Biocarbon Q&A Heating up: Q&A with CHAR Technologies CEO Andrew White By Maria Church O ntario’s CHAR Technologies has been making headlines this year with a flood of new projects and invest -ments in the Canadian cleantech market. The company is pioneering high-tem-perature pyrolysis to turn wood waste into renewable natural gas (RNG) and biocar-bon in the form of biochar and biocoal. In July, CHAR announced a $6.6-million in-vestment and annual biocarbon purchase agreement with global steel and mining company ArcelorMittal. Canadian Biomass caught up with An-drew White, CHAR co-founder and CEO, for a behind the scenes look at their grow-ing list of projects and agreements, and to hear White’s thoughts on the biocarbon market. CB: Canadian Biomass first profiled CHAR in 2019 and much has happened for the company since then. What has that rapid progress looked like on your end? Andrew: It’s been an evolution, certainly. Now is when a lot of the hard work over the last four years is finally coming to fru -ition. Besides surviving the pandemic – which was interesting for everybody – we now have this condensed process where we’ve been able to start communicating with the market with what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. In the background, we had our proj-ect planned for Thorold, and we had some initial progress on our other proj-ects like Lake Nipigon, Kirkland Lake and Saint-Félicien. And we’ve been able to announce our funding package from the province and federal government for Thorold. A lot of that development work, funding work, strategic partnerships, have all come together here, relatively speak-Andrew White, CEO of CHAR Technologies ing, in a very short amount of time. But we’ve been working with a lot of these partners for years. CB: How has the company evolved over the last few years? A big move was our London facility to Thorold at the end of last year. We were producing carbon the second week of No-vember ’22 in London, and the second week of January ’23 we were making it in Thorold. And we lost a week for Christ-mas. It was a great testament to the bene-fits of our modular technology. When we look at our future projects, that’s how we want to approach them – to be able to de-ploy fairly quickly by following this mod-ularity approach. Our plant when it was in London could input 500 kilograms per hour of material. The scaled-up version under construction in Thorold can input 3.5 tonnes per hour. In 2019 we had started the transition to really recognize that the value for CHAR, the value for our shareholders and stake-holders, is in our involvement in owning the infrastructure. A build-own-operate model that is focused on RNG and bio-carbon production. We’re still doing both, and we’re being selective with partners to build projects for them. Really getting into the RNG component of it, we’re now going to be deploying it in Thorold in the coming summer ’24. We just announced the ArcelorMittal investment. To look behind the curtain a bit, we’ve been working with ArcelorMit-tal Dofasco in Hamilton for some years now, and there was a huge amount of due diligence involved. We went deep on the technology, deep on the business case with a third-party consultant, just to val-idate that, yes, the technology works, and the business case works, and this makes a lot of sense. ArcelorMittal Dofasco then agreed to buy our production from our Thorold facil-ity. We’re excited that not only did Arce-lorMittal invest, ArcelorMittal Dofasco signed up to be our guaranteed customer. I think that’s excellent validation for all the work that’s gone on in the background. CB: At what stage are CHAR’s projects announced across Canada? [Lake Nipigon, Ont.:] We went up and we met with Lake Nipigon Forest Manage-ment Inc. group, which is a consortium of four First Nations groups who control the harvesting of about one million hectares of productive forest around the Lake Ni-pigon shore. We have the MOU in place as to what a JV [joint venture] structure would look like and now were working through the definitive agreement. We looked at a couple site options. And we want to get moving on the engineering de-FALL 2023 14 Canadian BIOMASS
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