04/05/2026
EVENTS BEYOND OUR CONTROL.
The rice straw to MDF CalPlant bankruptcy in Northern California scared off all larger investors in our proposed wheat/Canola straw MDF board plant. Nobody wants to be first to market using straw as the feedstock for MDF, despite all the lessons learned during the Eureka 2-3 years of start & stop operations. They failed real badly, unable to ever produce enough MDF to cover costs.
Our Directors had tried to warn the CalPlant team in advance about the plant design & feedstock mistakes they were making but as the new kids on the block, we were ignored. Their straw had far too much silica & sand, and resorting to washing it just added time & energy costs in having to then dry it ahead of input.
Unfortunately for us, even showing our larger Texas based investors how our design avoided CalPlant's mistakes wasn't enough to convince them. Especially as Covid struck & the global market shrunk for several years.
In late 2023 we regrouped and started focusing on our other planned usage of waste straws and waste post consumer wood fibres. Fuel Energy Pellets. We contracted some independent testing of some proprietary blends via Innotech Alberta and confirmed that we could indeed produce a high energy density straw pellet that got past the high ash issues typically associated with straw based pellets.
We've developed a smaller scale project and spent the past 18 months working with a USA based energy research firm to further enhance our straw blend pellets into a more valued black pellet "BIOCOAL" product.
We are now working with several Alberta based projects to secure a long term contract that will use our pellets to generate net negative Renewable Fuels & Electricity. Should any of those projects requiring carbon credits proceed, we will be positioned to move our Alberta BioCarbon Fuels Ltd project forward. At a cost TWENTY TIMES less than needed for a large MDF board plant.
As far as producing MDF boards with straw Fibre feedstock, that's going to be a project for a brave deep pockets entrepreneur one day. Not yet and unfortunately, not us.
George Clark