Biofuels Profile Calgary biofuels player’s patented tech is both feedstock and product agnostic By Maria Church Infinite opportunities The SixRing Technical and Operations team in front of the commercial scale reactors in its Calgary facility. Photo: SixRing f asked for the elevator pitch, Scott Treadwell, president of Calgary-based SixRing, will say they are offering in-finite optionality on the inputs and outputs of their biomass technology, a rare feat in the industry. SixRing has been operating under the radar for many years now while quietly developing more than 40 patent families (filing some in over 130 countries), scal -ing the technology and optimizing the downstream refining and associated end products to ensure commercial viability prior to entering the market. The core of the technology is a chemical delignifica -tion process that’s low-cost, scalable, and offers high conversion rates of non-food biomass to a multitude of end products. The company’s pilot plant has a 20,000-li-I tre reactor that can process around three to five tonnes a day of biomass, along with many other technical support systems used in their process. As Treadwell will tell you, SixRing’s advantage is in its flexibility. Their pro -cesses and methods can take any source of lignocellulosic biomass and turn it into high-value feedstocks for biofuels, special-ity chemicals and advanced biomaterials. “You’ve got these fundamental build-ing blocks coming out of the SixRing pro-cess that doesn’t lock you in to a down-stream or end-use market. And what’s coming in as feedstock doesn’t lock you in to an upstream market, greatly de-risking the deployment of our technology versus alternatives, most of which are very capi-tal intensive,” Treadwell says. COMPANY BEGINNINGS SixRing’s technology evolution began more than a decade ago when current CEO Clay Purdy founded Fluid Energy Group Ltd. to offer chemical solutions to the oil and gas industry. The company’s aggressive R&D efforts led them to a solution for treating biomass to produce a very high purity cellulose and a liquid or-ganic mixture that seemed to be reflective of a crude oil. Chief technology officer Markus Weis -senberger understood quickly there was a strong technology differentiator and busi-ness development opportunity in the del-ignification of biomass using their fairly simple chemical mixture, Treadwell says. Last year, serial entrepreneur Purdy and his team sold its petroleum-based tech-SPRING 2024 10 Canadian BIOMASS
Canadian Biomass Spring 2024: Page 10
