I’m currently leading a project to develop a business plan for a local entrepreneur. He had a couple of ideas he was kicking around and wanted to figure out if either was worth the investment of his time. One was the manufacturing of a standard set of products using gypsum, a byproduct of coal firing in power plants. This went nowhere; as our team quickly learned, gypsum manufacturing is an established and capital-intensive industry; definitely not the place for a startup.

The other potential idea was biomass pelletization. North Carolina has significant biomass resources and pelletization allows a wide variety of biomass sources, from wood waste to switchgrass, to be dried and transformed into a shape that enables easy transportation and consumption. Pellets are primarily used in heating applications as a fuel for pellet stoves. Unfortunately, pellet stoves are not popular in the southeast; they are present in the northeast and more common in Europe, and the costs to transport the pellets would turn the business opportunity into a volume game. This would again squeeze out the opportunity for a startup.

Enter a process called torrefaction. Torrefaction was new to me and to the team, so we had quite a bit of research to do. What we found was really very interesting. To summarize, torrefaction:

• is brand new, with only a few firms developing and/or commercializing the technology.


• reduces biomass weight by 30% while retaining 90% of its energy density.


• causes biomass to be hydrophobic, significantly improving its storability.


• allows biomass to be co-fired along with coal in traditional coal-burning power plants, at rates of around 90% coal to 10% biomass.

The implications of the last bullet point are fairly significant from a carbon perspective. The US has over 600 coal-burning power plants, none of which currently utilize this technology. These power plants emit 2,142 million metric tons of CO2 annually. If torrefaction and biomass co-firing were done at every power plant in the US, that would work out to a reduction of 214 million metric tons of CO2 annually, assuming that the biomass feedstocks were grown as part of a closed loop carbon cycle.

Torrefaction is obviously a very cool new technology and could have a significant impact. It initially bothered me that it promises only a short-term patch for the world’s energy problems. However, I recently participated in two different events that changed my mind. First, I helped review a set of 20 early-stage cleantech business plans as part of a local business plan competition. Second, I became part of UNC’s Business Accelerator for Sustainable Entrepreneurship, an incubator with membership of more than 20 North Carolina entrepreneurs launching sustainable businesses, several of them in renewables.

After overdosing on local cleantech entrepreneurship I was less bothered about spending time on intermediate solutions. My real worry has always been that focusing on short-term solutions will cause a loss of focus on long term, more critical solutions. But as I learned, entrepreneurial energy is not a limiting resource at the moment—the US currently has enough capable entrepreneurs to attack the energy crisis from every side.