Inside The Crazy $6 Billion Plan To Turn Wind Into Gasoline Read Article

TOPLINE

Why build a novel green fuels plant in remote Patagonia? First, strong winds are created when Antarctica's cold air meets the warm air from the Pacific. Turbines there can achieve 75% operating efficiency versus an average of 45% for Texas wind farms. Second, the plant's owner, Santiago, Chile-based HIF Global, already operates vast Atacama Desert solar farms and is looking to erect thousands of wind turbines in Patagonia. That would be enough to make billions of gallons of fuel a year and turn Chile into the unlikely exporter of millions of gallons a year of greener gasoline made from Patagonia winds—the same ones that 500 years ago blew Magellan's ships through the strait that bears his name. But Patagonia is not logistically the easiest place to build, which is why HIF aims to construct its first world-scale plant in Texas, near its chemical plants and refineries. Meg Gentle, HIF's executive director, was captivated by the concept when she heard about it in 2021 from chairman Cesar Norton. Gentle, 48, had just exited the liquefied natural gas business and agreed to put some money behind HIF (Highly Innovative Fuels). "I started as an investor. Soon it was, 'Meg can you help us' with this or that." Her job for the last two years has been planning, permitting and contracting for a $6 billion plant in Matagorda County, Texas, that will make 200 million gallons of greener fuels a year—equivalent to taking the emissions of 400,000 cars off the road.

WHY IT MATTERS

It’s an irony of the green wave—the world needs to make such enormous investments in low-carbon infrastructure that megaprojects might be easier to finance than small ones. “Demand for these projects is boundless,” says Andrew Ellenbogen, managing director at private equity shop Global Infrastructure Partners, “and will be much better addressed by projects of this size.”