Full Article from The Times:

Arigna’s green plan to ‘reverse engineer coal’ — using olive pits

From coal pits to olive pits, Arigna Group is making one of Ireland’s most unlikely energy transitions.

The Layden family have consistently tried to stay ahead of the curve. They have been involved in the coal business in the Arigna hills in north Co Roscommon for five generations.

By the 1980s their century-old coalmine, which overlooked Lough Allen, was rapidly depleting and the nearby ESB Arigna power plant faced closure. So the family developed their own smokeless coal plant.

When smoky coals were banned in Dublin in 1990, Arigna was the only plant in the country making smokeless fuel. It ended up producing 70,000 tonnes a year, exporting smokeless — actually low smoke — nuggets to the UK, France and Belgium, and even for a time Germany.

In 2017, to counter Brexit, Arigna Group bought Bruce Lindsay Coal, a distributor in Scotland, from fellow Irish fuel company Tedcastles. The idea was that “we would be trading with ourselves”, says Brendan Layden, managing director of Arigna Group, and not loading paperwork on to its customers.

By that stage the group was already well advanced on planning for its next phase of growth. “The end of fossil fuels, we could see, was coming,” Layden says.

The family invested in wind farms, only Eddie O’Connor at Bord na Mona was an earlier mover in the sector. Brendan’s brother Peter, who died in 2023, also began researching a way to convert biomass materials into a solid, stable form of carbon.

The plan was “to reverse engineer coal”, Brendan Layden says.

The company wanted to produce a fossil fuel alternative from organic matter that could compete with smokeless coal on price.

“One day my brother Peter called me into the office and said, I have a cunning plan, we’re going to make biochar through torrefaction,” Layden, an engineer by training, says. “I said that’s great. I went back up to my office and I started typing in all those words to find out what he was actually talking about.”

Biochar is a type of charcoal made from heating biological material in the absence of oxygen to extremely high temperatures, a process known as torrefaction.

The Laydens tested “about 200 different raw materials” including used coffee grounds, straw and cashew nut shells before settling on olive stones as a feedstock.

Globally, it is estimated that there is 21.2 million tonnes of olives produced annually, most going towards the production of olive oil. The pits or stone are largely discarded as waste.

“What we really wanted is a raw material that comes as a by-product of an annual crop,” Layden says. “You could use trees, but once you cut down trees, you have to start again.

“To us, anyway, carbon is already sequestered in the tree.

“If you have an annual crop, every year that olive is regrown again, so you recapture [carbon] again.”

The stones are low in moisture and have a high carbon content. The pits are milled and shipped to Ireland from Portugal and put through a pyrolysis reactor in Arigna.

What eventually comes out is a nugget that looks almost identical to smokeless coal and retails at roughly the same price.

Branded as Harvest Flame, the biofuel launched last year, and in its first home heating season, has done well, says Conor Layden, Brendan’s nephew, one of five family members involved in the business.

The UK rival Homeforce makes Ecoal 50, which is a mix of smokeless coal and olive stones. Harvest Flame is a totally renewable product, which Conor Layden believes gives it an edge in marketing to eco-conscious UK consumers.

In Ireland he expects rising carbon taxes will drive sales. As they increase over the remainder of the decade, a big price differential should emerge between smokeless coal and Harvest Flame.

Proper regulation of the market would help too. A Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown survey found that most of the coal sold in the area breached legal limits. Arigna invested heavily to become compliant, yet enforcement of the 35-year smoky coal ban has been weak.

“Everybody pointed the finger at somebody else,” Brendan Layden says. “The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] blamed the councils, the councils blame the government.”

He draws parallels with the import of hydrogenated vegetable oil that undermined Green Generation’s biomethane plant, the largest in Ireland. It was placed into receivership last week.

Arigna continues to produce smokeless coal, an environmentally beneficial product, yet that has created its own challenges, Layden says.

Funders, banks and insurers have shied away from backing a company in fossil fuels. In Co Meath, the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund invested €10 million in a company making briquettes from imported willow.

Arigna has funded the largest commercial biochar facility in Europe, from internal resources and investment from the venture funder BVP, the finance house Le Bruin Private and the Western Development Commission. Le Bruin’s Cathal Fitzgerald is the company chairman.

“A lot of people ask us, ‘Well, why didn’t you just shut down the fossil fuel business and start up as a greenfield operation?’ Because we have 50 staff, we have a site, we had our own distribution,” Layden says.

None would be sustainable without the contribution from smokeless coal. “The market wasn’t there to move day one,” he says. As Harvest Flame sales go up, smokeless sales go down. “So it is a transition process. That will take, we estimate, maybe three to five years. It could be seven years? I don’t know.”

Harvest Flame is just the first step. Biochar’s real value, globally, is expected to be as a replacement for moss peat. Google is a big backer of biochar agricultural projects in India and America.

Arigna has entered into a trial with a maker of probiotic growth products (Karen O’Hanlon’s Probio Carbon), a seaweed processor (Beobio) and a maker of fish extracts to produce an organic fertiliser that is being spread on Kilcock GAA pitches.

“So we’ve gone full circle from taking coal from the ground to putting carbon back into the ground,” Layden says.

As it looks beyond Harvest Flame, the group will most probably source its feedstock closer to home. Spent grains from the brewing industry is one possibility. An agricultural by-product that is part of the human food chain is attractive, particularly if the output is to spread on land.

The transport of the olive stones from Portugal to north Roscommon accounts for surprisingly little of the biochar’s carbon footprint. “Shipping is just very efficient, it is marginal,” Layden says. “It is infinitely more sustainable than shipping coal from Colombia.”

In the medium term the Laydens will be looking to upgrade its Arigna site, improve storage and other facilities, invest in new products and research and developments.

Longer term, as applications grow, Layden sees a need for more biochar plants. Perhaps by then, government and ESG funds will ready to step up to the plate.