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When was Preon founded and what has it accomplished?

I started the
company about 15years ago. We started working mostly with users of
critical power for an application called data-serve, which is basically
on computers. So through that experience I had to understand the
concept of generation of power because that was what data-serve had all
through the United States.

In 2000, four years
after I started the company, being a chemical engineer, I became very
fascinated with the cutting edge like jet-engine. It produces power
that is very clean, quiet, and economical to run, so I thought I’m
going to develop a part of pre-odd that promotes the generation of
power on site but will be generating power continuously.

First, we will be
generating power on a stand-by mode which was what we were doing for
Data-centres. I started promoting this concept globally. The city of
Chicago was our largest client with a lot of people in the city, we
were providing them with stand-by generators and for the Chicago
Housing Authority, we provided power for the CTA, (Chicago Treasury
Authority) and we also provided all the other back-up power for the
Chicago public schools. So we know a lot of people and its being a
great door opener for us and that is really how we cut our teeth. It
took us about four years of meetings with the city of Chicago to get
them to finally accept this crazy concept of acid-generation of power

Your company is involved in the generation and distribution of power, how do you do this?

We are into
generation by using micro turbines which are quite easy to manage and
transport and we use them as cells to provide power. The advantage of
this is that if you use micro turbines you can easily manage any
problem if they arise and apart from that you don’t need a large and
expensive one to work efficiently.

The other
technology we use both in the United States and in other places where
we are involved in power generation is called Gasification. Basically,
what happens here is that you are applying heat to the garbage and it
gives off gas; t gives 10 times more gas out and converts them to
energy to keep the whole process going. It kind of sets-up a chain
reaction and as you keep taking out the heat, you keep storing it as
the process is going its gives-off a gas called bio-gas or syn-gas
(synthetic gas) then you can take that gas and burn it again, in a
micro-turbine to generate more electricity.

This concept is
really being developed right now in the United States. We are working
in Puerto Rico, which has a lot of land-fills as an Island. They’ve got
nowhere to send the garbage and this is a serious problem for them so
we are educating them to let them know that you are necessarily
restricted to bio-gas because a lot of these land-fills. There is no
gas collection system at all, so we are educating people that even the
land-fills that people thought cannot be recovered, you can just go
there, and either literally take the fresh garbage and process them or
use another technology where you can actually go into an old land-fill
and dig up. All the old garbage is sorted out to take out recyclables
and this process could be very applicable to Nigeria because those
processes are very labour intensive. It is a great process that will in
turn provide lots of jobs for people in a country like Nigeria. It’s
good for the environment, it’s got bio-energy, renewable energy.

These technologies
are available today and that’s what I spend a lot of my time on,
explaining to people that on these land-fills, there is a lot of
potential. Nigeria can get a lot from this. The fact that Nigeria is
flaring gas; is such an extreme thing that we also need to make good
use of that first. And once we (Preon international and Nigeria) are
there, with our business and personnel in there, we plan on addressing
this through a number of initiatives like dealing with land-fills
issues in Nigeria and all over the place including the US but island
countries are really-really bad because there is nowhere to go. It all
burns out itself. It’s the same combustion energy, its bio-gas so it is
very synergistic to what we are doing now.

Apart from
the US, which other country have you being able to reproduce this kind
of technology and do you have plans for others?

We really are more reactive than
pro-active as to where to go with this. If Sam hadn’t liaised with us
we wouldn’t be in Nigeria. I will wait till we find the right personnel
and atmosphere to work in any country. Your business processes is as
good as your people. We were recently approached by a company in
Croatia and we have met with some governors and mayors there who wanted
us to help address issues of land-fills, and what to do with municipal
solid waste. They have a very expensive electricity and huge gas cost.
I will not underrate the opportunity in Nigeria because of this
gas-flaring phenomenon going on. So we are going to go smart and go to
where we know we can make money and wait for the right people.