Page 5 - BusinessWest September 30, 2024

Richard F. Burkhart, CPA and Salvatore J. Pizzanelli, CPA, JD, PFS
The talented team at Burkhart Pizzanelli
Accounting
Julie M. Quink, CPA and Deborah J. Penzias, CPA
The talented team at Burkhart Pizzanelli provides
provides expertise in a full range of accounting
and financial services. Feel free to call on us at Consulting 413.734.9040.Feel free to call on us at 413.734.9040.
expertise in a full range of accounting and financial services.
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Mike Garjian calls biochar “almost
a miracle substance.”
Staff Photo
All this is, as Garjian said, a different kind of green energy being produced at this same location on Main Street.
But there is much more to like beyond this symmetry. There is the environmental impact, driven home by numbers that Gargian uses to get his points across.
“The process of biomass decomposing and returning to CO2 in the atmosphere ... that contributes 17 times more CO2 than all human activity combined annually,” he explained. “There it is, sitting on the sides of roads, spewing CO2 and methane. That’s the material that we’d like to get, chip it into smaller pieces, and run it through the system.”
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There are also the business implications. Indeed, that space Garjian was standing in is intended for the production of catalytic pyroly- sis systems, and he can envision that space being transformed for that purpose within the next few years.
And then, there are the jobs, involving every- thing from the production of these systems to the prospect of people being hired to remove the biomass from forest floors — “just 100 feet off the highway,” as Garjian noted — to feed those systems.
“The process
of biomass decomposing and returning to CO2 in the atmosphere ... that contributes 17 times more CO2 than all human activity combined annually.”
Overall, there are many potential wins from
this, the latest venture for Garjian, who has
nearly a dozen patents to his name and has
developed products ranging from flat light
sources (tubeless neon) to alternative fuels —
specifically running diesel vehicles on waste
vegetable oil — to conversion of waste agricultural products into pellets for wood stoves and then cat litter.
For this issue, we take an in-depth look at his latest project and its far-ranging potential — for the region and the planet.
Burning Issue
As he walked around the prototype catalytic vacuum pyrolysis sys- tem in the middle of the 7,000-square-foot space he’s now leasing, Gar- jian explained how it works while also giving a brief history of how, and why, it was developed.
He noted that while the environmentally friendly cat litter he pro- duced sold well, that wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do with his time and energy. So, as a side venture, he got interested in pyrolysis and set out to develop a workable system.
After getting involved with a few different partners, he took the technology he helped develop and, with Irene, created CarbonStar to
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