At the age of 76, Rudi Roeslein isn’t ready to hang up his hat.&nbsp;Founder of Roeslein &amp; Associates and Roeslein Alternative Energy, Roeslein puts the people at his company before almost anything, even the endeavors that have kept his nose to the grindstone for the past 35-plus years. He views his employees as invaluable and the lifeblood of his business’ successes, and that sentiment hasn’t changed as the payroll jumped from just over 100 people in 2001 to nearly 1,200 people today, with operations in the U.S., China, Brazil, the United Kingdom and Poland. “I’ve run it more like a family—more so than what most people recommend,” he says. “In my early days, I knew almost everyone. But when you have 1,200 people, it gets harder.”&nbsp;Roeslein’s business dealings and continued aspirations extend far beyond any financial motive—he is genuinely, even gravely, concerned about the condition the Earth will be left in for future generations. As such, Roeslein plans to do as much as he can for as long as he can, sometimes feeling “like it’s a drop in the ocean,” but always reverting back to the mission. “With the little of difference that I’m making, sometimes I’m asking myself, ‘Why the heck are you wasting your time? You’ve spent so much time away from your family most of your life, why don’t you just focus on your wife, kids and grandkids, and your farm?’ But I can’t. I can’t sit on the sidelines when I have these ideas that I think will make a difference.”&nbsp;With perhaps his biggest claim-to-fame being in modular construction and game-changing innovation in aluminum can manufacturing, Roeslein, who exudes humility, has also become a big player in the renewable natural gas and prairie conservation space. He describes his journey as beginning with “good fortune,” being able to immigrate to the U.S. from Austria when he was eight years old. &nbsp;The Makings of an Innovator&nbsp;&nbsp; “I grew up in Salzburg, Austria, until I was eight. We moved from displacement camp to displacement camp—my parents were Yugoslav Germans, and after World War II, things in Yugoslavia got really ugly ... it’s a tragic story.”The immigration path landed Roeslein and his family in south St. Louis, Missouri. “Everybody worked,” he says. “I started working at age 13. My grandfather worked. My grandmother worked as a cleaning lady downtown, and my mom worked as a seamstress—and we truly lived. You know what most immigrants do? They will come here and they’ll work really hard, and they believe that the opportunities they have been given are special. I’ve always felt that, and you know, I make no excuses.”&nbsp;Roeslein attended Saint Louis University with his sights set on becoming a professional athlete. “I kind of went there because of soccer—I wanted to be a professional player and was majoring in engineering as a backup plan. Along the way, I figured out that I wasn’t really that good at soccer, and they weren’t paying that much money—I didn’t need differential equations to figure out I couldn’t raise a family on that.” &nbsp;Contrary to Roeslein’s opinions of his soccer skills, his 1967 NCAA Division 1 championship soccer team was inducted into the St Louis Soccer Hall of Fame.Post graduation, with an engineering degree underarm, Roeslein went to work for &nbsp;companies including Container Corporation of America and GISMO, where he developed many modular concepts. In 1990, Roeslein spun off and founded Roeslein &amp; Associates, where he and his employees designed, built and shipped entire modular, preassembled beverage can manufacturing systems around the U.S. and worldwide. “When most people pick up a beverage can, they don’t really appreciate that it’s actually rocket science,” he says. “We make cans, now after 35, 40 years of innovation, at 3,000 a minute as opposed to 300 a minute when I started. That’s 50 cans a second coming off our lines. We were able to do this with American technology, when everybody was leaving and lamenting how we couldn’t compete. I said, ‘Sure we can. &nbsp;We just have to give our people the right motivation and the right tools.’ Now, we build these modular systems in our factories and have shipped them to over 60 countries, with over 700 systems [shipped] around the world for the past 35 years. We became the premier dominant player in the aluminum can industry.”Roeslein &amp; Associates thrived for a solid decade, but that’s not say there weren’t challenges encountered along the way. “With the cyclical nature of the can industry, we’d almost lost everything twice in 2000, 2001,” Roeslein says. “I didn’t have any work for almost two years, but I carried all of my employees, by coming in and smiling every day, and challenging them to reconfigure our systems and make them more economical, more efficient and smarter. I felt a sense of responsibility to all those people. I really felt that we would come out of that, so I risked everything ... and we did. The past two years have been pretty rough again in the can industry because these companies all build out and then they kind of saturate the market and have to wait for a few more years.”As for extending into new markets, prior to entering the renewable natural gas (RNG) space, some opportunities to build ethanol plants presented themselves.Pursuing New Endeavors&nbsp; In 2010, Roeslein &amp; Associates entered the oil and gas industry and completed two ethanol projects using its concepts of unitizing and preassembly. “We built one in Illinois and one in Indiana, and that’s what led us to the renewable space,” Roeslein says. “I was asked to get involved in Abengoa’s plant in Hugoton, Kansas, but I looked at the complexity and became really concerned that there was too much of a jump from laboratory to a small demo unit to a commercial system ... &nbsp;of course, history proved me right, and they did go bankrupt.”Roeslein’s career led to frequent and lengthy travel around the world, with a significant amount of time spent in Europe and Asia, particularly China. “That’s kind of where I started seeing what was going on environmentally, and it scared me, having come from the pristine Alps of Austria to the rural areas of the United States—I’m always looking for wild places,” Roeslein says. “I just started questioning, how long is it going to stay wild when we have this population pressure? I’ve seen [the pressure] that it’s putting on our landscapes for wildlife and wild places, and water. &nbsp;We have a finite set of temperatures and parameters that we can live in, and as we continue to change those, we’re putting our planet under a lot of distress. The people who don’t believe that, I think, are just not facing up to the fact that we are contributing to it, and we need to do a better job of figuring it out. How do we balance what we need with what the planet wants to give us, so we can all survive?”&nbsp;Fast-forward to age 65, and Roeslein was nearly eight years into an employee stock ownership plan when he decided, rather than retire, he would start pursuing opportunities in anaerobic digestion and RNG. These efforts were influenced by what he observed during his travels in Germany, as well as the company’s previous work in the drop-in liquid fuels space. With Roeslein and Associate’s recent development of distributed control power systems for their modular utilized systems, Roeslein saw the potential application in the energy sector, and with intentions to integrate his passion for wildlife and prairie restoration, Roeslein Alternative Energy was born. “I approached Smithfield foods in 2011, and it took a couple of years to convince them,” Roeslein says. “They asked how much money I wanted, and I said, ‘I don’t want your money—I just want your crap.’ I spent $57 million proving on a number of the farms that what we wanted to do would actually work, as well as three years getting a pathway with the [U.S.] EPA—and the California market was long and painful.”With Smithfield as RAE’s partner, the joint venture forged ahead to build 200 lagoons across the country. “Almost 90 of them are in Missouri, and we’re in Utah, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, North Carolina and Iowa,” he says. “We’re still looking at other states that have these [manure] challenges.” &nbsp;Following the partnership with Smithfield, global private equity firm TPG invested in RAE, which ultimately led to RAE merging back with its parent company. “After a yearlong negotiation, they purchased a third of the company, and through that process, it gave me a real valuation on what RAE should be worth,” he says. “We had derisked all of this, we would own it, we would operate it, and we would get a revenue flow from the gas. It wasn’t going to be purely transactional, and we would develop our own technologies. We do everything—I don’t have to depend on any contractors, aside from some basic subcontract work such as civil works, and the lagoon covers.” &nbsp;Despite the successes of the company’s anaerobic digestion and RNG endeavors, Roeslein admits to plenty of challenges. “We’ve had some terrible times,” he says. “We’ve had viruses with the pigs where I had no animals to produce manure, and in 2018, a terrible storm wrecked most of the barns where I had my assets. I was pretty despondent that day, thinking about another year of no income and people thinking I’m crazy. But still—I felt it was the right thing to do.”&nbsp;Knowing the RNG portion of the business would have peaks and valleys, Roeslein designed RAE’s foundation similar to what he describes as a three-leg stool: renewable energy via RNG, ecological efforts through restoration of natural prairie grasses, and restoration of wildlife habitats from biomass crops similar to native ecosystems. “Our concept is this three-dimensional Venn diagram ... we want to produce energy, but we also want to look at the ecological services that we can provide, including cleaning water and addressing soil loss, and providing habitats for our critical wildlife and our pollinators, even our butterflies.”RAE-led Horizon II will do just that, Roeslein says, and help promote his vision all in one effort. A partnership of over a dozen public and private entities and supported by a grant from the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities, the project is focused on demonstrating how farmers get environmental credit compensation and renewable energy revenue by planting prairie grasses and cover crops. “We’ve already established over 5,000 acres of prairie grasses and over 1,000 acres of cover crops that we will be using as a source of energy,” Roeslein says. “I think [Horizon II] is the real solution. My dream is to restore 30 million acres of native grasslands around our streams and rivers, and improve the quality of our water while preventing soil erosion.”&nbsp;Refining RAE’s Offerings&nbsp; With continued motivation to innovate, in 2024, RAE debuted its revolutionary micro biogas upgrading system, which is designed to help producers of all sizes participate in the RNG market. Its development stemmed from Roeslein realizing how complicated and expensive interconnection could be for projects—especially smaller ones—thus, inhibiting some from participating. &nbsp;“I knew right away that the Missouri location was probably going to be one-of-a-kind,” Roeslein explains. “There are 2 million pigs. There are nine finishing farms, with the biggest one having 170,000 pigs and 17 lagoons, and the smallest one having around 50,000 pigs. So, the economics of scale for those are really, really good—a very significant amount of potential revenue can be created from these farms.”&nbsp;But after studying markets in Iowa, North Carolina, Kansas and most other states, RAE concluded that there weren’t any similar-sized, single operations that would achieve the same economy of scale. “I kept telling my team that there’s a finite number of these large plants, so we have to be able to help the small farmer, and at a scale where it becomes economical,” Roeslein says. “Just like a car, if we can make 1,000 of them, the cost gets drastically reduced. So my goal was to be able to address the small farms that maybe only have 1,000 pigs or maybe a couple hundred dairy cows? Is there a way to have a single point of interconnection?“Our gas purification systems are just part of the cost [of a project],” Roeslein explains. “There is an interconnect that we call Area 1,000. We have the piping to get from the various lagoons to their gas purification systems, and then piping from there to a single interconnect. We’re moving only the refined gas and not CO2, which reduces the pipe and volume requirements by almost 40%.”Roeslein says all participants share in the interconnection cost. The first one has been installed in North Carolina, and RAE has commitments for over 100 more of them. “I’m hoping that eventually, we have thousands of these little systems like people have generators at their homes,” he says. “What if we had thousands of little distributive energy systems all over the country, and our energy systems could serve the local community and the bigger cities? You know they’re going to need gigawatts, but the small farms and the small rural communities can work on, you know, 5 to 10 megawatts. We can produce that if we use our Horizon 2 [model] where we also use other substrates besides just the manure. We believe that we can multiply the amount of gas produced by the animals by three or four by adding cover crops and prairie grasses, and combining them in a way that actually makes those projects financially viable.”Paving a Way Forward&nbsp; As for his outlook on the RNG industry, Roeslein sees many opportunities beyond transportation fuels. “There’s LNG that we can ship, and I think there are other countries like Japan that would like to blend our low-CI score RNG with natural gas and get to net zero,” he says. “I think that’s a big step away from some of the other fossil fuels that have much bigger carbon footprint. RNG is a great movement going forward, because we have to deal with our waste. Why let all this stuff go into our atmosphere when we can use it, and it’s a big improvement over coal and most other fossil fuels?”Roeslein doesn’t like to refer to himself as an environmentalist because of the often-negative connotation. “But I’m concerned about our environment and having a healthy place for our grandkids and future generations,” he says. “Every day when I wake up I say, ‘Okay, what more can I do today?’”&nbsp;&nbsp;His message to the RNG space is that it still has a long way to go to reach its potential. “This industry is going to keep learning,” he adds. “It’s going to keep innovating, and somewhere along the way, we’re going to come up with a way to produce energy that doesn’t have unintended consequences. We’re on our way to doing that, but we have to keep working at it, and somehow, someway, educate people about the benefits of renewable natural gas and how it can be a bridge to wherever we go in 20 or 30 years. We can’t keep gobbling up landscape and doing things with photovoltaics and these giant windmills. It all has unintended consequences.”&nbsp;For more formation, visit www.roeslein.com and &nbsp;www.prairieprophets.com. Author: Anna Simet&nbsp; Senior Editor, Biomass Magazine&nbsp; asimet@bbiinternational.com&nbsp; &nbsp;

2025-04-07 - Mission Driven (Biomass Magazine)

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Behind its passionate leader, Roeslein Alternative Energy is making remarkable strides in the renewable natural gas space, with focused efforts in prairie restoration and wildlife conservation.

Mission Driven

Mission Driven

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