Dorreen Carey, of Gary, sets among a signs distributed by Gary Advocates for Responsible Development during the public hearing to gather questions and comments on the licensing of Fulcrum Counterpoint at the 21st Century Charter School in Gary, Indiana Wednesday April 27, 2022. Gary Advocates For Responsible Development members were pleased to read the recent news that Fulcrum, the company that proposed construction of a trash-to-jet biofuel plant in Buffington Harbor, is going under.
A drawing of the proposed Centerpoint BioFuels Plant by Fulcrum Bioenergy is displayed in Gary, Indiana on Tuesday, March 29, 2022. The plant’s future is in doubt as Fulcrum laid off most of its employees and ceased operations earlier this month “We said from the beginning that the technology they are promoting is unreliable, unproven, dangerous, and would not work. There was plenty of scientific evidence to support this view for any who cared to investigate,” Carey said in the statement.
In September of 2022, GARD filed a petition with the Indiana Office of Environmental Adjudication alleging that the Indiana Department of Environmental Management inappropriately granted a Federally Enforceable State Operating Permit to Fulcrum for the Centerpoint facility in August of that year. The group filed an updated petition in December.
The motion, filed on GARD’s behalf by Michael Zoeller, an attorney with the Midwest-based Environmental Law and Policy Center, claims that IDEM relied solely on information provided by Fulcrum, which in some cases was incomplete, when calculating the proposed facility’s projected emissions levels in multiple key categories, and did not independently verify Fulcrum’s data.