The SAF Podcast
Welcome to The SAF Podcast, the only podcast on the internet that exclusively covers sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). So if you want to find out the real issues and challenges are for commercialising and scaling SAF production, look no further.
Every week we will be hearing from senior industry leaders who are actively shaping the future of SAF and aviation.
Hosted by Oscar Henderson and brought to you by the team at SAF Investor. Connect with us at www.safinvestor.com
The SAF Podcast
The SAF Podcast: Biomass, burgeoning land economies and "the whole buffalo"
This episode Oscar sits down with Wendy Owens of Hexas Biomass. Wendy, a trailblazer with a captivating career journey, unveils the potential of Xanograss and the Xanofiber it creates which can be used for sustainable construction and as a biofuel feedstock. Her insights offer a flight path into how non-food, second-generation bioenergy crops could revolutionise the SAF supply chain and fulfill the soaring global energy demands.
Wendy articulates the significance of maximising every part of the Xanograss to enhance cost efficiency in SAF production, exploring Wendy's mantra of 'using the whole buffalo' in biomass optimisation. Our conversation navigates through the strategic partnerships Hexas is cultivating with growers, ensuring their profitability and the sustainability of local economies. We spotlight the local nature of biomass production, ensuring that the Xanograss doesn't roam far from home—preferably within 60 miles of its utilisation, encompassing partnerships spanning the U.S. and Europe.
We then address the rewilded lands and the burgeoning bioeconomy Xanograss can help sustain. Wendy shares her vision for regenerating lands degraded by exploitation, where the cultivation of bioenergy crops can reinvigorate ecosystems and revitalise the local economies of Southeast Asia and northern Africa. By rewilding marginalised spaces and creating localized SAF production hubs, we spotlight a future where environmental restoration aligns seamlessly with economic growth and global energy transition.
If you enjoyed this episode, why not try our discussion with Natasha Mann, Future Energy Global: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2202964/14508344
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Join over 200 leaders in the SAF Industry for two days of stimulating debates, discussions and plenty of networking.
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Host & Producer: Oscar Henderson, SAF Investor
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the SAF podcast. This week. We're delighted to be joined by Wendy Owens from Hexas Biomass. Wendy, before we get into Hexas and everything you're doing with Biomass feedstock, do you just want to give us a bit of a sort of brief background to yourself and everything that came before Hexas Biomass?
Speaker 2:Sorry, I'm happy to and ask for. Thank you so much for having me on. So I can say honestly that my career has not been a straight line from what I did my master's degree in to where I am today, but along the way it's given me lots of opportunities for learning and bringing those learning to each sort of industry that I've tried to tackle. So I started in more the computing side, that moved into advanced materials engineering actually and this is actually Hexas being my first startup and along the way had also hit biotech. So I'm bringing together those skills, both the all the mistakes let's say failures of previous entrepreneurial efforts and then the things that I learned and can apply here in Hexas towards success. So it's been different, but here I am today.
Speaker 1:Well, failures are always learning experiences, aren't they? So everything that happened before feedstock, so that's great. And now do you just want to explain sort of broadly what Hexas Biomass does and what you guys are doing and where you fit into the sustainable aviation fuel space specifically?
Speaker 2:Sure. So Hexas is a essentially producer of biomass and we are focused initially on purposely grown biomass and we call this our Xanogras, which produces what we call Xanofiber. And Xanofiber has applications not just in bioenergy applications, but also in structural and non-structural applications, such as building materials, as well as biochemicals and other areas. So we've got a really neat product that also allows us to go in and restore different soils and grow in many different locations around the world. So what Hexas does is we have what we call our Farm to Fiber platform, which is a fully integrated supply chain, which means we have complete traceability from the propagation of our plants all the way through the delivery of the Xanofiber in a specific format that usually is dropping ready for our customers, and we work with them on that. And that's what we're developing. We're developing IP a lot around biomass, so that IP applies not only to our biomass, but then I know the other biomass areas that we're going to talk about today. So that's where we are, yeah.
Speaker 1:Am I right in thinking that you started off with the Xanofiber being initially thought of as replacing word, as you mentioned, looking at the more structural stuff, and then you later moved into the biofuels space? I'm just curious about what sort of made that transition, what made you realize the Xanofiber would be a good product in terms of biofuel feedstock, and how that sort of branching out happened.
Speaker 2:You're right. So, my background being materials engineering, I, when I saw this plant originally in the wild that we developed Xanobrass from, I was like, wow, that would be phenomenal. Look at those fibers. Those could be used for so many different structural applications, whether it's for building materials or as fibers that reinforce in composites, for example. And as I learned more about the grass, I'm developed our product and I learned more about what industry needed.
Speaker 2:One of the things that we did learn along the way is that our Xanobrass is a US Environmental Protection Agency approved bioenergy crop, which means it meets the renewable fuel standards and qualifies for the RINs here in the US. As a function of that, I sort of got pulled more or less into this biofuel side of things. It was not energy, was not really where I was going to go with this, but I recognized in the ability to produce at a low cost and extremely high volume compared to other biomass, that in a non-food crop as well, that we could do some good in the bioenergy space because we can go into both biochemical processing or thermochemical process pathways to SAF.
Speaker 1:So yeah, so you mentioned bioenergy. It's a bioenergy crop. Could you just explain what that is and how that's different from sort of your regular farmed crops or your sort of waste biomass, because that's probably the feeds that people are more familiar with, your sort of wood waste or your cellulose biomass coming from sort of agricultural refuse and etc. And stuff like that. So could you just explain the difference, how those sort of are different?
Speaker 2:So bioenergy crops are purposefully grown is how it's termed, and so you would call this now a second generation of bioenergy crops. And they're also not food crops, so that we're not using corn, we're not using bagasse coming from the sugarcane. This is purposefully grown crops for the youth in bioenergy, but we find that bioenergy is just one pathway and we get multiple products from one plant. So that's essentially what they are, their purposefully grown crops for this, for energy.
Speaker 1:So what's the sort of overall potential for sort of the energy crops and Zanagrassana fiber sort of more, or holistically, as we look towards the whole sort of industry? As lots people know, there's a large requirement for SAF globally. So how much potential in the whole industry does this have in terms of meeting demand in your eyes?
Speaker 2:Well, in my eyes it's.
Speaker 2:You know we're hoping to meet a very large part, become the gold standard in terms of the crops that are purposefully grown for energy.
Speaker 2:But when you look at, for example, the US Department of Energy's billion ton report which I think is the Bible right now on biomass and new additions coming out, I hopefully, next month is what we're looking at, what they were looking at you know they'll talk about in even in the previous report, so that bioenergy crops will account for 60, 65 plus percent of the crop production, of the biomass. That's needed to fulfill what we hope to be succeeded achieving in sustainable aviation fuels and other biofuels for heavy, heavy vehicles. Let's just call them Now agricultural residue. You know that will have a meaningful as well, but it'll be about about the less than half of what we expect in terms of the biomass compared to energy crop production. So we can have a really positive impact on biofuel production without displacing food crops, certainly because we can grow, for example, our product in a very marginal soils, even with salinated water and so forth. So our goal is not to display those food crops but to be that consistent, reliable supply that supports the use of other biomass as well.
Speaker 1:And that's the really appealing thing about bioenergy crops is that you can grow them in environments that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily be suited to agricultural sort of crops that you use for for agricultural, for farming specifically. You can grow them in those sort of more marginal areas.
Speaker 2:Isn't that right? Yeah, sorry, oscar, when you think about what we have right now. So we've spent so much time exploiting the earth and the farmlands and so forth that we've ended up with 83 million hectares of simply abandoned farmland around the world and there's no monetary incentive to repair this. It's just sitting there, it's generating no revenues for the farmers or the landowners that own it and possess it, and that's 5% of the crop land in the world. Right now. It's just simply unused and that could meet up to 68% of our bioenergy demand just using abandoned crop land. That's like 20 exajoules per year of just energy that can be produced on this land.
Speaker 2:And this is not in biodiverse locations where water is scarce or anything like that. This is actually formerly crop land that we were used and we overused over, chemical, fertilized and so forth. We can take that back right. We can use these bioenergy crops and grow particularly zanagrass in this land at very high volumes with lower inputs and therefore low costs. And that's what's critical in this whole chain the supply chain is that low cost, high production, because it's gonna take a lot of fuel to fly those jets.
Speaker 1:So yeah, Another thing that gets tossed around a lot and is really is a serious issue in terms of feedstocks is their respective carbon intensity when you look at sort of the sourcing of it accurately, accurate accounting of the sourcing and actually the growing of the feedstock, whether it's grown. How do energy crops help alleviate the worries about the carbon intensity, the sourcing of the correct feedstocks and promote the most sustainable SAF feedstock possible?
Speaker 2:Well, I think, Oscar, I would step back just a little bit and talk about what makes a good feedstock, right. So that's really critical. When I started Texas five years ago, I was seeing lots of folks with great processes. Everyone had a process that was gonna take biomass in and it was going to utilize biomass, and but no one knew where that was gonna come from or what it exactly would look like. And so we need to have feedstocks that go into SAF, that are low cost, low cost, low cost. That are low cost, that have consistent properties, that have a reliable supply very, very important to all the procurement people that I talked to right that are available year round, not just intermittently, and they're available everywhere locally. And what I mean by that is that if you have a feedstock that you can grow multiple locations in multiple different environments around the world, then you can have that consistent underlying feedstock that you can use in your systems. Right, and that's super important because biomass is local. We're not gonna ship biomass around the world from different places to places unless it's densified, which adds a lot of cost when you think about concrete's local. Well, biomass is local because of the other density versus non-dix. Right, it's not food, so you want a feedstock that's not food, so you're not displacing any food crops, you're not using arable land that is for food production. It can be used in multiple applications and you can break it down into multiple applications. It drops right into existing facilities, it has the right biochemical and thermal chemical properties and we're minimizing carbon footprint. So there's a lot right. There's a big checklist to what like that optimal sort of way of getting through a feedstock is Bioenergy crops.
Speaker 2:Particularly our bioenergy crop meets this checklist. There are other, of course, biomass that you can use. That come close in some cases. The bioenergy crops. The real focus is on pinpointing and targeting the issue of having that reliable, consistent supply, and so I would first say that you have to have this checklist right. They're pros and cons. I mean the cons is for some bioenergy crops is you can only grow them in certain locations, that they're from seeds. We really would like to have a bioenergy crop that's perennial. We plant it once, our plant, we plant it once, we grow that crop for 20 years, 20 plus years, without having to replant. So you're not tilling and so forth, and that just yeah. That really consistency and availability is what the difference is there.
Speaker 1:You touched on it there, but one of the benefits of Xanofibra is that it's fairly agnostic when it comes to refining technologies. You can use it in the alcohol to jet pathway, the fish and tropes and porallus is that right? You can use it in all three of those different processes, sort of fairly seamlessly put it into the refinery each of those.
Speaker 2:Correct. I mean there's, you know it. No, no, biomass is perfect, right, for one reason or another. So we can. So we can go into both biochemical as well as thermal chemical pathways and the ASD approved pathways. You know, we can go into pretreatment, which will sort of loosen things up right and make the sugars more available or however whatever's being used, the lignin broken out and so forth. And that that is something that we've been working on, is, you know, sort of optimizing our fiber, not only from a physical perspective so that it goes right into hoppers and flows well, but also from a biochemical perspective, that it becomes optimized for SAF production, for example.
Speaker 1:And doesn't that have a sort of knock on effect in terms of for the refiner themselves? Having a surefire sort of supply of feedstocks helps them with their costs and keeping costs down, because everyone is obviously very concerned about the premium on SAF currently it's sort of a very big topic and everyone is, you know, talking about how it is a considerable markup on JETA. But with your sort of Zano fiber being able to go into multiple different pathways, do you see that helping being one of the ways in which refiner's can actually bring the cost of the fuel down?
Speaker 2:I think that, yes, it starts upstream, right, the lowering the cost of the fuel starts all the way upstream, with the raw materials.
Speaker 2:I want to think that we can do that would be as beneficial to the overall cost is what I refer to as using the whole buffalo so that's a very Native American term from my background and the really what it really means is that we can take this biomass and we can take from the biomass very much valuable pieces and parts and then only give to who needs it those pieces and parts For example, sugars or lignin or furferols or cellulose right, those things can be broken down and that really will help achieve that $3 gasoline gallon equivalent that we talk about here in the US by having multiple co-products that you can get from a single source, because your raw material is going to be what?
Speaker 2:60 plus percent of your overall cost. Well, if that raw material can be broken down into constituent components, you're going to even lower that cost there. So, where we're working on that, of course, for Xanofiber and doing that also, then what we're learning from Xanofiber can be applied to things like crop residues for sure, because that, in order to achieve this, yeah, the money-saving part comes right at the beginning of that supply chain.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I just want to take a step back and look at your relationship with farmers, because obviously they're a really integral part of it. They're the ones that are going to be on the ground growing the Xanograss, which is obviously so integral to what you guys have got going on. Is that sort of a really integral part of it? That you're really looking at is your relationship with farmers and trying to get as many as possible to be sort of open to growing Xanograss.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we love our farmers, so farmers are our first consideration, of course farmers and landowners, because in some cases we will have farmers produce Xanograss for us and then we'll harvest and process the Xanofiber. In other cases, we may leave land, depending on the size of production, of course. So what we're looking at with farmers is our system is to go out and to sell to our customers first and then to plant, and the reason being is because we really want to be able to pay our farmers. So if you look back and I've always been a student of history you look back at what happened with hemp. Farmers started growing hemp, but there was no market for it, so they lost a lot to hemp, for example, and nothing against hemp. That's not the case. It's about how you handle the market.
Speaker 2:So our goal with our farmers is to provide them with, again, long-term contracts and with reliable supply of revenue, and to give them actually a pretty easy to grow crop. I mean, this is letting the grass grow, essentially, once we get it in the ground. Like I said, it grows for 20 years and they really like that, and so it's respecting that. It's their land and we'll be utilizing that. And then they're also their expertise. Of course, we provide all the technical support that they need to achieve their volumes. We provide sensors and traceability and so forth.
Speaker 2:So that's critical to monitoring and monetizing any crop right Is understanding how it's doing and when to apply for irrigation or irrigation and so forth. But yeah, they are super important and we have farmers that approach it and say, hey, we'd love to grow. Now again, I'm going to go back to this idea that biomass is local. You need to grow biomass or transport biomass, including wood, it doesn't matter with then, really, within about 60 miles maximum, so 100 kilometers from where you're going to actually utilize that resource, unless you're going to densify it first. So we just don't grow also willy-nilly. We grow where the biomass is needed, with the farmers that are in that location or using land that's in that location. So deep respect for that, again, very, very, very upstream of the supply chain for us.
Speaker 1:And are you mainly working with farmers in the US at the moment? Is that we're working?
Speaker 2:with you at the Global yes, sorry, yes in the US, but also in Europe. We're working with farmers in Europe as well.
Speaker 1:Interesting. You bring up Europe, because there's a lot of discussion about European policy being a bit more hesitant, or maybe slightly stronger than hesitant, to look at crops, being it growing crops as a feedstock for biofuels, because there's this understanding that you know this land could be used for For food, as you, as you said, a lot of you know. We need to keep our crops, though, for food protected, and that's very important. But what? What are you saying? You said you're working with farms in Europe. Are you seeing that there is scope for energy crops within Europe within the policy landscape at the moment, or is that something that still needs to be sort of worked out over the coming years?
Speaker 2:I Think that they need to understand is that every farm you go to there is some type of marginal land. There's land that is less Usable for food production in other locations. So we are currently growing alongside food crops in Europe, so right alongside summer and winter weeks, and you know that's working very well. So it is important that we're not displacing food crop. That's certainly our goal. We're not going to go in and say, yep, we're gonna get rid of weeds or we're gonna get rid of whatever happens to be there. Let's get rid of that. Let's take down fruit trees or whatever. That doesn't make sense.
Speaker 2:There is a sufficient amount of land that we can otherwise utilize. It is abandoned or overused. It lost its top soil. I mean top soil takes 500 to 1,000 years to rebuild if you can grow biomass on that. So we're looking at also promoting the idea that on that land we can add nitrogen. We sequester over a ton of carbon per acre per year under the ground. That we would be generating revenues for farmers and local communities. We would be creating jobs.
Speaker 2:But again, if you know, if the land resource isn't there, then we're not going to go in and take out crops to use it. It really is a matter of, yeah, land use policy needs to be tight. I don't think that they're wrong in that, you know, we need to be able to feed people. That said, if there is room, you know, for those energy crops and we can cite those locations, then it's a really nice additional resource of income resource for farmers in these various areas. So it's a tough call, no two ways about it. That's it's about in this case, about land and who has it and who doesn't, and really available. So, yeah, I would Not argue, but I would support a position of there needs to be a balance in that. Yeah, and it's chewable.
Speaker 1:You'd like you'd like to say a bit more of a conversation about energy crops being used responsibly in Europe, around Arboland right, right, and if you can get, yes and I think there, you know, should be metrics.
Speaker 2:You know, I do. It can't be just a ton of biomass on a metric ton, on a per hectare basis. It's got to be lots and lots of biomass, of very land use efficient policy, a resource use efficient policy. We do that without even having any Regulatory oversight of what we're doing. Is it just simply makes sense that? So, yeah, I think that that we're not going to be able to avoid the use of energy crops. It would be nice to be able to use, you know, ag residues alone with residuals, municipal solid-ray waste, heffa, which is the fat creases and oils, but heffa is only going to get us ever to maximum 10% of the staff that we are going to require, whereas ag residue, you know you have to.
Speaker 2:The struggle in that is contamination and stabilization. And you know how do you? You know how do you make sure you have a consistent supply year over year? What if there's drought? What if there's? You know Climate change is impacting our food supply, right, so it would impact our residuals from that food supply and visible solid weight waste is. It's ever-changing and again it's. The properties are different. So when you talk to the companies that process biomass into different fuels or into precursors for those fuels. They really want that consistency and we can achieve it with some some, some work, but Underlying and underpinning the use of waste Should be something that's very consistently and reliably available, so you don't have gaps and holes.
Speaker 1:Are you looking at potentially exploring outside of US and Europe With Xenogras any time soon? Are you focusing mainly on sort of consolidating US Europe for now, or is there sort of a more expansionist approach coming in the next, in the few next few years?
Speaker 2:In the next few years we will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we we're already Looking at Southeast Asia as well as northern Africa.
Speaker 2:We've been approached by people that I think folks see this coming and they see the need for this these energy crops in different locations and the utilization of land and water sources that are underutilized or really can't be used for any kind of food crop production. So you know the ability to use a more salinated water, for example, or a what I call dirt versus soil, and have a plant that can grow in dirt versus soil and then actually Improve that soil and turn it into soil and rebuild top soil in the short time to add nitrogen and then when you grow these bioenergy crops, like our crop, will grow. You know 20 to 30 feet tall. So you know several 10 meters tall is, in a way, with leave material, you're cooling the earth, you're creating micro climates, you're renewing the soil biome. So I think there's going to be, if you can achieve these layers of benefits, the ecosystem services, along with generating revenue and Producing something sustainably that's traceable and that can be used in multiple applications. You know we can. We can get this done. It should be something that we looked at, look upon positively. That's what I hope.
Speaker 2:My hope is.
Speaker 1:It seems like it's really well suited, sort of emerging markets, emerging economies though, sort of countries really looking sort of to grow and sort of regenerate sort of their land and Stuff like that. Do you have any? Do you have sort of a region in particular that you're sort of excited about? Or I know it's a bit like Sort of picking favorite children slightly. You know which one, sort of the one that's jumping out or going. This has got loads of potential and it's really exciting. We will really want to get involved.
Speaker 2:I Think the places that I think are most exciting are those places that have been Exploited for, perhaps, mining or Former sugarcane plantations that are out there, that they're just sitting there, they're not being used to, sugarcane is very hard on the soil and and so there's there.
Speaker 2:You know, it's the the sugarcane industry sort of collapsed. There's a lot of space out there, also, places that have been deforested, I so when you end up taking down these trees and you're exposing that soil to the sun, direct sun rays and so forth, you're destroying that soil biome and it's very difficult than to go back in and replant native species, because they need a certain number of different types of bugs and bacteria right and fungi even to repopulate that space. So I think we have an opportunity to go into those spaces in particular and repopulate the soil biome and then go away. And then go away and let the space be rewilded and continue to find those kinds of spaces where we can restore what was there and work on a program that benefits everybody all around in terms of jobs and resources and then being able to produce sustainable aviation fuel from what's produced there.
Speaker 1:And you said it there. It could be a very sort of because a lot of the sort of studies that go into you know, is there capacity for getting refineries? A lot of it is. Is there feedstock? Is there sustainable, consistent feedstock supply? And getting an amount of Xanagrass growth in certain countries that have had deforestation or sugar cane growth, is a great way of signaling yeah, we've got long-term feedstock here. We're sort of, we're ready for refinery, and that's how you can actually get more localized supply as well, rather than it being focused in US and Europe, because that's another big issue is actually getting SAF around different regions of the earth, isn't it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it really is. I mean, when you look at where we were starting with SAF, with the fat screases and oils, the HEPA, and then also looking at some folks being right there in the heart of corn country here in the United States, because you have the residuals and such, you know, readily supply, there's only so many refineries you can put in a location. There's only so much corn we actually probably maxed out is my understanding. I've done that corn that we can produce in the US and almost 40% of that production is just for ethanol, which is a little bit ridiculous to me.
Speaker 2:But so to be able to produce in Brazil, to produce in Portugal, to produce in Africa in different locations, I think what is critical with this new bio economy is what is commodity-based economy is what one of my mentors referred to it as but that means that a lot of people can participate. Right, there's gonna be a lot of people to participate in this economy and if we have more and more people participating in an economy, we have more and more people with a purpose, with work that they can do, with a way to support their families, and we need that in many different locations around the world for political stability and for environmental stability. So where it's getting too hot to grow certain food crops, we can grow in and grow energy costs there right, and we can. People wouldn't be displaced, their homes would not be displaced, and we are also looking very closely at the efficient use of water and recapturing water for repurposing and not overusing groundwater.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of things to think about in this natural cycle where we go away from the old exploitive way and go way back in time to where we used to work with the earth more carefully and be more symbiotic with our production.
Speaker 1:I think that I mean you said it there that's the sort of the great trend of sort of SAF is trying to get this more symbiotic relationship with the earth, trying to whether it's with carbon capture and taking out of the atmosphere what you're putting in, or with designer grass trying to monitor water or regenerate the soil. There's this really exciting sort of flood of sort of new ideas helping to bring that more to a head and help reshape local and global economics and trying to bring that to the forefront and that's really important and really exciting.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's I have to say that's. That really is what underpins what I'm doing and why I started this company. It's really not about me. It's about the next generations, about continuing forward. It does sound kind of snappy and soupy, but I decided when I started this company that I wanted to work for the earth and that's what I wanna do.
Speaker 1:Are you currently? Are you currently supplying? Have you got any sort of agreements you don't have to name any names, obviously if you've got agreements in place for Xanafibris to go into refineries when they come online, or are you constantly sort of working on getting those agreements in place as new technologies continue to sort of to develop and commercialize?
Speaker 2:Well, the nice thing is that we've done a lot of testing and so that's where we've been is in that, as these refineries are preparing to come online, I know one of the requirements is that they do have a consistent, reliable supply of biomass in order to get financing and insurance and so forth. So we've been testing with a number of companies in their processes to demonstrate that, yep, this will work in your process and look, we can plant and grow this stuff. So we are working in a couple of industrial scale pilots, both in energy and other areas, and so it's been exciting to see that roll out and to be part of that process of helping people understand the value of energy crop and where we can fit into that supply chain.
Speaker 1:How early in the sort of process of getting a new technology do you get involved? Do you get involved sort of before the pilot plan or sort of when the pilot plan is sort of coming about? So when do you?
Speaker 2:when have you been getting involved or would you like to be involved, or do you want to be involved sooner in conversations around feedstocks or yeah, yeah, I'd like to be involved right at the beginning, honestly, and the reason being is that we industry seems to have done it, as I sort of alluded to before, in reverse, in that, developing these different processes for pretreatment or for conversion and then saying, oh, the biomass will be out there, oh, we'll go get it somewhere right, and so that is not the case, and maybe in a few places you can put your first refinery in and then be like, yeah, we got our first refinery in and there's biomass here.
Speaker 2:Well, that's because you're taking residue from corn or even from trees or something like that. So I think it's critical to be involved early, very early in the process, because, like I said, if we're gonna grow this biomass, we're gonna grow it close to where the SAF will eventually be produced or where the precursor fuel will be produced, and that's gotta start before you put the shovel in the ground. So it is important to be very early on in that process.
Speaker 2:And even though, we, yeah, yeah, and our establishment period is about a year, unlike trees which could be seven, eight, 15, 80 years, and we can harvest every year Doesn't seem that practical for the short term. Yeah, so it can be, but so being there early and figuring out and getting the land in every setup would be something that you know you're not standing there with the plant going, okay now, where do I? Get my biomass again. So yeah, that's what I like.
Speaker 1:And it would presumably be very helpful in terms of attracting investment, for you know pilot plants looking at final investment decision if you go, if they are producing, go. We've got this relationship with you know Wendy Hexas who's going to you know we know where the Xanagross is going to grow. We know where it's going to be converted into Xanify, but we've got that whole process sort of on that already. That must be a really sort of a critical sort of step in getting these projects underway.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're developing an app right now that we will use to site locations, you know, to really evaluate, I guess, sites for locations, and we're not just looking at the amount of water or sunlight or growing days and things like that, but we're looking at the socio-economic situation there. We're also looking at the infrastructure Are the right farming machines there? Are there roads or railways or things like this? So things that we are considering in terms of monetizing this crop. I think that needs to be a collective consideration going forward where you're going to put these different refineries for this stuff. So we, you know, we have a sort of weighted matrix this is a better place, this is a less better place. But it's not just simply looking at is there dirt and can we grow in it. It's a more nuanced evaluation.
Speaker 1:Do you think producers put enough emphasis early on in sort of where they get enough feedstock. Do you think it's something they can put more consideration to early?
Speaker 2:I think that producers now are just trying to get that first plant started, right. They're trying to get that first plant, that first location, to develop that template that is repeatable and putting a plan, effort, plan. So they're mostly are locating in places where there is access to what they would say is sufficient feedstock. But going forward, like you say, you know, we can't just focus on the US and we can't just focus on Europe. We've got to expand our universe in terms of SAP production and consequently they, much earlier on, and their next refinery, need to be saying OK, can we put it out here, can we put it over there? Is there going to be guys? And so in order to achieve that, you know, 450 million, 500 million gallons of SAP per year. That consideration needs to come super early in the process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's been a great conversation. I've just you want one more thing before we sort of wrap things up. You I believe it was last year you got a grant from the Department of Energy, I believe. Is that correct last year?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's true. Yeah, 2022 August 22.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I mean it's only just 2024. Yeah right, how important was that for you? And also, and what did it sort of allow you to do the probably otherwise wouldn't have been able to do? And how important do you think grants are more generally for growing the SAP industry, companies like yourselves, in sort of growing the production, the supply?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm a huge advocate for grants. I have to say I've had grants in a number of different and does that have nothing to do with the free money? Well, free money is is is a very loaded term. So no, it's not. It's not actually free money.
Speaker 1:So we know sometimes free lunch.
Speaker 2:Right and we want to phase to SDR grant from the US Department of Energy to focus on optimizing Xano fiber for the SAP pathways, so focusing on ash reduction. You know, format of the, the biomass and then also, you know, can we get multiple products from it. So we're just initially this is early on as we're looking at this what did it allow me to do? It allow me to when sort of come out of the sort of incubation period of the company and say, wow, look at what we have the potential to do here. Look we, we, you know, we've been validated by the US Department of Energy and the reviewers who look at this and that was very exciting, that was really important. And then people are like, oh hey, maybe we should have a look at this hexes. So that's been phenomenal.
Speaker 2:It has allowed us to expand our internal infrastructure to focus on doing this work. Specifically, it has allowed us to work with the renewable energy national renewable energy laboratory in rail in the United States and get their advice and guidance. They're going to be doing our techno economic analysis. It's expanded my universe beyond the structural, non structural applications and into bioenergy as well, for for all of us here, so it's been just a phenomenal experience opportunity. I'm deeply grateful to, to the taxpayers of the US who've given this opportunity, and we take it very seriously and a very high responsibility to utilize these funds to make a difference, to really make progress in this process. So, yeah, very happy to have it, is it?
Speaker 1:is it not just about the money but about the access to? You know the people at the Department of Energy. They said you said they're going to do that. You know techno economic analysis. Is it the extra things like that, Like along with the funding, that are really critical?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's. You know it's brought this recognition where we've been able to create a wider network, not only within the national laboratories and the researchers there, but also to the other, the companies that are out there that are looking to find biomass and see how it's processed. And you know keep tabs on what's going on here that that's really expanded our universe in terms of bioenergy. So, yes, the money is nice. It is very good to have funding. I've met a lot of great people we've brought, we've hired some really great people as well to work on the project. So there's a lot more than just the sort of monetizing the grant itself and utilizing it. Yeah, it's been superb.
Speaker 1:Well, wendy, thanks so much for giving us your time. That was, that was excellent.
Speaker 2:Great, that was my pleasure. I enjoyed it. Thank you for the great questions, oscar.