ENCAP aims to profit from biofuel byproducts

Quick—ethanol producers, stop feeding your distiller grains to cattle.

A small privately-held soil amendment company in Wisconsin thinks it's found a more profitable way to get rid of the byproducts of biofuels.

And some new partners have found the process so exciting that they're helping build test facilities in Colombia to process sugar cane and other agricultural wastes using the company's technology.

Since 1999, ENCAP, based in Green Bay, WI, has been creating soil amendments and other products to improve plant growth, help solve soil erosion problems and improve moisture management. Its mulches, fertilizers and other products are widely available at home and garden stores in the U.S.

As the basis of its products, the company has been coverting recycled and de-bleached office paper into dry granules. It has then combined the granules with a proprietary water-soluble polyacrylamide polymer, which helps minimize water run-off, erosion and crusting, and stabilizes the soil.

The company, and its new partners in Latin America, suspect they can apply the same process to agricultural waste and other materials that have been piling up from biofuel production.

"We can take almost any inert material, including byproducts of the sugar cane process, or dried distillers grains from the corn ethanol process, and form it into granules and add our advanced soil technologies to it, so that when it's applied to the soil it does all the wonderful things it's capable of doing," Michael Krysiak, president of ENCAP, told the Cleantech Group.

ENCAP and eight other organizations, forming what they ambitiously call a "Global Alliance," [ed. their caps, not ours] recently signed an agreement in Cali, Colombia to apply the technology to help "address the world's agricultural, ethanol, and paper waste issues."

While thinking big, its beginnings are modest: the alliance is building a test facility based on the process and business model currently in use at ENCAP's facility in Wisconsin. The facility is to focus on transforming waste from sugar, corn, rice, cassava, bio-diesel, and other starch-based plants into marketable products.

The plant will be located at a global research and learning facility in Cali, Colombia, originally built with support from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations. The ENCAP facility is to serve as a prototype for larger operations to be built throughout the world.

According to Krysiak, there's no lack of raw material nearby, given the country's huge sugarcane industry.

"It's amazing. Not only are they generating significant amount on daily basis, but the stockpile of this material is enormous, enormous," said Krysiak.

The Central American connection came through a longtime business partner, Aicardo Roa, who grew up in sugar cane fields. ENCAP ultimately got introduced to CIAT (the International Center for Tropical Agriculture), a Latin American non-profit called CLAYUCA focused on raising the standard of living, Propal, one of Latin America's largest paper mills, and three of the largest sugar mills in Colombia, some of which have ethanol plants.

All of these organizations have signed on to ENCAP's Alliance and pledged both short and long-term resources to help address these problems, according to Krysiak.

"The international ethanol industry will gain a competitive advantage over conventional fuel sources by implementing this process," said Krysiak.

"By transforming waste materials into meaningful, valuable, and effective erosion control and fertilizer products for use in agriculture and construction, the need for government support of these industries will likely be reduced."

The Colombian operations have been structured as a joint venture between the parties involved, said Krysiak, who, speaking to the Cleantech Group by cell phone after dropping off a visiting Chinese delegation, also noted that ENCAP is in the process of raising money.

"In one way it's a new beginning for us, bringing our technology out into the world. This international research facility could be the first step to something big," he said.

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