Maybe This Time: Aries Clean Technologies Hits a Milestone in the Never-Ending Battle for a Great Biochar Business

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) ... You can finance a bioenergy project making gases and solids, so long as your gas is a solid stream, and, solidly sold, and your market for solids is liquid, and your liquidity is solid. If you have lots of liquidity, you’re solid, and then building out the company is a gas.

We think the basic proposition is solid, even if it’s a gas (caveat: when the region is committed to biomass energy as an emissions-reducing strategy). The addition of a solid product, sold at retail for $29.95 a gallon, adds a lot of value to biomass. Why, you can get timber for $60 a ton in most places, easy. And that’s not counting the value of the syngas for electricity, steam, direct thermal energy (for kiln operations and sludge dryers, for example) or combustion. Reducing biomass by 85 percent means smaller landfills, and useful products flowing from the landfill operation — it becomes an EXTRACTIVE business instead of a STORAGE business.

That’s also the reason we like Carbon Capture & Use instead of Carbon Capture and Sequestration. It’s why shows like AMERICAN PICKERS exist — that’s also about taking stored junk and extracting value. The parts are worth more than the sum of the whole, to turn the old adage on its head.

One of these days someone is going to come up with a solution that turns landfills into a true extractive business.

First, the drift of the times toward soil health and emissions reduction. They don’t have one pony pointed in the right direction, they have two. Second, there are some claims which may well be true about the transformative abilities of their downdraft gasification technology to handle wood, and their fluidized bed technology to handle odious biosolids. Having not signed an NDA nor practicing due diligence, it’s a job for the Due Diligence Wolfpack, but I’d have to say they have a lot of operating hours, and are clearly making saleable product. Third, we like biochar as a market and a product — though we wish it was better studied. Perhaps an academic journal of biochar is needed, something for the International Biochar Initiative and NIFA to consider — no better way to get academic attention than to offer publication, and grants. They are the butter and bread of that world.

The 1 Million Pound Mark

News arrives from company HQ that, with shipments to all 50 states and Canada, Aries GREEN bio-carbon retail and commercial sales have reached 1 million pounds and launch new renewable carbon product offerings. That’s the biochar product from woods. The biosolids gasification produces a Fly-Ash which is also sold commercially.

OK, 1 million pounds is 50 tons, or around 7 million gallons of fuel, which is what they will make at the Rodeo renewable diesel plant in roughly 3 days. So, why a big deal?

Why a Big Deal?

Greg Bafalis puts it this way. “Aries Renewable Carbon is replacing coal and becoming a green alternative to coal-based carbon products,” Bafalis added. “When industrial products, including ferrous and non-ferrous metals, are made from sustainably sourced wood and biomass, they are carbon neutral – an ideal fit for today’s circular economy.”

But what about the biochar. Well, it’s a soil conditioner, part of your field prep, or it’s an additive for cement or asphalt. It improves lawns and gardens, returns carbon to the soil and retains moisture near roots.

And, what about activated carbon? It’s used to purify liquids and gases in a variety of applications, including municipal drinking water, food and beverage processing, odor removal, industrial pollution control. Activated carbon is produced from carbon-rich source materials, such as wood, coconuts, nutshells, coal, and peat, and this fits perfectly into gasification production. Aries uses steam to activate its bio-carbon. READ MORE