C&I Engineering, one of Louisville’s largest engineering firms, has bought an equity share in BioProducts LLC. The goal of the investment is to grow each business as well as capitalize on new products being developed for the state’s agricultural sector

C&I Engineering, one of Louisville’s largest engineering firms, has bought an equity share in BioProducts LLC, an emerging agricultural technology company.

The goal of the investment is to grow each business as well as capitalize on new products being developed for the state’s agricultural sector, officials from each organization told me in recent interviews.

BioProducts holds various patents, licensed from the University of Louisville, that aim to transform agricultural waste into usable products. Products include Bio-Coal, a burnable fuel made from hemp, corn or other plant matter and xylose, a sweetener that can be used in foods.

“With our technology, we can put more money in [farmers] hands,” said Dr. Jagannadh Satyavolu, a faculty member at the University of Louisville School of Engineering, who founded BioProducts LLC in 2018.

Clifford Speedy, executive director of projects at C&I, said he’s hopeful that this partnership can create 20 new jobs at his company as well as $3 million to $6 million in additional revenue for the firm in the coming years. The company has 42 licensed engineers locally and total employment of 116, according to our most recent research, linked below.

C&I bought a 10% share of BioProducts — though the parties declined to publicly say how much that amounted to specifically — with an option to buy more. With the investment, C&I is looking to grow the company by using its engineering capabilities to take some of BioProducts offerings from theoretical to the real world, said Speedy.

For example, both firms are looking at how they could make so-called “stillage” — the corn mash byproduct generated by distilleries — into something more useful for farmers. I say more useful here because distilleries have long sought to unload stillage by giving it to farmers for animal feed. But as Speedy explained, after the animals feed on the solids, the leftover liquid has contaminates and creates a new waste problem for the farmers.

With this partnership, the two companies are looking at engineering a process that could simplify this for both distillers and farmers. There’s even talk of leasing a Downtown facility to house a stillage processing plant, so that the two firms could easily sell this service to Downtown distillers like Angel’s Envy (which is a C&I client) as well as others.

Satyavolu said with this process, the companies can fractionate (or divide) fiber, protein and water in the stillage. That fiber can be used to make the xylose sweetener as well as activated carbon, used in chemistry. The protein can be used for animal feed. The water can be treated to produce biogas as well as safer water discharge.

All this takes good, strong engineering capabilities, he said.

The engineering firm has decades of experience in industrial processes.

C&I is short for Chemical & Industrial Engineering Inc. It’s long been a standout in the oil and gas industry, but as I reported a few years ago, has sought to diversify its customer base by getting into the food and distilling industries — both of which have a large local presence in the Louisville area.

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A University of Louisville research-backed startup has beaten teams from around the country in a pitch competition aimed at bourbon sustainability.

The startup, BioProducts LLC, took the top spot at the Distillers Grains Reverse Pitch competition, backed by the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development and others.

The goal was to find innovative solutions for using distilling byproducts. According to the competition website, about 10 gallons of byproduct are generated for every gallon of bourbon produced.

BioProducts is built around UofL-patented technology that gives those distillery byproducts new life, for example, as a low-calorie sugar substitute and as specialized activated carbon suitable for a number of high-performance applications, particularly lithium ion batteries. 

For the pitch competition, BioProducts teamed with Louisville-based C&I Engineering Inc. to present how the integrated technology could be applied at different types and sizes of distilleries. And, said UofL’s Jagannadh Satyavolu, who helped invent the technology and later founded the company, how this process could create activated carbon that’s more cost-effective and sustainable.

“Using this technology — invented in Kentucky and for one of Kentucky’s signature industries — we can take this otherwise waste material and turn it into a game-changer,” he said. “This could help make distilling more sustainable, reduce pollution and much more.”

The technology was invented by Satyavolu at UofL’s Conn Center for Renewable Energy Research in collaboration with Michael Nantz and his team in the UofL chemistry department.

BioProducts holds an exclusive license through UofL Innovation and Commercialization, which handles intellectual property resulting from university research and helps forge partnerships with companies for commercialization. 

“We feel we are the right team at the right time to solve this challenge,”

said Cliff Speedy, C&I Engineering’s executive director of projects.

Because they won the pitch competition, the BioProducts team received an engraved bourbon barrel lid and will now present to 500-some distillery professionals at the James B. Beam Institute Industry Conference in March 2022.

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C&I has volunteered our Laser Scanning services to design a new distillation column lab for the University of Louisville Chemical engineering department. UofL is planning on completing construction during the summer and fall of 2020, so that the new lab will be ready for students in January of 2021. Since there is quite a bit going on in a small space, the scan allows us to confirm dimensions and review interferences while creating the design model. The distillation column itself will remain, but C&I is working on a new layout/materials that will be more interactive for the students as well as safer for the students..

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