South Florida Biochar Plant Poised to Be Key for Domestic Silicon Chipmakers

INDIANTOWN, Fla.—Martin Ellis is building a first-in-the-U.S. business that he said 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 in a specialized production plant with a centuries-old process that refines a product man has used for millennia. The plant has been 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.

He said another necessity is “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.

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Ellis said Polchar has “30 years’ experience developing pyrolysis to meet the needs” of large silicon customers in Europe.

“Our history is how we put them all together,” he said.

Ellis said that there is no other company like Green Carbon Solutions, a bio-based, sustainable, low-carbon business that uses Florida resources and that can produce a high-grade biochar at an industrial scale.

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

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

Just the Beginning

A native of South Africa, Ellis, 60, has decades of global experience in corporate finance as an executive and consultant with Deloitte, Fairchild Associates, and Stern Stewart & Co., among other companies. He has also served as president and 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 in which customers pay fees based on the volume of carbon emitted and captured.

He said he would not invest in and manage Green Carbon Solutions’ startup biochar operation if he were not certain there was a market for his product.

And that market, right now, is 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, he said, noting that that starts with a “carbon supply chain” that does not rely on imports.

Silicon “is at the top of the pyramid of metals,” Ellis said. According to him, silicon for semiconductors must be extracted and purified from compounds such as 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 the pulpwood market has collapsed since the 1990s—a casualty of the digital age and its reduced demand for newsprint. Eucalyptus is now used mostly as mulch, he said, because it is “the highest grade, 90-percent carbon that holds on to nutrients and water.”

Rockwood first became interested in eucalyptus 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. He noted that Green Carbon Solutions “could use waste wood” as biochar but that bad feedstock leads to a bad or mediocre product.

“The silicon industry has high expectations,” he said. “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 and aircraft manufacturers, medical device companies, and the construction industry, among others.

But that is just the beginning.

It Works and It Is Ready

Ellis found Indiantown, a drive-by eyeblink 40 miles northwest of West Palm Beach, Florida, in 2019. Not only does it feature “coarse,” but also, it is conveniently located near CSX railroad lines, Florida’s 710 “Bee-Line Highway,” and 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 at first sight resemble a roller coaster.

“We know it works,” Ellis told The Epoch Times 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. In Poland, he said, Polchar does it by using emissions to generate steam.

“Industrial self-sufficiency,“ he said. ”We won’t take anything from the grid.”

He said eventually the company may sell “excess electricity.”

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

He said the company will 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,“ Ellis said. ”Put all of it together, and you get an interesting mix of revenue streams from the processing of biomass.”

In other words, he said, “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. Ellis said he expects to have 70 workers by 2028–2029.

In mid-March, the plant’s control room was manned by the Polish techs, including Martin Moilynz and Jan Sawicz, who had dismantled it in Poland 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.”