By Mike Fitts
mfitts@scbiznews.com
Published March 3, 2010

An S.C. startup has attracted an investment and production partner to manufacture equipment to turn biomass fuel into an energy-producing product for coal plants.

Columbia’s Agri-Tech Producers LLC announced today that it will work with Cate Street Capital of Portsmouth, N.H., to begin producing the first such equipment in the United States. The first processing machine, expected to be set up in South Carolina, should be operational near the end of the third quarter, Agri-Tech President Joseph J. James said.

Cate Street is committed to building, owning and operating four to eight more machines by the middle of 2011, managing director Bob Payne said at a news conference in Columbia. Each machine will cost $6 million to $8 million to get up and running, Payne said. Cate Street is a private investment and operations company that seeks investment prospects in clean and renewable energy.

“I’m very confident that we’re about to create a new industry,” Payne said.

The machines will be manufactured in Spartanburg by Kusters Zima Corp., a company with a background in the manufacture of textile equipment. Kusters Zima CEO Ken Kruse said his company is likely to add up to 50 jobs in the coming months to ramp up production to meet Cate Street’s needs.

Agri-Tech has a license to use a system developed at N.C. State University to perform torrefaction. In that process, wood or plant matter is dried to about 10% of its initial moisture, essentially baked into a nugget of matter that can be burned in a coal plant but is renewable. The system also can create products that are useful in the production of ethanol.

Utilities from across the country are interested in how Agri-Tech’s material will burn in their plants, and these new machines will produce “Carolina coal” that the companies can test, James said. International inquiries about the technology, from places as far away as Taiwan and South Africa, also have been strong, he said.

If these systems become popular suppliers for the energy industry, they can bring employment and growth to rural areas in the Carolinas that have few other economic prospects, James said. Agri-Tech is considering sites along South Carolina’s interstate corridors to place the first operating torrefaction machine, James said.