Recently two of us from Biochar Products met with the president of ABRI. We wanted to discuss and get a better understanding of where ABRI felt they were going in the next year and how we at Biochar Products might fit into those plans.

It turns out that the efforts of ABRI running a 1 ton plant in Ottawa, another plant in New Zealand and our plant in Halfway have all contributed documents with our experience and needed improvements to ABRI in the last month or so. These accumulated experiences have been incorporated into modifications in the one ton plant in Ottawa for further testing.

There will likely be one or two more 1 ton plants built in the next year. These will be built with specification based on this years experience and will be further tested. 

The second part of what is happening is the development of a database that will be contained in the future control system of the proper dryer and reactor settings based on experience with a variety of feedstocks. These will not cover all feedstocks it will be a long term project with ABRI to develop a full collection of recommendations. This database is part of what will be delivered with production plants coming in the next year or so.

We also had a good discussion about the development of actual production plants. ABRI had been focused on production plants of 50 ton per day plants as their initial production and though that it would be quite a while before they though they would produce the 20 ton per day plant the we have thought would be a good fit for use in the woods.  It turns out that the folks from New Zealand  also have an interest in the 20 ton size plants as well. So it seems now that ABRI will be considering pretty favorably developing designs for both 20 and 50 ton plants that will be ready hopefully some time in 2012.

We will continue to have discussions with ABRI as we prepare for these actual production plants coming on line. We will try to keep the current situation documented on this site.