The vision, the idea, came from Dr. Esteban Chornet, a retired professor of chemical engineering at the Université de Sherbrooke. He was involved in looking at solutions to take forest residues to produce electricity at the time, and he had the idea in the nineties of trying to find a solution to basically use mixed waste, to try to solve the issues related to managing our waste, while also producing liquid transportation fuels.
The company was co-founded in 2000 by Dr. Esteban Chornet and his son, who's the businessman and has a finance background. They started at the lab phase, using the Université de Sherbrooke installation, and then they invested in a pilot. They got some money from the regional economical development fund in Quebec, but soon they had to go outside Canada to find some private capital. They went to New York and they found two clean tech funds that were ready to invest; and basically the company has gone through all the steps in terms of technology development and validation, from pilot to the demonstration phase.
NRCan supported us with some R and D programs at the beginning. Then SDTC helped us. It really complemented the capital we were able to attract from private investors, and for our private investors, it was really key to have the Canadian government through all those phases of development.
SDTC was also involved at the commercial phase, with the next generation biofuels fund. The way they do the technical due diligence is by having an independent engineer. It was a very thorough selection process with commercial due diligence, technical due diligence; and we got a repayable loan from SDTC for the large-scale facility, but most of the funding we got was private. We got most of our skills from universities. A lot of people also coming from the petrochemical industry came to work for us, and we have great people with very strong skills. We have headquarters here in Canada and and we can grow the company internationally.