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Robert Walker. Bixby Energy. An entrepreneurial saga. Not a Horatio Alger story, but one of dedicated and focused effort toward a goal - raising the capital needed to bring an idea to its profitable end, where many can own a part so that the effort is sufficiently funded to achieve its ends - a process which any of the GOP presidential hopefuls will tell you, is the thing that made America what it is, and the GOP what it is, standing for such ways and means. Indeed, a former Minnesota Republican House Rep. a part of the story. What more, what more? Midway through this 2007 leading-edge Twin Cities Business story, the explanation unwinds:
Walker’s vision of alternative energy sources becoming the mainstream is not only “absolutely realistic, but beyond that, it’s going to happen. The only question is, who will get the job done?” says former U.S. Congressman Gil Gutknecht, the Minnesota Republican who chaired the House agricultural subcommittee concerned with alternative energy. Now a consultant to the energy industry and to Bixby, Gutknecht points out that Walker isn’t the only one building a biomass-based energy business, so there are competitive issues of “who gets there firstest with the mostest. From what I see around the world, Bixby is in position to be a leader.”
He gives the company an edge because of more than just its technology for converting biomass into useable fuel: “What Bob Walker understands, and most others working on renewable energy don’t want to know, is that the energy business is incredibly price competitive. People will drive a mile to save a penny on a gallon of gas. The winners will be the low-cost providers.” During his tenure in Washington, Gutknecht says, Walker was one of the few alternative-energy enthusiasts he met “with a business model not predicated on long-term government subsidies.”
To date, Walker has raised $27 million from private investors. One, Don Schreifels, who has a Brooklyn Center insurance agency, says he doesn’t question the viability of Walker’s vision, but that realizing it “will take years and a lot of money—money on the Wall Street level.” The major risk for Bixby, he adds, is that “other players could come along, do a better job of getting the money, and do what we want to do better and quicker. We have an edge getting to the marketplace, but in today’s world, you never know.”
Walker says going public is imminent for Bixby, but probably not through an IPO. An alternate route is more likely, possibly a merger with an already public entity.
He says other big developments are imminent, too: more partnerships and expansions of his company’s technology portfolio. Bixby Energy Systems is being approached by people with other energy technologies—cutting-edge wind and coal-gasification systems—who tell him, “‘We think you’ve got a model for the future in the energy business, and we’ve got compelling technologies that we think you ought to take a look at and see if it doesn’t fit within your framework.’”
Because of increased public attention to global warming and to renewable energy in general, Walker says, “we’re actually evolving more rapidly into an energy business” than he had originally anticipated. Bixby is already “dramatically changing our market structure,” not just beyond stoves or pellets, but beyond biomass, though it remains central to the company’s plans.
“We find that a lot of the energy solutions that are in alternative energy are really an application of several energy disciplines,” he explains—a point illustrated by his further intentions for biomass and for Bixby’s stoves.
Your Home as Power Plant
Bixby has been a financial backer of research on “pyrolysis” done by Dr. Roger Ruan of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering and his collaborators in the U.S. and Norway. Like Bixby’s pellet-making technology, pyrolysis works with all sorts of biomass, applying heat to vaporize it and then condensing most of the gases into liquid fuel—“biocrude” that can be refined for use as heating oil, turbine fuel, and other energy products. Many researchers and companies globally are developing pyrolysis technologies; Bixby is working to secure a role as commercialization agent for Ruan’s particular process, which takes just two hours. With further refinements, including pressurization, Ruan says he expects to cut the time to around 30 minutes.
To understand things from the beginning of the report, this headlining:
Bob Walker's Plan to Transform the Global Energy Industry
At Bixby Energy Systems, he's starting with corn-burning stoves but expects ultimately to change the way homes, businesses, and power plants run. If his biomass fuels reduce global warming, it won't be because it's a good cause, Walker says, but because it's good business.
March 2007 | by Jack Gordon
Too good to be true, a doubter might say. If it's that promising, the big corporations would be doing it - perhaps Exxon-Mobil has a patent pool, having bought the technology in order to keep it off market so that their oil business may prosper and the strategic positioning of the Middle East and its resources can be maintained.
But that's skepticism, not reality. Not sensible Republican conservatism, not the Chamber of Commerce, NRA, nor Tim Pawlenty, the Governor from Sam's Club.
For an update, this Google. A link.
The Minnesota Republican Senators are meeting today to elect leadership, there having been resignations of which readers may be unaware. May Bixby Energy be with them as they regroup to sell you, the voter, their version of reality in which the wealthy do not pay onerous taxes and the workers gain under a health care provisioning system engineered to create dependence, obedience and compliance with a status quo; you get healthcare via your corporate employer, or at great personal expense, or none at all. You may not like it that way, but others, holding power, trusted with the decision making, think things fine as they are. They, unseen and working the strings of the system are meeting behind closed doors to do wonderful things - like the Bixby folks they are, directly or by representation, the job creators. Don't ask them if it is so, they will tell you, at length and without asking. Steadfast in their belief system, they know what is right for them, what is right for you.