Aries Clean Energy hires new vice president of engineering

Aries Clean Energy, Nashville, has hired Ben Gardner as vice president of engineering. Gardner 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.

“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 says. “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, Alabama; Range Fuels, Denver; and RTI International, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

As an independent resource, he has worked on the technical and management teams at such industry pioneers as Agilyx Corp., Tigard, Oregon;  Sundrop Fuels, Longmont, Colorado; and Brightleaf Power, Montrose, Colorado. 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 says. “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 U.S. as well as off shore.”