WALNUT, Calif., Aug. 25, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- VIASPACE Inc.
(OTCQB: VSPC) today announced that CEO Dr. Carl Kukkonen was interviewed by The Wall Street
Transcript, a paid subscription publication and website that
publishes biweekly industry reports that feature equity analyst,
money manager and CEO interviews. In publication since 1963, The
Wall Street Transcript has interviewed the CEOs and senior
executives of public companies and publishes these interviews
verbatim. The full interview is available to paid subscribers only,
and is available at http://www.twst.com/interview/30350.
Below is an excerpt from the interview of Dr. Kukkonen.
"VIASPACE focuses on the renewable biomass energy business and
on our Giant King Grass, which is a proprietary biomass crop.
Biomass is just a fancy word for biological materials such as
trees, grass and crops. And so when people are talking about
biofuels or bio energy or biomass, they are talking about fuels
that are derived from trees, grass, or crops. In the renewable
energy business, the most well known things are wind energy, solar
energy, and hydroelectricity. And the attractive things about these
options is that the energy source is free. The sun is free and wind
is free and there are also no carbon dioxide emissions, but the
major disadvantages of these solar and wind are that they are
intermittent. Wind energy is only there when the wind blows and you
can't depend on it for electricity. You need a backup generator to
go with the wind power plant so that when the wind isn't blowing
the generator is going and the wind is blowing hard, the generator
generates less, but you really need two power plants if you are
going to use wind. Similarly for solar, what are you going to do in
the night time or on a cloudy day, you need a backup and batteries
are good for your laptop or your cell phone but the batteries
aren't available on a utility scale. So for solar and wind you need
backup power, which means two power plants and that makes it more
expensive.
Biomass electricity is pretty simple; you grow biomass-- wood or
grass-- and you dry it, and you burn it in a power plant instead of
coal or oil. And since biomass can be stored, it can be burned
continuously to give you reliable 24/7 electricity and that's the
major advantage compared to solar and wind. It's not intermittent.
It can be used as base electricity and it can be sent whenever and
wherever you want. Biomass electricity is renewable because you can
grow the crop every year and it's also carbon neutral. When you
burn biomass it puts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but biomass
breathes carbon dioxide just like people breathe oxygen, and that
carbon dioxide is sucked back out of the atmosphere, and overall
biomass electricity is carbon neutral. The key with biomass
electricity or biofuels or biomaterials is where do you get the
biomass for the product. You need a reliable and affordable source
of the biomass and that's what VIASPACE offers. Our Giant King
Grass is the highest yielding crop in the world and it's grown
specifically for energy. It can be grown on marginal land where it
doesn't compete with crops. Because its high yield, it needs
minimal land, and it is the lowest cost biomass. Giant King Grass is a perennial crop and it actually
improves the soil quality where it's grown. However, it is a
tropical crop and doesn't survive a freezing weather and that gets
into your question of where we are working on this. Giant
King Grass is suitable for
California, for Arizona, and the Southern US. We're also
growing in Hawaii, in the US
Virgin Islands on Saint Croix, but then you start looking south and
we have projects in Nicaragua,
Jamaica, and Guyana in South
America. You look at other tropical regions in Africa, we are growing in South Africa and looking at other
opportunities in tropical Africa,
and we're also growing in Myanmar
in Southeast Asia and in
China and there are opportunities
in Thailand, Philippines etc. So our business focus is in
these warmer areas.
I can give you an example (of how we do business). We are
developing a 12 megawatt Giant King Grass power plant in
Nicaragua and the way we work is
this. We don't know how to do business in Nicaragua but we find a local partner, and our
partner in Nicaragua is a company
called Agricorp, which is one of the largest companies in the
country. They are an agro business company and they grow rice
amongst other things. So they have a 6,000 acre rice plantation in
Nicaragua already. They are
experienced in doing this. They have the land, they have the
irrigation. They have 4,000 extra acres that are not suitable for
rice and we have decided to grow Giant King Grass on that land and
to build a 12 megawatt biomass power plant. That's an example of
how we do business. In Nicaragua
and in many of these other countries, especially island nations,
the basic electricity generation comes from oil. They burn oil and
that turns a generator and makes electricity. Oil is
extraordinarily expensive and biomass electricity with Giant King
Grass is about 30% cheaper than oil and it's clean and carbon
neutral, and it's renewable. There are lots of advantages for
Nicaragua where they have a lot of
agriculture but also have a lot of farmers out of work. So growing
Giant King Grass provides jobs for their farmers. The power plant
is going to provide good jobs as well. We are going to be
introducing sustainable agriculture to Nicaragua and the money stays in Nicaragua rather than going overseas to pay
for oil. So it's a win in many of these countries and that's how we
do business. We focus in regions where there is a need for
electricity and current electricity is expensive. In developing
countries, it is much easier to introduce a new technology-actually
biomass electricity is actually a very old technology because
people were burning wood hundreds of years ago- but bringing this
in as a commercial scale to produce electricity is now very
attractive in these countries that are just emerging from the third
world into the second world status.
The 12 MW Giant King Grass power plant in Nicaragua will be our flagship. We've built up
a large pipeline of potential projects that are all watching the
Nicaragua project, and what we
expect will happen is that Nicaragua will be our showroom. We expect that
we will be doing probably three or four projects per year. At this
stage, the environment is pretty good and probably the equity
financing is the most challenging part of it, but the countries are
very excited about biomass energy that they can grow themselves.
The international development banks find this a very attractive
opportunity for development in these countries and are willing to
do the debt financing and just finding the equity financiers that
are willing to do countries like Guyana and Nicaragua is probably the challenge at the
moment.
We understand the positives and the negatives of biomass energy
and we feel that we know the niche very well, and we can deliver a
solution to a customer. We have the full financial models and all
of the technical information needed so that if a potential partner
in Indonesia or some other company
or country comes to us, we can quickly evaluate that opportunity
and we can use all of the expertise we developed so far to put
together a plan to move forward very quickly."
About VIASPACE Inc.
VIASPACE grows renewable Giant
KingTM Grass as a low-carbon fuel for clean electricity
generation; for environmentally friendly energy pellets; and as a
feedstock for bio-methane production and for green cellulosic
biofuels, biochemicals and biomaterials. Giant King Grass is a proprietary, high yield,
dedicated biomass energy crop. Giant King
Grass when it is cut frequently at 4 to 9 feet tall is also
excellent animal feed. The USDA granted approval for planting Giant
King Grass throughout the US and cooperates in exporting by
performing the required inspections and issuing the phytosanitary
certificate needed for import into foreign countries. Giant
King Grass is being grown in
California, Arizona, Hawaii, St. Croix Virgin Islands, Nicaragua, South
Africa, China, Myanmar, Pakistan, Guyana and Jamaica. For more
information, please go to www.VIASPACE.com or contact Dr.
Jan Vandersande, Director of
Communications, at 800-517-8050 or IR@VIASPACE.com.
Safe Harbor Statement
Information in
this news release includes forward-looking statements. These
forward-looking statements relate to future events or future
performance and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and
other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of
activity, performance or achievements to be materially different
from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking
statements. Such factors include, without limitation, risks
outlined in our periodic filings with the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission, including Annual Report on Form 10-K for the
year ended December 31, 2013, and
other factors over which VIASPACE has little or no control.
SOURCE VIASPACE Inc.