South Florida Biochar Plant Poised to Be Key for Domestic Silicon Chip Makers

INDIANTOWN, Fla.–Martin Ellis is building a first-in-America business he says will boost domestic manufacturing of silicon chips, solar panels, and steel while enriching soil, purifying water, and generating electricity.

The veteran entrepreneur is going to do this with a centuries-old process that refines a product man has used for millennia in a specialized production plant tested in Poland and moved piece-by-piece to a 17-acre pasture in South Florida’s swamp savannah.

The key components in this high-tech venture?

“If you want to make good silicon, you need good ‘coarse,’” Ellis said, referring to the area’s Myakka fine sand, Florida’s official state soil.

And, he added, “wood,” specifically “engineered charcoal” from a eucalyptus tree developed by University of Florida forest geneticists and converted into biochar using pyrolysis, the heating or thermal decomposition of organic materials in the absence of oxygen.

“Our DNA is, we have 30 years’ experience developing pyrolysis to meet the needs” of large silicon customers in Europe, Ellis said. “Our history is how we put them all together.”

Related Stories

“We’re somewhat unique,” Ellis said. “There isn’t anything like this—a bio-based sustainable low-carbon business that utilizes Florida resources” that can produce a high-grade biochar at an industrial scale.

While decarbonization is no longer a priority under Trump administration energy policies, industry and entrepreneurs such as Ellis are investing billions in new technologies and ancient techniques that recycle organics—biochar, biomass—for an array of expanding carbon-free applications.

The broader biomass market, which uses feedstock plants such as corn to produce ethanol, and “waste wood,” landfill solid waste, and methane-rich sewage sludge from utilities and cattle ranches to generate electricity, is also growing.

Just the Beginning

A native of South Africa, Ellis, 60, has decades of global experience in corporate finance as an executive and consultant with, among others, Deloitte, Zurich-based Fairchild Associates, New York’s Stern, Stewart & Co., and as president/CEO of Agilysys, an Ohio information technology leader.

Since leaving Agilysys in 2011, he has focused on energy development, specifically in pyrolysis technologies that can produce low-emission, high-carbon reductants for the alloy industry, specifically for silicon chip manufacturers.

In addition to founding Green Carbon Solutions and serving as Polchar board chair, Ellis is also board chair at Carbonor AS, a Norwegian company pioneering carbon capture and storage as a commercial service where customers pay fees based on the volume of carbon emitted and captured.

He wouldn’t invest in and manage Green Carbon Solutions’ start-up biochar operation if he wasn’t certain there was a market for his product.

And that, right now, is biochar for silicon chip manufacturers in the United States. “For 15-plus years, the goal has been to make the supply chain more sustainable” for domestic industries, and that starts with a “carbon supply chain” that doesn’t rely on imports, he said.

Silicon “is at the top of the pyramid of metals,” Ellis said, noting silicon for semiconductors must be extracted and purified from compounds like silica sand through a manufacturing process to achieve the needed purity.

Eucalyptus has been a commercial crop in South Florida since the 1960s, Rockwood said, but with the collapse of the pulpwood market since the 1990s—a casualty of the digital age reducing newsprint demand—it became mostly used as mulch because “it’s the highest grade, 90-percent carbon that holds onto nutrients and water.”

His interest in eucalyptus was primarily as an energy feedstock because those same attributes make it an ideal biochar. He and others at the University of Florida saw its potential as a short-rotational wood crop, a fast-growing tree that could be used in advanced manufacturing.

“Eucalyptus allows us to make a consistent product every day,” Ellis said, noting Green Carbon Solutions “could use waste wood” as biochar, “but if you start with bad feedstock, you end with a mediocre or bad product. The silicon industry has high expectations. What you used this week, you better use next week.”

Green Carbon Solutions has contracts to sell its biochar to Mississippi Silicon and Sinova in Kentucky. It will eventually sell to solar panel makers, auto/aircraft manufacturers, medical device companies, and the construction industry, among others.

But that’s just the beginning.

It Works and It’s Ready

Ellis found Indiantown, a drive-by eyeblink 40 miles northwest of West Palm Beach, in 2019. It not only featured “coarse,” but is straddled by CSX railroad lines, on Florida’s 710 “Beehive Highway,” and close to Port Everglades.

His project’s first phase is near completion with the construction of a 4,145 square-foot office complex and a 110-foot-tall retort structure with a horizontal moving grate, four dryers, and electric arc boilers that resemble, at first sight from the distance, a roller coaster.

“We know it works,” Ellis said in mid-March. “We did the testing, knocked the rough edges off. It’s ready.”

Within 18 months, Ellis said, the site will generate its own electricity.

“We do it in Poland,” he said, by using emissions to generate steam. “Industrial self-sufficiency. We won’t take anything from the grid.”

He said eventually they may sell “excess electricity.”

The plant will produce activated carbon, which water utilities use to clean water and is very expensive, Ellis said. There’s a pilot project in Germany testing a product Green Carbon Solutions will make that “performs 50 percent better at a much better price.”

He said the company would sell bio-oils for varied uses. Farmers prize its biochar ash because it holds water and nutrients better than other biomass and, in Florida, could help reduce runoff that fosters red tide and algae blooms.

“It’s the integration of technology and experience, a cutting edge to get into a new playing field. Put all of it together, and you get an interesting mix of revenue streams from the processing of biomass,” Ellis said.

He has another way of putting it: “You have taken every last piece out of a piece of wood and turned it into something useful.”

Green Carbon Solutions has 10 employees and will double by year’s end. Over the next 18 months, Ellis said, it will expand to 40 workers and then “incrementally” add staff until it needs 70 by 2028-29.

In mid-March, the control room was still manned by the Polish techs, including Martin Moilynz and Jan Sawicz, who had dismantled it and put it back together again.

“Now, it’s easier,” Moilynz said, swatting away gnats, recalling when there was nothing—no water, no power—on the site.

“There’s a lot of Polish sweat in the soil here,” Ellis said.

But their work is almost done. The “turnkey” plant is ready to operate at full tempo.

“There were cattle here a few years ago,” Ellis said. “We’re in a good place.”