Sweetwater Energy

ARUNIS CHESONIS: My name is Arunis Chesonis, and I'm chairman and CEO at Sweetwater.

JACK BARON: My name is Jack Baron. I'm president at Sweetwater.

As we've developed the technology of Sweetwater, it's really become a platform technology. So we break down biomass in just 20 seconds, and we can use over 90% of the biomass to create high-value products. So it's a wide range of products. We're making alcohol for fuels, drop-in hydrocarbons, bioplastics, biochemicals with partners.

And perhaps most exciting, we're making specialty cellulose, microcrystalline and nanofibrillated cellulose, which, although those aren't terms you hear every day, they go into products that we all use every day, from cosmetics to food, auto body parts, building materials, cement, packaging, paper, and in a sustainable way, replacing petroleum ingredients. And so that's what we're bringing to the world today.

One of the big things that's held biorefining back over the last few decades is economics. To compete with low-cost oil, realistically, unless you've got something that's highly efficient and creates products that can compete on price globally, and that's what we've done.

ARUNIS CHESONIS: So when you look at what differentiates Sweetwater from the competitors, it's our SUNBURST technology. And this is actually the fourth technology that we've piloted in our demonstration plant in Rochester over the years. And all of those other technologies help teach us what was really important if you're really trying to extract all of the value of a piece of wood or a corn stalk and create all those ingredients for different biomaterial applications. Just like the oil companies did a good job of extracting value of every drop of oil in the barrel, we're doing the same thing with the biomass material.

And the real secret is it's incredibly simple. It's a twin screw extruder. It's basically a gearbox, a motor, and a barrel with some screws in it. And that footprint is only about 14 feet long for a commercial system. It fits on your extended dining room table. And it's such a fast process, it goes in about 20 seconds, taking something like a wood chip and turning it into a pre-treated material that looks more like chocolate mousse. That speed and that efficiency and that low-cost platform is really what differentiates SUNBURST from all the competition.

JACK BARON: So the applications are broad, and the markets are broad for Sweetwater's technology. When you break down biomass, you break it into three component parts, cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. Not that those words are words you use every day, but we create building blocks, or products that we do use every day, fuels, chemicals, biochemicals, the chemicals that are for cleaning products, paints, coatings, resins, adhesives.

If you think of a lot of the products that petroleum goes into today, we can replace those products, the petroleum-based products, with these sustainable products from Sweetwater's process. And we can typically do it at lower cost and even bring some performance benefits.

ARUNIS CHESONIS: We just had an incredible milestone achieved in Estonia with our partners there building the first commercial demonstration plant using the SUNBURST technology. And we have definitely proven that the commercial-scale system does what it's supposed to do. So that's what most of the industry has been waiting for. Because everyone has a difficult time going from pilot plant to commercial-scale system and hit those same performance metrics. And that's really what's happened just in the last week for Sweetwater.

JACK BARON: The big news for us is that we've been able to prove that this will work globally at commercial scale. And our commercial scale starts out small, but it's unlimited on the back end, on the high end. The small scale that it starts at is 50,000 green tons of wood per year we can process now. And we've just proven that in Estonia with our licensee, Graanul Invest.

So we'll be partnering with larger companies that can build plants all over the world. If you think about the hundred years-plus that it's taken the petroleum industry to get from zero to where they are now, it's going to take us a lot less time to get from zero to thousands and thousands of products. Because frankly, we have that model to use, and it's wonderful. And there are a lot of products out there that we're all using every day that our ingredients can go into and lower the cost and still enhance some performance benefits, all while driving sustainability.

Because, of course, trees are going to keep growing. We can plant more trees. We can plant more crops. And they're already using carbon that's in the atmosphere today, which is why this is so sustainable.

ARUNIS CHESONIS: One of the real exciting opportunities for Sweetwater the next 10 years is the fact that our footprint is so small with the SUNBURST system that we can take advantage of all the existing manufacturing plants of all kinds around the world and co-locate our equipment on each of those sites and grow with our customers. So there are hundreds and hundreds of pulp and paper mills around the world. There are hundreds and hundreds of biochemical and bioplastic plants that we can leverage.

So for us, it's going to be a combination of building some of our own systems and providing ingredients to people for their manufacturing processes, and it's going to be an even larger program creating licensing opportunities for our technology, for venture opportunities, and really just ensuring that we have hundreds of Sweetwater facilities in the world operating in the next 10, 20 years.

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