Quasar Energy Group's Mel Kurtz comes from a family that has focused on soil amendments and fertilizers for about 80 years. He can see the operations of Kurtz Bros.Inc., a landscape supply company operated first by his father, and now by his three brothers, just a few hundred yards a way from Quasar's headquarters. Quasar is focusing not on landscaping but on fixing the problems of municipal waste-water treatment plants and the manure mess created by factory farms that are threatening the nation's waterways.
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Mel Kurtz is the President of Quasar Energy Group, a start-up alternative energy company that produces methane from food waste and manure in anaerobic digesters. INDEPENDENCE, Ohio -- Mel Kurtz is a modern evangelist for "doing the right thing" and obeying "natural law."
Kurtz is the president of Quasar Energy Group, a company with a mission that his marketing division once described as making the world better, one digester at a time.
Quasar's digesters are industrial-scale living machines that put natural bacteria and enzymes to work converting manure, including municipal sewage, and other biosolids such as commercial food waste, into methane, carbon dioxide and a nutrient-rich left-over called "cake." The company's engineers are expecting in 2015 to convert fertilizers and making water clean enough to almost drink.
It's not a pipe dream. Quasar has built more than a dozen such plants and expects to announce another dozen in the coming year. And there are dozens of others in the talking stage -- both agricultural projects to handle the concentrated manure generated by modern feedlots and municipal waste-water treatment plants facing federal fines.
Kurtz is the kind of boss who slams 18 hours of work into 8-or-10-hour workdays. And he expects everyone else to do the same. Or did. For the first six or seven years of the eight-year-old company that is how things were -- and not many had a personal life.
He set out to fix that, in the same fashion he had used to create the problem.
Here are few excerpts from that conversation.
Q. How did you change that culture of overwork?
A: Twice a week we send out an email to remind our employees that the focus should be on results, not on hours spent. We want people to be productive, not just working to work. The e blast, or "Balance Blast," is just planting a seed to remind them of that policy. And we do a monthly breakfast.
Q. What do you mean by natural law?
A: We know that incineration (of waste) is a volume reduction strategy. We know that because it was scientifically available at the time, not because it was the best. These biological processes that we use in the digesters are just like those in our bodies. It's a natural process. We can now take fertilizer to places that need it, instead of places that already have it, which is why we have algae blooms in shallow lakes.
Q. What does 2015 look like for Quasar's business?
A: We expect whole bunches of orders. We have tripled our sales division. And we expect to build 12 projects in 2015.
Q. Will Quasar concentrate its sales efforts on waste-water treatment plants?
We have three sectors. Waste-water treatment plants, agriculture, because rural America needs it and exporting our technology. But our initiative is primarily waster-water treatment facilities, water resource recovery facilities is the terminology.
There are 15,000 waste-water treatment plants in the nation. And 1,500 of them need immediate help. That is our primary objective, to win that market, to improve the way that market is doing business.
Q. Your technology has been criticized by some who think the sludge it produces might not be safe to apply to farm land. Can you explain that reaction?
A: Until recently, the concept of separating the nutrients from the natural soil amendments was not considered feasible or practical. But now it is, and we are commercializing that technology right now. Our future is predicated on producing clean water and commercial fertilizer.
It means that in the future we will have clean water, have soil amendments, the organics, and we will have the phosphorus and the nitrogen relocated to where we need it and have it to become commercially sustainable.
Q. Do you have competitors? And how do you deal with that?
A: I suppose we do. But we don't know who they are. In other words, we don't sell things based on price. Ever. It has always been a value proposition. Our goal does not start with making money. Our goal is: Does this make sense? Then it becomes a contribution to our bank account.
It does no good to exploit somebody for money because there is always going to be a consequence ... to the community, to the employees, to character. When you do the right thing, good things happen.