Imagine a chef in his or her kitchen, experimenting with new dishes to serve to their fans. Various ingredients are found throughout the kitchen. Perhaps things like flour, sugar, salt, oil, eggs, milk, and so on. Each one of these individual ingredients is unique, produced by different farmers or companies. Eggs may come from down the road at a local farm, flour may come from wheat grown in the Midwest, and milk comes from a large dairy a state away. The chef did not develop them. The chef adds the various ingredients to a bowl, carefully measuring each to get the right balance, and then bakes the resulting mixture. What comes out of the oven 30 minutes later is a sweet, tasty cake that all of his customers will enjoy.
You may be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with biomass feedstocks?” A lot! Building efficient and economical feedstock production systems, whether on the farm or at the preprocessing facility, is just like baking a cake. Selecting the right ingredients to include sets the recipe for success. Just like the chef, biomass supply chain managers do not need to develop or invent new technologies to create something new and wonderful. What we must do is identify the best technology or “ingredient” for each activity in the supply chain, and then put all of those technologies together to create a supply chain that is extremely efficient, economical, and sustainable. To do that, we work with a large number of equipment and technology partners to access the best-in-class tools for our systems.
Let’s take a supply chain based on biomass sorghum as an example. Selecting the right seed to plant involves evaluating at least three different sources. Planting requires a tractor, planter, site preparation chemicals, and other factors all selected from different partners. Management involves weed control with chemicals applied by the best sprayers in the market. Harvesting includes selection of the right mower and baler (or forage harvester) along with bale collection, staging, and transport equipment. In preprocessing, one vendor supplies bale grinding equipment, while another supplies the hammermill. Yet, another partner provides the dust control and conveyance system.
The result of integrating technologies from various partners is that sweet cake discussed earlier, only in this case the cake consists of a high quality, consistent feedstock that is economical, environmentally sustainable, and produced in an efficient manner. Without the extensive support of our technology partners, it would be impossible for Genera Energy to develop such efficient, broad systems for management.
Our partner companies, regardless of their position, offer significant R&D support along with improvements in technology to allow us to continue to lead the industry. This support allows Genera to focus on optimizing its systems and delivering the right product to its customers while its partners work on advancing their technologies as well. Working together accelerates the success of both our company and those of our partners! With our technology partners, we can offer your project an optimized feedstock that will lead to long-term success! Contact us today to see how we can help!
By Sam Jackson, Ph.D., VP of Business Development
