Sawdust-to-coal revenue on way

Carbonscape's co-founder Nick Gerritsen. Photo / Supplied

Blenheim's Carbonscape, which has developed a one-step process to turn sawmill waste into pure coal and other valuable materials, is developing its technology to manufacture products at commercial volumes.

Nick Gerritsen, co-founder of the clean-tech outfit, says the four-year-old company may be about 12 months away from its first revenues.

Carbonscape's industrial microwave heats waste at up to 3000C, creating a process called pyrolysisation.

"Pyrolysis basically creates three product sets - we get charcoal or carbon, bio oil and syngas," he said.

Gerritsen said Carbonscape's focus was on producing carbon products, used by many billion dollar industries around the world.

One of those products, activated carbon, could be used to filter water or soak up polluting industrial waste gases, and sold for up to US$5000 ($6120) a tonne, he said.

Gerritsen said the process could also turn pine sawdust into anthracite coal, an extremely pure form of the mineral used in steel production.

"Effectively we've created an equivalent to coking coal out of sawdust," he said.

Gerritsen said similar processes under development around the world required up to 10 steps to create value-added products, as well as "exotic feedstocks" such as coconut shells.

"What we've done is create a one-step process," he said, adding that Carbonscape's technology could use a range of feedstocks, including waste corncobs.


"We're still pre-revenue, but we're anticipating that the end result of this next stage of development will be achieving the first commercial revenues."

Gerritsen hoped the company would be making sales within the next 12 to 15 months, although that depended on access to capital.

Carbonscape plans to license its technology to organisations - such as sawmills, which would deploy the equipment in the field - and collect royalties on production.

"We don't envisage that we're going to become a manufacturing company," Gerritsen said, although he said the firm's first revenues would likely come from selling activated carbon and anthracite coal.

He said Carbonscape's process was the brainchild of scientist Chris Turney, who got the idea from the memory of burning potatoes in the microwave as a teenager.

"He got the metrics wrong and ended up blowing up the microwave and creating perfect carbon out of the potatoes," Gerritsen said.

Meanwhile, Carbonscape has been singled out on the world stage by inclusion in a book by British futurologist Mark Stevenson.

In An Optimist's Tour of the Future: One Curious Man Sets Out to Answer "What's Next?" the Blenheim company features alongside Nobel prize winners and leading scientists from Harvard, MIT and Cornell universities.