Bob Walker's Plan to Transform the Global Energy Industry

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.