Holland Industrial sets June 3 auction for Fulcrum Sierra Biofuels assets

Holland Industrial Group on June 3 put Fulcrum Sierra Biofuels’ former assets up for live webcast sale at 9 a.m. PT, offering a package at 3600 Peru Dr. in McCarran, Nevada, that the listing said reflected more than $200 million invested between 2019 and 2021. Inspection was by appointment only, and checkout was set for June 8-26, 2026.

The auction, run with Federal Equipment Company and Heritage Global Partners, put late-model processing systems, electrical switchgear, generators, transformers, compressors, centrifuges, heat exchangers, crushers, shredders, a boiler system, tanks, pumps and laboratory equipment in front of buyers. For the market, that was the real signal: this was a sale of hardware, site infrastructure and residual industrial value, not a working biofuels platform.

Fulcrum BioEnergy, founded in 2007, originally aimed to convert municipal solid waste into ethanol before pivoting to sustainable aviation fuel and renewable diesel using gasification and Fischer-Tropsch technology. Its Sierra project near Reno was described as an 11 MMgy facility designed to process about 219,000 metric tons of garbage a year. The plant began operations in late 2022 and later shipped a small amount of synthetic crude to Marathon Petroleum for processing, but it was shut in mid-May 2024 after clogging, corrosion, sludge buildup and maintenance and retrofit work derailed operations. Fulcrum’s CEO, Eric Pryor, departed around the shutdown.

The financial unwind followed quickly. Fulcrum filed Chapter 11 on Sept. 9, 2024, in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware with more than $456 million in obligations to more than 200 creditors. Switch Ltd. provided a $5 million debtor-in-possession loan and entered with a $15 million stalking-horse bid, and the bankruptcy auction later left Switch with the biorefinery while Refuse Inc., a WM subsidiary, acquired the feedstock processing facility adjacent to WM’s Lockwood Regional Landfill.

The asset sale also sat against a permitting record that never stabilized. Nevada regulators issued permits in September 2023 and March 2024, and state records later described stop-work orders tied to permit modifications. Fulcrum also faced opposition to a planned second project in Gary, Indiana. PitchBook data cited in 2024 put cumulative investment at $467 million as of June 2023, a reminder that even heavily financed waste-to-fuels projects can end up monetizing equipment, not throughput, when policy support, feedstock economics and operating reliability do not align.