacific Airways plans to obtain about 375 million gallons of sustainable aviation fuel from the Sierra BioFuels plant over 10 years, or 2 percent of its annual fuel supply.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was the scheduled featured speaker at Reid’s seventh annual renewable energy conference at the Mandalay Bay resort on the Las Vegas Strip. Officials last year announced that solar panels would be installed on the roof of the conference host hotel.

A tax differential between traditional fossil fuels and renewables drew criticism from Reid and Myron Gray, president of U.S. operations for UPS.

“We burn a lot of oil,” Gray told reporters during a conference-opening news conference with Reid, Vilsack and Macias.

Gray tallied 100,000 UPS trucks and 235 aircraft worldwide, including some 3,650 vehicles using liquefied natural gas, electric, bio-methane and other renewable fuels.

Gray said liquefied natural gas costs about 7 percent more than diesel, and he called for federal lawmakers act to reduce taxes on LNG to the same level as traditional fuels.

“That’s an extra tax that companies like ours are paying for trying to do the right thing,” Gray said.