Bioleum Corporation acquires Hexas Biomass Inc. for $6.5 million

Comstock Inc. has announced that one of its strategic investees, Bioleum Corporation has acquired Hexas Biomass Inc. which is a global leader in the development and deployment of purpose grown energy crops and biomaterials, including all of its intellectual properties and certain liabilities.

The acquisition took place in exchange for a purchase price of approximately $6.5 million.

Hexas has developed a portfolio of proprietary intellectual properties for the propagation, production, harvesting, and processing of purpose grown crops with proven annual yields exceeding 25 to 30 dry metric tons per acre, or about 4 to 7 times the yields of traditional forestry species.

The combination of Bioleum’s high yield refining platform and Hexas’ high yield purpose grown crops enables the production of over 100 barrels of biofuel per acre of biomass production per year.

Wendy Owens, Hexas CEO, said, “Bioleum’s acquisition will help us to execute on that vision by accelerating commercialization and global deployment of our technologies in biofuels and multiple other biobased applications.”

Kevin Kreisler, Bioleum CEO, added, “While our solutions are designed to process most known forms of lignocellulosic biomass, the Hexas technologies will allow us to enhance, supplement, and/or dramatically expand locally available biomass by “anchoring” each of our owned and licensed refineries with a dedicated, perpetual feedstock supply, ensuring the reliability, consistency, scale, and pricing needed to minimize risk and maximize profitability.”

The U.S. DOE has previously estimated that America can produce over of one billion tons per year of waste wood and other forms of biomass for conversion into transportation fuels. That’s enough to produce more than 3 billion barrels of fuel per year with Bioleum’s refining solutions, but much of this biomass is widely dispersed and subject to regulatory, collection, and other sources of regional variability.

Converting just 40 million underutilized acres of non-food producing land into profitable purpose grown biomass farms with Hexas’ high yield crops could provide enough feedstock to double that output while decreasing variability and risk for new renewable fuel projects.

Kreisler concluded, “Our ambition is to build shareholder value by systemically empowering agricultural, forestry, pulp and paper, renewable fuels, petroleum, energy, and mobility stakeholders to license and deploy our solutions across their respective industries at speeds that are far greater than Bioleum, or any other company, could ever achieve on its own. We are laser focused on developing, deploying, and enabling that system, and we couldn’t be more excited to complete this transaction.”