Darcy’s Vision Merges Innovation, Sustainability & Growth

DG Fuels Owner Mike Darcy’s Beverly Hills childhood was nothing like growing up in Phelps County’s vast oceans of corn. But his belief in the value of a dollar and not letting anything go to waste matches the values of many Phelps County residents.

His innovative process of changing cornfield waste into synthetic aviation fuel will not only transform the local economy, it will also support energy independence for the country, and meet a pressing global need of the airline industry. 

DG Fuels announced in August its plans to build a now $7 billion synthetic fuel facility in Phelps County. 

“Phelps County is at the heart of America’s efficient, undervalued bioeconomy,” Darcy said. “I need to go where the feedstock is, and it’s a great place to add value to the nation’s farmers who the country relies on for energy and food security.”

A Heart for Innovation

Darcy’s parents, Gene and Frankie, lived an exciting lifestyle and owned several businesses in entertainment, retail, communications, shipping and marketing. One of their early companies, Darcy Advertising Agency, specialized in securing movie stars to appear in radio and television commercials. Their friends included Kirk Douglas, John Cassavetes, Paul Newman, and Ronald Reagan.

Darcy was born with a serious heart condition that prevented him from participating in many activities with friends his age. “Like many such children,” Darcy said, “I read a lot, stayed at home, matured quickly and listened to the amazing people around me, which included German synthetic fuel scientists that my father had extracted from Europe” during his time serving in World War II. From them, young Darcy learned about the Fischer-Tropsch process and water electrolysis, which are technologies that can be used to turn biomass into fuel.

At age 9, with the help of Ronald Reagan, Darcy was accepted into the prestigious Palo Alto Military Academy adjacent to Stanford University. He thrived at the school’s physics programs for advanced students. He attended several other elite schools, including the Army Navy Military Academy in Carlsbad, Calif., for high school. “I learned through a natural affinity for sciences and experience,” Darcy said.

After selling several of his family’s businesses, he worked in shipping where he had many connections from his parents’ ocean liner memorabilia business. “It’s there that I learned the value of efficiency and not letting anything go to waste,” Darcy said. “Nothing was treated as a waste.”

Turning Waste into Fuel

In Darcy’s shipping career, he worked with military commercial dual-use transactions and technology development. The ships and heavy equipment he worked with were used commercially but had to be rapidly adaptable to military use if needed.

“A large cruise ship program uses over 340 megawatts of power generation in each ship,” Darcy said. “That’s the engines of six Boeing 777 aircraft in one ship. This was a gigantic power requirement intended to push a large cruise ship or auxiliary amphibious support vessel through the water at 50 knots. This program needed a predictable, stable-priced power system. That was the original genesis of DG Fuels – a drop-in jet fuel that required no engine changes but was not petroleum-derived.”

Darcy said the DG Fuels system is an aggressive effort to efficiently use what others call waste. “DG Fuels culls biogenic carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide from agricultural waste high-value-carbon feedstock,” Darcy said. The patented process is the brainchild of Darcy and several other people with specific expertise in various fields. 

“I wanted to develop a stable-priced, drop-in jet fuel for gas turbine engines, not necessarily green fuel,” he said. “It just so happened that when you separate carbon feedstock from petroleum, it has a much more stable production price. It doesn’t take much effort to make it basically zero carbon emission by using hydrogen from other methods.”

Darcy said the aviation industry needs synthetic fuels. Although he loves the idea of electric or hydrogen-fueled aircraft, but it would require a major scientific breakthrough to increase flight times beyond 30 minutes. 

“Any biofuel process will bring dollars and jobs back to the United States, and that means something to me,” Darcy said. Developing new forms of waste-to-energy that are also environmentally friendly just makes sense.”

Giving Back to Communities

In addition to Phelps County, DG Fuels is planning more plants around the country to turn biomass into synthetic fuel. Its first project in Louisiana was designed to turn sugar cane trash – bagass - and plant waste into fuel. Unlike petroleum companies that often leave local populations uninvolved, Darcy believes in giving back and listening to the residents of the communities where he builds. He plans to do the same in Phelps County.

In addition to giving back to the community and increasing revenue streams to farmers, the Phelps County DG Fuels plant will create not just jobs, but high-paying careers. “It only requires us to listen to communities to make sure they are involved and are beneficiaries of the long-term benefits of energy production,” Darcy said. “It only makes sense to be a good neighbor when developing our facilities. That’s what we strive to create within any community we choose to establish a DG Fuels facility.