Success Stories
A Peel Region Success Story
Woodland Biofuels Inc.
A Mississauga company transforms waste into profitable, environmentally friendly fuel
Greg Nuttall,
President and CEO
of Woodland Biofuels
Greg Nuttall is a man with a mission. Like his childhood hero Tom Swift — a fictional inventor featured in more than a hundred books — Nuttall longs to make the world a better place by transforming innovative ideas into great businesses.
As president and CEO of Mississauga-based Woodland Biofuels Inc. 
— a company that "owes its existence to innovation," he says — he is in striking distance of this goal.
A group of Ontario scientists founded Woodland Biofuels in 2000 to take their latest invention to market. They had developed and patented a thermo-chemical process to convert Ontario’s rich supply of biomass into a clean-burning automotive fuel as affordable as gasoline.
Biomass is garbage — the remains of dead vegetation. Ontario produces close to 50 million tons of it a year. It’s the main ingredient of our sewage and green bins, our forestry industry’s wood waste and our farms’ agriculture waste.
Woodland’s technology is expected to efficiently convert this organic waste into ethanol and other fuels, as well as industrial chemicals, electricity and water. The process generates no toxic emissions and eliminates the need to burn food products — such as corn — to produce ethanol.
It also holds the potential produce very cheap fuel. “We expect to be able to successfully produce ethanol from renewable waste for less than $1 per gallon — significantly lower than the cost of producing a gallon of gasoline,” says Nuttall.
When Nuttall joined the company in 2003 to help it commercialize this technology, he focused on getting financial backing and joining forces with existing, successful world-class commercial operations.
The company also welcomed new partners. One is Burlington Ontario’s Zeton Inc. , the world’s leading demonstration plant engineering and construction firm. Another is Thermo Design Engineering of Edmonton, which will provide a staging area for new installations. And a third is the province of Ontario.
“The simple truth is that Ontario is doing more than most places in North America and around the world to support innovation through initiatives like the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) , and to promote and foster a clean, green technology economy,” says Nuttall. “And at Woodland, we’re proud to be part of that.”
In 2010, Ontario invested $4 million through the Innovation Demonstration Fund to help Woodland and its partners build a $10 million demonstration plant at the Bioindustrial Innovation Centre , in the University of Western Ontario’s Sarnia-Lambton Research Park .
By the middle of 2012, this demonstration plant will begin pumping out 750,000 litres of ethanol annually. Over the following five years, the company will license and open modular commercial plants all over the world. The first is expected to generate 20 million gallons of automobile fuel annually. The next ones will each generate around 50 million gallons annually.
These accomplishments will help the company replace the gasoline emissions, spewing out of the world’s automobiles, with an affordable, environmentally sustainable alternative. As well as generate an estimated 3,500-plus jobs, many right here in Ontario.
“With the level of efficiency of our patented technology, we expect to be — by a significant margin — the lowest cost producer of automotive fuel in North America,” says Nuttall. “That will put Ontario at the front of the global race to find an alternative to fossil fuels, and provide us with significant economic and environmental benefits.”
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