Aries Clean Energy is pleased to announce that Ben Gardner has joined its team as vice president of engineering and will direct all efforts in design, construction, and operations, as well as the company’s ongoing research and development programs. Aries is a privately held company focusing on renewable, distributed energy generation using alternative feedstocks.

Photo: Ben Gardner

“Ben’s experience in taking companies from early stages of development all the way through to commercialization will be invaluable to executive management and to our engineering teams,” Aries CEO Greg Bafalis said. “His previous work with fluidized bed gasification is especially important to us, and Ben brings a waste conversion and green energy knowledge base that is rare to find even in a global marketplace.”

Gardner, recently engaged as a consultant with several energy companies, provides Aries with almost 20 years of progressive engineering, project management, project controls, commissioning/startup and plant manager experience. His career path in the power and chemical industries include Southern Company Services (Birmingham, AL), Range Fuels (Denver, CO), and RTI International (Research Triangle Park, NC).

As an independent resource, he has worked on the technical and management teams at such industry pioneers as Agilyx Corporation, Sundrop Fuels, and Brightleaf Power. Aries Clean Energy, formerly branded as PHG Energy, in 2014 acquired the intellectual property and assets of MaxWest Environmental Technologies, a fluidized bed gasification company where Gardner had previously contributed as a technical consultant in process engineering.

“The great news here is that Aries has already proven its patented technology and installed the world’s largest downdraft gasification plant for a city here in Tennessee,” Gardner said. “That commercialization step is critically important for the company to move to the next level. What I see now in the project development pipeline is very exciting, and we are moving into a phase of rapid growth through new deployments across the United States as well as offshore.”