Eleven years after helping to start up Biox Corp., Kevin Norton has moved into the top job, moving up from his chief operating officer position to become CEO on Sept. 1. The ex-navy engineer will now be responsible for making Canada’s largest biodiesel producer even bigger. The first step will be to build a new plant in the United States to complement its large production facility in Hamilton.
Biox has piggybacked on the shift to renewable fuels, taking advantage of production subsidies and quotas established by governments in Canada and the United States. Just this summer, Ottawa introduced a rule that requires 2 per cent of all diesel sold in Canada to be made up of biofuel.
The company’s competitive advantage is its technology – originally developed at the University of Toronto – that allows almost any type of fat, from vegetable oil to kitchen grease, to be converted to biodiesel.
Is it hard to adjust to the CEO job after a decade as second in command?
I may have been in the background, but [I was] very much involved in all the day-to-day decision making. What is new for me is doing the government relations work, and being the face associated with investor relations. But I’ve got a lot of knowledge of where the industry is and where it is going. I’ve been part of the that growth.
What does a founder bring to the CEO job that an outsider can’t?
There is not a job within the company that I haven’t had my fingers in or wasn’t actually directly involved in. I have the knowledge of how the industry has evolved over time. I understand what has happened with the early developments out of the University of Toronto through the pilot plant stages. I have great rapport with the operators and the mechanical components of the company.
Did your navy background affect the way you managed employees when you were chief operating officer?
I was always known for being right in the thick of things with the troops - getting my hands dirty, staying late, actually doing what their jobs entailed. In our company, [employees] know that I’ve been to the plant and climbed inside the distillation column, cleaned out the centrifuges, and shovelled the yellow grease out of the parking lot.
Being CEO is an extension of that. It is about establishing a direction, a vision, a focus, and communicating. That was extremely important in the navy. I don’t think it is any different in a public or corporate organization. [Employees] need to know what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what has changed.
Why is your technology unique?
Traditional feedstocks such as soybean oil and canola oil are very expensive, as are olive oil and cotton oil. But rendered products, tallows, recycled restaurant oils, and yellow greases [are priced] at about a 30-per-cent discount. Our ability to use any permutation and combination of raw material provides us with a competitive advantage over traditional producers that are limited to those [more expensive oils]. We can even accommodate new raw materials that potentially could become available, such as algae oils.
What would have to happen to see biodiesel become more common?
If algae turns out to be a real significant contributor to the overall fats-and-oils matrix, it could be a real game changer. There are interesting research programs that are growing algae in very controlled environment, where you can actually produce protein and a fat. Whether or not those fats could be used for fuel production is still being investigated.
Do you foresee a day when traditional fossil fuels will be eliminated.
In my lifetime I don’t believe that I am going to see the end of petroleum or fossil fuels.
Your technology originally came out of the University of Toronto. What should be done to make technology transfer to industry work better?
