Media Center
Actor’s company puts spotlight on waste
By: Jim Johnson
May 24, 2010
Actor ... singer ... dancer ... and hog waste entrepreneur.
John O’Hurley has spent two decades in the public spotlight rising to fame starring as the eccentric J. Peterman on “Seinfeld” and later trading off that success to host game shows and even winning the dance competition on first season of “Dancing with the Stars.” N
ow, O’Hurley wants to be known for waste — all sorts of waste — hog waste, dairy waste, municipal solid waste.
O’Hurley is the very public face of Energy-Inc., a company he he co-founded with CEO Kim Kirkendall that aims to use gasification to create energy from different waste streams.
“There’s probably a half dozen television critics that would consider this a natural transition in my career, especially to hog manure,” O’Hurley said.
Energy-Inc.’s first contract is with High Ridge Farms in North Carolina to install a gasification system that will transform hog waste, through extremely high temperatures, into a synthetic gas. Called pyrolysis, the approach can be used on a variety of waste streams, including municipal solid waste, agricultural waste, tires and medical waste, O’Hurley said.
The idea of gasification has been around for a century, O’Hurley said, but his company has put together a proprietary approach that makes financial sense — so much so that the company is willing to install systems with no money upfront from waste generators.
The return on investment is two to five years, O’Hurley said.
“It’s a pretty extraordinary unit in terms of that,” he said. “Most capital expenditures don’t have anywhere near that kind of return.”
The system has nominal emissions and does not involve incineration. Companies that install Energy-Inc. systems buy electricity from the company at a discounted rate.
“As a venture capitalist, which is really my second life outside of entertainment — it’s the business part of show business, let’s put it that way — I look for solution-driven investments. Everything I do has to have a solution and a story to it,” O’Hurley said.
“This, I believe, is one of the great solutions,” he said.
Energy-Inc., based in Las Vegas, plans to roll out a half dozen projects this year, starting with the High Ridge Farms work. Others include work at dairy farms, used tires, and even a landfill, he said.
O’Hurley first became a venture capitalist shortly after “Seinfeld” in a case of life imitating art.
“It began, ironically, with the demise of the J. Peterman Co. in 1999 after ‘Seinfeld’ ended,” he said. “I bought the J. Peterman Co. with the real J. Peterman, so he and I own it together. It’s kind of a great act of identity theft.”
O’Hurley said he doesn’t invest just to make money.
“I take a project because it has a great story,” he said. “It’s kind of like J. Peterman — everything has a great story in it. That’s what I do. It’s got to be something that makes me go ‘wow.’ Anytime I say this to anybody, it just produces the same reaction: ‘Wow.’
“Business, if you look for certain elements of it, and entertainment are all very theatrical in that respect,” O’Hurley said. “You’re looking for that big opening night. This is our opening night,” he said, referring to the formation of Energy-Inc.
“I get just as excited about this as I do on an opening night,” he said.
“We’ll never run out of waste, and the only way to use it efficiently is to not dump it in the earth [and] to use it as electricity or power,” he said. “I’m so enamored with the idea of this being one of the great solutions to an overall problem in this country that I forget the specifics are not particularly attractive dinner conversation.”
Copyright 2010 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Source: http://www.wasterecyclingnews.com/arcshow.html?id=10052400304
