ABUNDIA GLOBAL IMPACT GROUP: De-Risking Waste to Fuel
Abundia Global Impact Group will soon launch its waste plastic to fuel plant in Texas, turning 80,000 tonnes of material destined for landfill or incineration into valuable energy products. CEO Ed Gillespie tells Energy Focus about rolling out a demanding development timeline over the next two years.
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Interview with Ed Gillespie, CEO
Only around 9% of the plastic the world produces ever gets recycled, according to analysis from insurance broker Marsh. Another 12% is incinerated, and the remaining 79% ends up in landfill or the ocean, where much of it will still be sitting in 450 years. It is a statistic that has reframed how parts of the energy industry think about plastic waste: not as a disposal problem to be managed, but as a stockpile of hydrocarbons waiting to be put back to use. Abundia Global Impact Group, a Houston-headquartered company listed on the NYSE American as AGIG, has built its entire business around that reframing, and it is now closing in on the point where the idea becomes a working plant.
CEO Ed Gillespie describes the company’s purpose in blunt, commercial terms. “We are in waste-to-value – taking waste plastics or waste biomass through thermal processes then upgrading them to drop-in fuels,” he says, of a model that takes material otherwise destined for landfill or incineration and turns it into transportation and aviation fuel that can be used exactly like its fossil equivalent. It is a business built to solve two problems with one process: a mounting plastic waste crisis on one side, and steady global demand for renewable fuel on the other.
Gillespie’s own instinct for spotting that kind of prospect runs through his career. “I have always looked for opportunity wherever it arises, and this idea came up when a former CTO came to me with an idea of developing waste-plastic-to-fuels-project,” he explains. “That was five years ago, and we have put together a technology stack that we are very confident in.”
PROVEN, NOT EXPERIMENTAL
That confidence rests on a deliberate refusal to gamble on theories. “We work with already established technologies. We don’t take technology risk. The market is scary enough without adding R&D into it,” Gillespie says, a philosophy that shapes every partnership the company signs. For the plastics side of the business, Abundia has licensed pyrolysis technology from Alterra Energy, which operates what Gillespie describes as the largest continuous operating facility of its kind in the world, based in Ohio. For upgrading crude products into usable drop-in fuels, it has partnered with Topsoe, a name synonymous with refining technology, on a hydroprocessing route known as HydroFlex. “Both are fully operational, fully working at scale, and come with the necessary process guarantees to leave a project bankable,” he says. Abundia holds licences to deploy Alterra’s technology across four plants in Europe and the UK and three more in the US, giving it a pipeline of future sites well beyond the one currently under development.
What separates Abundia from much of the rest of the waste-to-energy sector is where it chooses to stop, or rather, where it refuses to. Most operators in this space take waste plastic through pyrolysis, produce a crude oil, and sell that oil on to a refiner as chemical feedstock. “A good thing to do which should continue,” Gillespie says, “however, the margins are tight.”
Abundia instead pushes the material through a further upgrading step to produce finished, specification-grade fuels and chemicals, a choice driven as much by market structure as by ambition. “The renewable plastic market is somewhat behind the renewable fuels market and therefore not as well established and more prone to fluctuation,” he explains, whereas “there is always demand for renewable fuels.”
Independent research into upgrading pathways for plastic pyrolysis oil supports why that extra step matters commercially: raw pyrolysis oil is typically too high in nitrogen, oxygen and unstable olefins to meet fuel specifications on its own, and it is the hydroprocessing stage, exactly the step Abundia has built its model around, that turns it into something a refinery or airline can actually use. The result is a product split that gives Abundia a built-in hedge: out of every barrel produced, 15-20% is sold as chemical feedstock, while 80-85% becomes transportation and aviation fuel, the segment Gillespie regards as the company’s clearest point of difference in the market.
BUILT IN BAYTOWN
The company’s technology stack is now being built into steel and concrete at Cedar Port, a 25-acre site in Baytown, Texas, chosen for reasons that go well beyond convenience. “There is a lot more waste plastic in the US, just because of the population size,” Gillespie says, explaining why the first commercial plant is being built there rather than in Europe or the UK, where Abundia holds licences but has yet to break ground.
Texas offered something else, too. “We are based in the oil and gas hub of the US in Texas, and distribution and engineering expertise, as well as offtake partners, are within close proximity to the site,” he says, of a location that sits near the Houston Ship Channel with rail, barge and pipeline access built in. The plant is designed to process 80,000 tons of plastic waste a year once operational.
Getting to that point has meant assembling engineering partners who already understand how to blend technology and infrastructure rather than starting from scratch. In February 2026, Abundia appointed Burns & McDonnell as its lead engineer to deliver the front-end engineering and design (FEED) package for the Baytown facility, a decision Gillespie says came down to direct experience. “Burns & McDonnell is based in Houston and they have expertise in the industry as well as experience with Alterra Energy, our technology partner, on the design and engineering components for its current operating plant. That was a big advantage as they understood the technology,” he says.
By July 2026, Alterra had delivered the process design package that sets the site-specific engineering basis for the plant, with the next phase integrating Alterra’s liquefaction technology and Topsoe’s HydroFlex system into a single commercial design, work being coordinated alongside Nexus PMG as owner’s engineer. Each step is aimed squarely at what Gillespie calls Abundia’s four de-risking pillars: a commercially ready technical design, secured capital and project financing, regulatory compliance, and a commercial ecosystem ready to receive the finished product. “We are all about making sure the project stands up commercially,” he says. “We bring in the very best in the business to ensure that the funders feel confident in everything we do.”
Feedstock and offtake are the two pieces still being finalised, and both are moving. Against the 80,000 tons a year the plant will need, Abundia has already secured 40,000 tons from an established plastics recovery operation, Frankfort Plastics, that collects industry waste and delivers it in a usable form. On the output side, discussions with potential distribution and offtake partners are underway, with Gillespie targeting a shortlist by the end of the year so that Abundia enters 2027 knowing exactly who will take the fuel it produces. “We need around 80,000 tons of feedstock every year,” he says, “and we are currently focused on finalising the suppliers for the balance of the feedstock.”
GROWING WHILE BUILDING
Development of Cedar Port has not come at the expense of near-term revenue, largely thanks to a business Abundia added to its portfolio earlier this year. In April 2026, the company completed its acquisition of RPD Technologies Americas, a Baytown-based engineering firm that had been quietly scaling up its own pilot-plant and process-development work for the refining and petrochemical industries. “We acquired RPD Technologies earlier this year, to capitalise on our established strategic partnership, and they had grown organically, handling all of our R&D,” Gillespie says.
By August, Abundia had completed a newly built engineering and commercial scale-up facility for RPD’s new headquarters at Cedar Port in Baytown, a milestone the company points to as evidence of steady execution rather than a project running ahead of itself. Including RPD’s team, Abundia now employs around 30 people. “We have provided investors with another derisking component because as we build the plant, we are also growing revenue,” Gillespie notes.
Abundia’s first full-scale plant is expected to come online and generate revenue by 2029. The roadmap between now and then, in Gillespie’s words, is “aggressive”: appointing engineering partners, securing feedstock, completing planning and permitting, locking in offtake agreements, and finishing FEED studies, all with an eye on reaching the end of the first quarter of 2027 with the project positioned to secure funding for construction, or final investment approval, for the development period that follows.
None of this, Gillespie is careful to stress, is being sold as a silver bullet. “In the energy transition industry, there are a lot of people that are purist and only want to use renewable fuels or renewable chemicals, and that is good but not practical. We are here to supplement the industry rather than totally disrupt,” he says.
That framing, in an industry still searching for enough distinct solutions to make a dent in fossil fuel demand, is the same instinct that has driven visions that today’s landfills could become tomorrow’s oil fields. Abundia’s model leans into that idea at a local level rather than a global one. “We are decentralised and will supply local industries,” Gillespie explains. “Where there is a large urban area that generates enough waste plastic to feed a plant, we can build the plant and distribute the fuel back into that large urban area,” cutting out the long, fragile supply chains that move conventional fuel around the world.
It is a modest claim dressed up in realistic terms. “We have a drop-in fuel that is distributed locally from a waste that is collected locally,” Gillespie says. “The technology is already proven, and we are putting the safeguards in place to negate the execution risk as we move through the development process.” For an industry that has too often promised more than proven technology could deliver, that combination of ambition, restraint, and realism may turn out to be Abundia’s most valuable asset of all.