Project Profile A Plan with Merritt Diacarbon Energy takes over idled Merritt pellet plant By Andrew Macklin J erry Ericsson never had any intention of produc-ing white wood pellets. The president of Diacarbon Energy was working on his PhD from Simon Fraser University when he and his father started looking at opportunities in bioenergy. “We were looking at materials that could be developed out of thermochemical processes,” Ericsson says. “We actually won some money from the B.C. Innovation Council to develop a business plan and, in doing so, we determined that bioenergy had greater opportunities than advanced materials at that time.” It was the idea of creating second-generation biomass, tor-refied pellets, that caught Ericsson’s attention and it became the focus of the business that he began to create. So he moved forward by raising some capital and teaming with a handful of other inventors and engineers to work on a pilot-scale system for production. Over the course of three to four years, Ericsson continued to refine the process by developing more materials with different feedstocks, investigate ways to scale up the technology, as well as attempt to interest larger capital and corporate partners in an effort to attract off-take agreements for the advanced biomass. “We did a 50-ton trial with a major cement company and that led to purchase commitments from two cement companies for about 80,000 tonnes per year,” explains Ericsson. “From there we were able to raise more capital and conduct about two more years of research and development work at our lab in Burnaby.” With the successful trial completed and a demonstrated mar-ket for the Diacarbon product established, the company was A primary issue with the pellet plant was that there was no drying capacity on site at the time of the purchase. Ericsson had purchased a dryer for the Vancouver operation, which was then moved to Merritt. 10 Canadian BIOMASS MARCH/APRIL 2016
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