Bob Walker's Plan to Transform the Global Energy Industry

Scaling Up from Stoves to Power Plants

The notion of Bixby as a national or global energy company sounds grandiose at present; its current product line consists only of two exceptionally efficient corn-burning stoves. The MaxFire, a 50,000-BTU unit that’s usually prettied up with artificial logs for home use, went on the market in 2004. Some 500 hearth-products dealers in the United States and Canada sell it for about $4,000. Walker says Bixby has sold more than 8,000 MaxFires, most to people in rural areas who otherwise would burn propane or heating oil.

A new 70,000-BTU unit that began shipping in December is intended to heat barns, outbuildings, and other facilities where looks don’t count. It is called the UBB, for Ugly Black Box. “I believe in calling a spade a spade,” Walker says.

The stoves themselves are plenty compelling. The MaxFire burns dry corn kernels with no odor or smoke and at a 99.7 percent combustion rate. After 22 hours of operation, the only ash remaining from 106 pounds of corn is two or three “cookies” the size of a hockey puck. Turn on the MaxFire with its feeder bin filled to that two-bushel capacity, and Walker says it will heat a 2,000-square-foot house for three days at half the cost of heating oil, propane, or electricity.

But to think of these products only as corn stoves is to miss the potential of Bixby Energy Systems, he explains. While corn is the most common fuel burned in the MaxFire and UBB at present, it is not the only fuel they can use. They work just as well with wood pellets processed from sawdust and other lumber scrap. What’s more (and here is where the plot begins to thicken), they work with biomass pellets that Bixby Energy Systems has developed an innovative method of producing by combining all kinds of plant and animal wastes.

Walker holds up several test tubes to illustrate, rattling off the energy value of their contents from memory. Here are corn kernels, which burn at a rate of 7,000 BTUs per pound. Here are olive pits, a better fuel that will release 9,300 BTUs per pound. Here is cottonseed, 9,500 BTUs. Then you’ve got almond shells, beet pulp, wheat straw, cranberry waste—the list is practically endless. “There are 10,000 biomass materials in the United States and 36,000 on the planet,” Walker says. “All of those things can be turned into fuel that can be burned.”

One of the main problems preventing biomass pellets from being widely used for fuel has been that different biomass stocks burn most effectively at different temperatures. Olive-pit pellets, for instance, would want a different burning system than beet-pulp or cottonseed pellets would.

“The experts said you’d need 400 different pellets and 400 different stoves to burn them,” Walker says. Bixby Energy Systems’ breakthrough is a process by which all of this organic stuff can be combined, regardless of its original density or moisture content, into uniform pellets that will burn consistently in its stoves with combustion rates of better than 99 percent. Walker says Bixby will have those pellets in mass production in two years or less. And they will work not just in Bixby’s stoves. They could have other applications—such as heating boilers in larger buildings or even replacing coal as the fuel burned in electric power plants.

Power plants in Europe are already burning biomass, and Walker says Bixby will announce a joint venture in coming weeks to build a pellet facility on the East Coast to supply some of those plants. Chuck Limbach, Bixby’s vice president of engineered fuel production, has been scouting locations around the country for production facilities. Based in Virginia, he has been building wood-pellet plants for 20 years, and says the first Bixby Energy Systems plants will produce wood pellets in collaboration with businesses that generate scrap, such as cabinet shops and flooring makers. “We’ll start where we have those opportunities,” Limbach says.