Back before there was an advanced bioeconomy, or even a United States, there was the Big Piney Woods and six flags have flown over it. Through it ran a path cut not by men, but by bison. From the southern plains to the banks of the Red River, the buffalo moved with the seasons—seeking salt, water, new grass. And behind them came the Caddo people, Spanish mustangs — their riders in sun-battered cuirasses, calling themselves adelantados, chasing gold and gospel. French trappers with names like La Salle and Bienville chasing pelts. Highland Scots with musket scars and Carolina debts. Runaway slaves carving freeholds in the river cane. Timber barons, sawyers, rail-spikers, riverboat captains, G-men and land-grant dreamers. And still they come—now, engineers with laptops and LIDAR, entrepreneurs with methanol maps and forest-carbon models.
This isn’t just a trail. It’s a current—a river of ambition running through the Piney Woods. A thousand feet, a thousand reasons, always chasing something: opportunity, carved one swing at a time from the longleaf and cypress.
If you mosey through this fine country, down creeks that smell of sassafrass, near the ancient waters of the Red River when it reaches Central Louisiana, you’d find Beaver Lake, where the here the old pursuit of forest riches now takes a new form: clean fuel, steady work, and a future made from what the woods have always offered.
Where once stood a pulp and paper mill—closed since 2009, its lights out and jobs gone—now comes a new kind of promise. SunGas Renewables plans to process 2.5 million tons of forest thinnings, slash, and sawmill residues annually—converting them into 500,000 tonnes of green methanol. That’s not just a fuel stream—it’s a revenue stream, a job creator, and a signal to forestry towns across the U.S. and Canada: we’re back in business
The feedstock numbers match the old paper mill’s inputs almost exactly, but the end product is something new entirely—advanced biofuels with low carbon intensity, serving sectors like marine shipping, aviation, and green chemistry. With $50+ million already committed to front-end engineering and a projected $2.5 billion construction budget, this project could create over 1,000 jobs during peak construction and more than 100 permanent roles.
From Crockett to Carbon
If that sounds bold, well—it should. This part of America was built on bold. Davy Crockett came this way, rifle in hand and wildcat on his head, riding the piney edge between wild and civilized. Later came Kit Carson, Jedidiah Smith, Alexander Mackenzie. They weren’t always right, but they sure weren’t afraid.
Back then, we unlocked the forest with axes and grit. Today, SunGas unlocks it with reactors and resilience. Their tech—simple in principle, elegant in practice—takes forestry waste and cooks it down into something you can load on a ship, run through a jet, or use to heat a home. It’s like a still, if the moonshine ran on carbon math.
This kind of project doesn’t just drop from the sky. It grows from a few key ingredients. It’s a simple frame for spotting systems built to last. That’s GTESI — read more about it here. It tracks four things every strong system needs: memory, structure, adaptability, and a way to let off steam.
Know How. Some things just stick with folks—stories, know-how, ways of doing things that get passed down like a good axe head or an old trail map. When Captain Henry Shreve solved the mystery of the Great Raft in the 1830s—clearing a logjam that had choked the Red River for centuries—he didn’t just move water. He passed on a lesson: that knowledge, once earned, can open up a whole new map for the next generation. That’s IPR, the long memory of innovation.
The stuff that holds. Not just bridges and rail lines, but trust, custom, handshake deals, family-owned mills and weather-worn barns that still do their job. Along the Natchitoches Trace, it wasn’t just wagons rolling—it was whole systems of trade, rest stops, ferry landings, kin networks and signposts carved in cypress. The Spanish built missions, the French built posts, and the forest held it all. That’s SCD—strong bones in a living land.
Make new friends, but keep the old. Sometimes change runs head-on into habit—and you can tell a lot about a place by how it handles the heat. When Red River cattlemen like Tom Dunson clashed with railroads and new markets, it wasn’t just a Western movie—it was the old way learning how to ride the new trail. That friction didn’t break the land. It sharpened it. That’s TRFI—how you sweat through change and still stand tall.
Reinvent, rethink, reinvigorate. Every good system needs a way to let off steam, shed the waste, keep what matters and move on. That’s the trick to staying alive. The bison paths, the runoff gullies, the timber chutes—they all had their way of moving mess out of the middle. It’s how forests breathe. It’s how mountain men kept going. Now, it’s how a place like Beaver Lake turns leftover wood into clean-burning methanol. That’s EED—making good use of what the world would otherwise waste.
From Beaver Lake to the world
SunGas isn’t stopping at Beaver Lake. They’re scouting sites across Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Texas. The forest is big. The need is bigger. And the opportunity is wide open. This tech doesn’t need a megacity. It needs a mill town. A woodlot. A county with a little grit, a little smarts, and a whole lot of trees.
As SunGas CEO Robert Rigdon put it, “Our goal is to build several new biofuel production facilities over the next decade, which will likely be concentrated throughout the South and Southeast of the United States.” The company’s technology, backed by strategic partner C2X, can convert sustainable forestry by-products into valuable fuels—and that opens the door for more than a dozen communities already working to prepare the way.
Here are some we see real opportunity with, 15 BDO Zones and high-potential sites each uniquely suited to host the next generation of renewable fuels:
- Bon Wier, TX – A legacy timber community with 2.2 million tons of forest waste and mill residues, and strong support from local industry. It’s all set for fuel-grade ambition.
- Greenbrier Valley, WV – With more trees than people and growth-to-removal ratios up to 14:1, this is stewardship country. The forest here keeps giving.
- Quesnel, BC – One of Canada’s premier wood basins, Quesnel combines fiber access with mill infrastructure and a legacy of innovation.
- Butte County, CA – Wildfire-prone and biomass-rich, Butte’s urgent need for forest cleanup aligns perfectly with SunGas’s fuel-forward mission.
- Coconino, AZ – Remote, dry, and densely forested, it’s a prime example of where slash becomes solution.
- Conecuh County, AL – Quietly ready, with rail, road, and fiber to spare. A sleeper pick for methanol.
- San Juan County, UT – Rich in low-grade pinyon-juniper biomass, the area is seeking economic rebirth through clean industry.
- Tazewell, VA – Appalachian transition in motion, with underutilized fiber and a readiness to pivot from coal to clean.
- Trois-Rivières, QC – A Quebecois hub where industry meets forest, with carbon reduction top of mind and public buy-in already deep.
- Wyoming County, PA – Strategically located and community-driven, it’s a region with a strong history of energy and a will to evolve.
- Kemper County, MS – “Everybody knows everybody,” says local developer Steven. That means fast calls, fast permits, and a family mindset that gets projects built.
- Lewis County, WA – West Coast forest culture with rail and port access. Timber is tradition here — and the next chapter is green.
- Natchez, MS – A port town steeped in wood products and logistics, Natchez blends heritage with global reach.
- Cameron County, PA – “We’ve got more dirt roads than paved,” says Joshua, a local entrepreneur. “That means quality of life, recreation, and real forest work side by side.”
- Pointe Coupée Parish, LA – rated “A” for woody biomass, with a capacity for 1,300,000 bone dry tons per year, long-term private forest ownership and strong endorsement from local logging companies.
- Richland Parish, LA – rated “A” for woody biomass, including pulpwood, forest residues, and sawmill residuals, including 341 acres of development-ready land adjacent to the Livonia Union Pacific Rail Yard
- Clarksville, AR – rated ‘AA’, or very low risk, based on steady and reliable generation of large volumes of biomass
The Model Is Here. The Map Is Growing.
And that’s why we’re seeing momentum from places like Kemper County, Mississippi, where folks say you can get a project moving with one phone call and a fish fry. Or Cameron County, Pennsylvania, where the loggers and trail-builders overlap, and a town can still come together around work that means something. This isn’t just clean fuel. It’s clean narrative. It’s what happens when you respect the forest, the people, and the long memory of a place.
A new kind of motion
They used to say the problem with the Big Piney wasn’t the trees—it was the motion. First, just getting through it at all: Spanish mustangs tangled in underbrush, bison forging muddy gaps, French trappers bushwhacking through sassafras and gum. Then came the story of getting the good stuff out—first on Red River rafts, then over dirt roads laid plank by plank by mule teams and pine-knuckled hands.
But now comes a better way. We don’t burn the forest down—we take just enough. Thinnings, tops, slash, sawdust. We lift it gently from the land, not as a torch but as a promise. Gasify it. Clean it. Upgrade it on site. No more shipping logs and hope and watching value drain away downstream. We’re not piping out problems—we’re exporting solutions. The old moral dilemma of Red River—of burning through what you’ve inherited just to hold on to power—meets its match not in fire, but in flow. Not in liquids, but in gas streams.
The Red River once jammed with logs. Now, maybe, it flows with stories again.
Note: the image of the SunGas Beaver Lake facility is based on the Digest’s imagination, not the actual project which is still going through design.
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