[Gasification] What happened at Choren

[Tom Miles]

Tom Taylor,

As you well know starting a business of any kind is a challenge. When I took a business course in the 1960s they considered a sector of the economy to be healthy if it had both a high rate of business starts and business failures. We always seem to have a number of "Starts" in gasification. I would expect a high rate of failure in gasification and a low rate of success. 

With gasification we are often trying to start businesses in several areas at the same time - preparing and handling biomass, making clean gas, dealing with solid or liquid effluents, reprocessing the gas to a product which may not have a market, adapting the gas or liquid to secondary conversion processes, developing new markets, developing distribution systems. We often assume that the processes and equipment we will use in each step are already "proven". We also forget that if we are good in one area we are probably naive in another. Many companies that start out in thermal conversion of biomass (carbonization, pyrolysis, gasification, combustion) get launched when they have demonstrated a small part of the process in the laboratory. That small success becomes what Doug Williams calls a "funding magnet".  We have all seen what financial folks can do with that. Projects don't get easier when they get bigger. Or they become efforts that are perpetually under-funded because the technically savvy may not have the financial horsepower to move the project forward.

This gasification business is not easy. To be successful the systems must be simple, maintainable and reliable. Proving reliability is always a challenge. You need another successful business to support your gasification habit until it works. I'm sure that there are easier businesses to get into.  

Tom Miles