Turning waste into renewable energy

Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday 30/10/2010 Page: 15

YOU may remember the biochar specialist Crucible Carbon from early last year, when the then opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull visited its Newcastle base and touted the potential for biochar to draw down CO₂ from the atmosphere. In July Crucible Carbon won a $680,000 grant from Commercialisation Australia, to prove up its Pyrolysis technology - converting biomass into gas and char by slowly burning it, without oxygen.

At the Vales Point power station of its partner Delta Energy, on Lake Macquarie, Crucible Carbon's demonstration facility will take waste from timber mills - shavings, sawdust and bark - to generate renewable energy. Next year will be the company's year of commercialisation. "It'll make us sales-ready", says its chairman, Joe Herbertson, helping it through the cashflow "valley of death" that kills off many start-ups.

Crucible Carbon turned down a substantial venture capital investment. "Once you scratched beneath the surface it was ugly", Herbertson says. They wanted management rights and 'drag and tag' rights [allowing them to sell the whole company]". Crucible Carbon's business model is to work with partners to make power and heat from agricultural residues and wastes-sugar, cotton, wheat... and wood.

"The forest and timber industry is very big for us", Herbertson says. 'We're certainly not going to be chopping down forest for the sake of it [but] along the forest and timber value chain we can generate a lot of electricity or gas for industrial heat and power".