Garbage as gold?

When Brian Appel was courting investors for his alternative energy company, he warned them, "When you put in your $2 million and $10 million, there’s a good chance you’ll lose it, because no one’s ever built anything like this before."

By BETSY CUMMINGS – The New York Times Helena IR

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(This is a follow up to a previous story that drew a great deal of interest: http://www.matr.net/news.phtml?newsid=6837 – Russ )

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Not exactly an enticing offer — and hardly one you would expect from a man who was the Russell Stover Candy salesman of the year in 1981 and, four years later, the designer of a ticket-sale computer system that led to the formation of Ticketmaster.

Appel was only half joking when he approached investors with that seemingly self-defeating pitch in the late 1990s. After all, his goal — to build a machine that turns animal byproducts into oil — was something of a long shot. And when he flipped the switch three months ago on a machine capable of converting 200 tons a day of turkey feathers, guts and bones into liquid fuel, it was still too early to gauge the outcome.

But Appel was, and remains, undaunted by skepticism toward his project or by other scientists’ failed dreams of recycling waste into fuel. The fact that the $22 million plant in Carthage, Mo., a joint venture of his fledgling Changing World Technologies Inc. in West Hempstead, N.Y., and the giant ConAgra Foods, is up and running shows that it is no pipe dream, he says.

Appel recalls his conversion from hard-knuckled executive to entrepreneur while on vacation with his family in St. Tropez in the mid-1990s. He suddenly realized he wanted to do more with his life than make deals as the president of Atlantis International, a trading company.

"So I called my partner and said, ‘Look, it might sound like I’m drunk, but this is what I want to do,’ ” said Appel, 45. ‘‘I’d like to go out and develop this technology, because if I do, then it’s going to make the world a better place.’ ”

Today, that means trucking in scraps from the Butterball turkey processing plant next door to the Missouri plant, turning it into oil and delivering the experimental fuel to the Carthage Water and Electric plant one mile down the road.

If the emissions meet government environmental standards when testing begins, and if Carthage decides to use the oil for the long term, it will pay roughly $33 a megawatt hour for it, compared with $14 for coal and $55 to $120 for gas, Changing World says.

The company’s technology, thermal depolymerization, mimics the earth’s creation of fossil fuel from extreme heat and pressure, but in hours rather than eons. The process breaks down organic waste — chicken bones, say — and rebuilds it into liquid fuel.

Appel had his work cut out putting together a management team. Terry Adams, a former engineering professor and now the company’s chief technology officer, recalls his initial skepticism.

‘‘There had to be a thousand of these schemes in the course of 30 years that I reviewed closely as part of my job as a consultant,” Adams, 59, said. ‘‘And they all, clearly from the beginning, were not going to make it.”

But then he looked up the patent that Changing World Technologies had filed and liked what he saw. And he was impressed with Appel’s business credentials and technical expertise. He joined the company in 1999 and recruited talent like the former CIA director James Woolsey.

All five members of the original management team abandoned high-powered careers for 20-hour days at the start-up’s headquarters in a Long Island house. Even today, after six years, the company’s commercial success is still just around the corner.

‘‘I tried to convince my wife and family to take this job by saying, ‘For a year or two it will be tough, then things should get going,’ ” said Craig Einfeldt, manager of the company’s pilot plant in Philadelphia. ‘‘Here we are five years later, and we’re just starting our first plant.”

It’s not easy trying to replicate what Mother Earth does. From the first patent the company filed in 1997 to the one it submitted in October, Appel says, it had to fix half a dozen major design flaws and make 400 minor alterations at the Carthage plant. And its first test in the Philadelphia pilot plant produced useless fuels that were contaminated with chlorine and nitrogen or toxic dioxins.

The company’s big break came in December 2000, when ConAgra formed a limited liability partnership with it to develop the Missouri plant, helping the $27 billion food company solve its problem of dumping agricultural waste.

Appel says he has enough clients to buy all the fuel he can produce for the next four years and predicts business will explode over the next decade. ‘‘The dot-com boom will be slow compared to what we’re doing,” he said.

That may be an overstatement, but his company does seem to be on a growth track.

http://www.helenair.com/articles/2003/12/12/business/e01120703_03.txt