IN THE NEWS

Enviva Continues Pellet Growth

Enviva announced that on December 31 it converted from a mas ter limited partnership, Enviva Partners, LP, to a corporation nam ed Enviva Inc. As part of the conversion, each outstanding limited partnership unit was exchang ed for one share of Enviva Inc. common stock.

“This represents an important milestone for Enviva as we complete the evolution of our same great business into an even better corporate structure,” comments John Keppler, Chairman and CEO. “This conversion creates an opportunity for investors worldwide to participate in the significant accretion we see ahead of us, whether by directly investing in Enviva Inc. or investing passively through one of the many indices for which we are now eligible.”

Enviva Inc. is the world’s largest producer of industrial wood pellets, owning and operating 10 plants with a combined production capacity of 6.2 million metric tons per year in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi. Enviva sells most of its wood pellets through long-term, take-orpay off-take contracts with custo mers in the United Kingdom, the European Union and Ja pan. Enviva exports its wood pellets to global markets through its deep-water marine terminals at the Port of Chesapeake, Va., Port of Wilmington, NC, and Port of Pas cagoula, Miss, and from third-party deep-wa ter marine terminals in Savannah, Ga.; Mobile, Ala.; and Panama City, Fla.

With regard to ongoing projects, Enviva reports that construction of the industrial wood pellet plant in Lucedale, Miss. is nearing completion, and its terminal at the Port of Pascagoula also remains on track to receive, store and load production from the Lucedale plant.

An expansion at the Northampton, NC pellet plant is complete and an expansion at the Southampton, Va. plant continues its commissioning ramp. Construction on the existing Greenwood, SC plant expansion is also nearing completion.

Enviva has acquired projects at 15 plant sites, all in various stages of evaluation and development. One of these acquired sites is the fully contracted Epes, Ala. plant, which is currently under development. Enviva expect to commence construction there in early 2022.

The Epes plant is designed and permitted to produce more than 1 million MTPY of wood pellets, which would make it the largest wood pellet production plant in the world.

A prospective production plant in Bond, Miss. is the next most likely to be constructed, and is being developed to produce between

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750,000 and more than 1 million MTPY of wood pellets. Enviva expects construction of the Bond plant to commence once the Epes plant is operational, but timing of construction could be expedited depending on the schedule and delivery requirements of additional off-take contract opportunities under negotiation and general market conditions.

Strategic Biofuels Builds LGF Team

Strategic Biofuels announced that two energy industry veterans have joined the team—Stan Parton and Steve Walkinshaw. These additions will further support the com pany’s Louisiana Green Fuels (LGF) project at the Port of Columbia in Caldwell Parish, La., a renewable diesel project that intends to combine Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) with conversion of forestry waste to renewable fuels, yielding a carbon negative fuel product.

CEO Paul Schubert comments, “Stan and Steve are highly respect ed within the forestry and geoscience industries, respectively, because of their proven track rec ords of success. We are honored to be able to add the brightest minds the industry has to offer to our team.”

Parton has 50 years of experience in the forestry industry and will serve Strategic Biofuels as VP of Forestry. He will oversee all elements of forestry feedstock supply to the LGF plant, including all contracts, agreements, pricing, and QA/QC.

Prior to joining Strategic Biofuels, Parton served as manager, Bio energy/Biochemicals Practice for Forest2Market, a consulting firm recognized as global wood and fiber supply chain experts. Prior to Forest2Market, Parton held executive level positions with Kvaerner Pulping and Sunds Defibrator.

Walkinshaw becomes Strategic Biofuels’ VP of Geoscience. In this capacity, he leveraged his geology expertise for carbon sequestration and, partnering closely with COO Bob Mere dith, conducted Strategic Biofuels’ first seismic study. That study led to the selection of the Port of Columbia in Caldwell Parish and for its Louisiana Green Fuels plant. Walk inshaw worked together with Geostock Sandia in designing and implementing the sequestration test well program, including the ongoing data evaluation and analysis required for the EPA Class VI well permit application.

Strategic Biofuels recently announced that the CCS Test Well Program was successful allowing the LGF project to proceed to the next stage. Walkinshaw is also the owner of Vision Exploration, LLC. He is recognized as a foremost expert in the Upper Tuscaloosa geologic formation, which will be the sequestration reservoir for the Louisiana Green Fuels Project.

Louisiana Green Fuels is a wholly owned subsidiary of Strategic Biofuels. The plant is expected to produce 34 million gallons of renewable fuels and permanently sequester the majority of the green house gases produced in an EPA Class VI well.

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Drax Announces More Expansion

Pacific BioEnergy Corp. (Pac Bio) has reached an agreement to assign some of its assets, including wood pellet long-term sales contracts, to the Drax Group. Meanwhile, it is intended that the Pac Bio wood pellet plant at Prince George, BC will be permanently closed in 2022 once the assets are assigned.

PacBio CEO John Stirling states, “Our company has been battling several challenges for the past few years. Sawmill closures in the region have reduced the volume of available raw materials and increased their cost significantly. Forest fires, landslides and floods have severely impacted our ability to transport our product by rail to the export terminal in North Vancouver. The impact has been a significant

increase in operating costs. Our sales contracts have been sold to Pinnacle (Drax) to mitigate the impact on our customers.”

More specifically Drax is acquiring the pellet sales contract book of Pacific BioEnergy, adding 2.8 million tonnes of orders for sustainable biomass supply to customers in Japan and Europe. These contracts are for delivery between 2022 and the mid-2030s. The deal complements Drax’s existing supply contracts to Asian counterparties and European generators, increasing the group’s long-term third-party sales book by 15%.

These developments supports Drax’s ambition to double sales of sustainable biomass by 2030 to markets in Asia and Europe where demand for biomass is increasing as countries transition away from coal. It also demonstrates Drax’s commitment to the growth of sustainable biomass in Japan specifically, where Drax expects to establish an office in 2022.

Drax also announced that its affiliated operation, Pinnacle Renewable Energy, will be adopting the Drax brand across the North American pellet operations in early 2022. Drax Group has 13 operational pellet plants with nameplate capacity of 4 million metric tons, plus another two plants currently commissioning which along with other developments/expansions will increase output to 5 million.

Drax is now targeting 8 million metric tons of production capacity by 2030. To deliver this additional capacity Drax is developing a pipe line of projects, principally focused on North America.

Drax believes that the global market for sustainable biomass will grow significantly. Concurrently, Drax plans to transform Drax Power Station in the UK into the world’s biggest carbon capture project using BECCS to permanently remove 8Mt of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere each year by 2030. The project is well developed, the technology is proven and an investment decision could be taken in 2024 with the first BECCS unit operational in 2027 and a second in 2030, subject to the right investment framework.

Bandit Purchases The Trelan Co.

Bandit Industries has purchased The Trelan Co. from the Schumacher family. Bandit will continue to produce Trelan chippers and related products and market them as Trelan machines produced by Bandit. Bandit will also supply parts and service to Trelan customers.

Trelan has a strong history in the whole tree chipper arena. The first Trelan chippers were produced in the early ’70s. The Trelan chippers

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will add volume without affecting the sale of Bandit’s line of whole tree chippers.

Bandit will use Trelan’s 45,000 sq. ft. manufacturing space and 10,000 sq. ft. of storage buildings to continue to produce the Trelan machines and to produce additional Bandit machines.

Because of the strong demand for Bandit products, Bandit is on a ma jor expansion campaign. Three expansions of Bandit plants were completed in 2021 and two other expansions will be completed in the first quarter of 2022. Three additional facilities will be built in 2022.

Bandit now employs 610, up from 450 in 2020. Bandit has 110 job openings and hopes to increase employment to 800 employees by the end of 2022.

Alliance Focuses On XanoGrass

Continental Energy Corp., its wholly owned Indonesian subsid iary, PT Kilang Kaltim Continental (KKC), and Hexas Biomass Inc. have established an unincorporated strategic alliance and joint venture between Hexas and KKC. The alliance’s primary objective is the production of Hexas’ proprietary Xano Grass plant varieties for use as a sus tainable source of non-food and non-feed biomass feedstocks for production of environmentally responsible advanced biofuels at KKC’s Maloy Refinery development site in East Kalimantan, Indonesia.

XanoGrass is an EPA-approved bioenergy crop that meets the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standards. Since the plants are not used for food or feed purposes, commercial use of harvested XanoGrass biomass for production of biofuels, biofibers and biomaterials is not in competition with alternative uses of Xano Grass as human food or animal feed. Further, XanoGrass production does not displace food crop production.

Importantly, XanoGrass plants are hyperaccumulator plants with the ability to remove heavy metals and other pollutants from contaminated soils and store them in plant tissues. XanoGrass plants also sequester carbon both underground in the plants’ roots and in harvested plant fiber. Cultivation of Xano Grass restores soil microbial communities and fixes nitrogen in the soil. The net effect of these properties is that, over time, Xano Grass cultivation regenerates and restores damaged and contaminated topsoil and subsoil to a condition suitable for replanting to re-

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store its original wild condition or suitable for commercial agriculture production of food, feed or other products.

The alliance recognizes an opportunity presented by the availability of large tracts of degraded land near KKC’s Maloy Refinery site, upon which the original fertile topsoil, and in some cases the subsoil and the entire soil profile, has been eroded and exhausted due to insufficient agricultural or forestry soil conservation practices, or has been removed, polluted or damaged by decades of strip-mining activity. The provincial government of East Kalimantan is looking for solutions to restore and regenerate more than 2 million hec tares (4.9 million acres) of degraded soil.

Cultivation of XanoGrass on available damaged land near the Maloy site using Hexas’ Farm-toFiber system and business model can help 1) restore, regenerate and reclaim barren soils, 2) provide local farmers an income opportunity and guaranteed harvest offtake, and 3) minimize renewable biofuels feedstock transport costs and reduce the overall CO2 footprint of the clean biofuels to be produced at KKC’s refinery.

Hexas’ XanoGrass yields 50-85 dry metric tons of biomass per hec tare (2.47 acres) year-over-year, is highly pest-resistant, grows in different climates and soil types, tolerates drought, and has low ecological demand.

XanoGrass can be harvested repeatedly for up to 20-years before re-planting is necessary.

The average yield in temperate climates for XanoGrass is 55 dry metric tons per hectare per year com pared to 37 for Miscanthus and 15 for switchgrass. Hexas and KKC expect much higher yields in the tropical climate of Indonesia where the growing season is 12 months per year.

In addition to use as an advanc ed biofuels feedstock, XanoGrass can be processed into a variety of specialty XanoFiber biomaterials using Hexas’ proprietary post-harvest processing. Xano Fiber is a low-cost, high-quality feedstock with consistent physical and chemical properties. It integrates directly into manufacturing systems as a replacement of, or supplement to, wood, jute, hemp, or other natural biofibers and fossil fuel-based feedstocks.

KKC is fully licensed by Indonesian foreign direct investment and energy ministry authorities to build, own, and operate a 24,000 barrels per day, digitally controlled, integrated biofuels and crude oil

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