Mainebiz

S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 / W O R K F O R M E 49 Maine's tech businesses continue to grow in the areas of payment processing, biotech and R&D. There are opportunities there and the jobs pay well. TECHNOLOGY 5 6 CO2 shortage continues to vex brewers Higher carbon dioxide prices are forcing Maine breweries to get creative S TA RT I N G O N T H E N E X T PAG E » MB: How did Player Design unfold? TP: At the start, I was working out of a little rental office in the basement of the chamber of commerce in Presque Isle. At the begin- ning we were doing consulting engineering for industrial projects. Right now, across the three companies, we have 40 to 45 employees with locations in Westbrook, Presque Isle, Ashland and Fort Fairfield. We are vertically integrating with the addition of K-Pel and are moving from designing the equipment and developing technology to building those designs ourselves. It creates manufactur- ing jobs in Aroostook County, which is a key principle of our growth strategy. It not only helps us control our process, but it al- lows us to engage all sorts of new input on how to further improve our designs. As an additional natural growth, the investment in MaineFlame is new technology that was developed and will be constructed and oper- ated in northern Maine. MB: What's an example of an interesting engineering problem you've tackled? TP: That has to be what we have recently an- nounced in our steam-exploded pellet facility. We figured out how to take any waste wood product — branches, slash, limbs, leftovers from wood harvesting operations and sawmills — and turn it into water-resistant wood pellets that can take the place of a mid-grade coal. A lot of people have played around with this conceptually, but there aren't any facilities that can do it economically. Our team came up with a way to make pellets out of scraps and keep the costs down by using a very high- pressure system. This sort of system had never been used for this application, but our team figured it out, where others had given up. MB: Who are some of your customers? TP: Overall we have about 60 installations of our machinery around the world. We have wood pellet sites in Australia, Asia, and all over Canada and the U.S. Our current regional projects are with Irving, Groupe Lebel [a forestry business based in Riviere- du-Loup, Quebec], Granulco in Quebec, Viet Phat Energy in Vietnam and Baskin Live- stock's new food recycling plant in New York. Overall, going forward, we see companies in the waste-wood-to-energy industry sector as a real opportunity to not only grow our company but also grow opportunities for other Maine-based wood industries from harvesting to consumer. n S P R I N G 2 0 2 3 / W O R K F O R M E 49

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