Northstar Clean Technologies Inc. has announced that it has initiated steady state production at its fully constructed asphalt shingle reprocessing facility in Delta, British Columbia.
The Empower Pilot Facility reprocesses discarded single-use asphalt shingles into liquid asphalt, fiber, and aggregate, allowing these products to enter the circular economy while diverting waste from landfills.
The company is now producing “green asphalt” within the exact specifications the company has aimed to produce at the Empower Pilot Facility.
Mr. Aidan Mills, President & CEO and Director of Northstar, states, “One of the critical metrics for any energy transition, ESG-based, clean technology company is demonstrating that its transformational technology actually works. For Northstar to do that, we need to produce the end products from our facility at the specification we expected, in a repeatable manner. Therefore, we are very pleased to announce that the Empower Pilot Facility is not only producing exactly the end products we planned, but we have also initiated the production plan to do that repeatably.”
Empower Pilot Facility operations
The company has initiated steady state production, which is expected to deliver throughput of asphalt shingles in the range of 10-20 tpd up to 4-5 days per week.
Steady state operation will continue at these levels with the objective of demonstrating repeatable production in terms of production safety, quality, and duration (hours per day and days per week).
Most importantly, the two primary output products (liquid asphalt and aggregate) are being produced exactly as designed, meeting the company’s end product specifications.
The production of specification products has enabled the company to deliver samples of its “green asphalt” and aggregate to multiple major road construction companies, shingle manufacturers, and other industry stakeholders. These samples are now enabling detailed technical analysis to be carried out by a wide range of the company’s potential customers.
Internal testing capability has also been implemented at the Empower Pilot Facility, enabling the development of a quality assurance program for the company’s reprocessed products.
Since October 2021, the company has been implementing the changes identified through the unit-by-unit commissioning of the company’s proprietary BEST process. This commissioning process, combined with the ramp up to steady state production, has provided a clear roadmap for commercial production levels targeted at 50-75 tpd.
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Mr. Mills continues, “We are thrilled to have finally entered this critical stage of our company’s development, as we now have ‘proof of concept” and a viable technology. Critically, this technology is the foundation for our ongoing independent engineering design study for our future scale up facilities. Therefore, this announcement is a major inflection point for the company as it proves to the market that our technology works and validates our business model, as we set out to scale up this technology to a facility size that we can expand with across the North American market.”
“Our objective is to maximize the applicability of what we believe is the ‘greenest’ asphalt in North America,” continues Mr. Mills. “In delivering this, we will be in the unique position where our reprocessing of asphalt shingles could not only divert approximately 40,000 tonnes of shingles per annum per facility currently sent to landfill, but these products can be applied in numerous markets. We believe we now have a sustainable, proven solution that can help solve North America’s asphalt waste problem.”
“I would like to thank our shareholders for their continued support and patience. I would also like to thank all members of our operational team for helping us get to this critical juncture. Our operational team has been working around the clock to achieve this significant milestone for our company. We greatly appreciate your efforts,” concludes Mr. Mills.
