Operation and maintenance
Recurring cover for a plant that has to keep running: preventive maintenance, breakdown response, spares planning and operator competence as staff turn over.
O&M contractsServices
We work on the plant and on what comes out of it
Most biochar operations are held back by a plant that won't run properly, by output nobody will buy, or by both at once. We work across the chain, from feedstock intake to the point of sale.
What we do
Three ways in
Customers usually arrive through one of these and end up needing another; a plant that has just been recovered still has to be kept running.
Commissioning and plant recovery
New installations brought into service, and existing plants that have never reached their numbers measured, diagnosed and recovered.
Engineering workAgronomy and route to market
Turning bulk biochar into a specified agricultural product: characterisation, formulation, field trials and the channel that will carry it.
Product development
How we work
Engineers in the region, on the same equipment for years
Our focus is Africa, with projects inKenya and Tanzania, and our engineers live there.
We also stay on after commissioning instead of handing over and leaving. Performance drifts when nobody is responsible for it, and most of what we know about this equipment came from running the same machines through several seasons.
We also produce biochar andcarbon removal ourselves, on sites where we carry the cost of getting it wrong.
How engagements start
Usually with a diagnosis
Find the real constraint
Plant availability, char yield, quality consistency, formulation, agronomic evidence, distribution economics. Usually more than one at once, so the diagnosis comes before the quote.
Fix the immediate problem
A defined piece of work with a result you can measure: a plant recovered, a facility commissioned, a formulation developed and trialled.
Decide whether to keep us on
Most of this work has a natural continuation: maintenance, agronomic backup, channel development. We will usually want it, because performance holds when someone stays responsible for it. It is never a condition of the first engagement.
Equipment development
A machine for the conditions it has to run in
We're developing a pyrolysis machine with specialist engineering partners, designed around rural operating conditions. The brief came out of repairing other people's equipment: controls a trained local operator can read, faults diagnosable on site, wear parts that are reachable and can be made in a regional workshop, and modules sized for the trucks and lifting gear that exist near the site. It has to take unreliable power, dust, heat and bad roads as ordinary conditions.
Status: in development. The first unit goes into one of our own sites for validation before it's offered to anyone else, so the prototype risk sits with us. We won't publish throughput, yield or comparison figures until they have been measured in the field against defined benchmarks.
Start with the plant
Send us what the equipment is and what it is doing.