Atlas Carbon has risen from the ashes.
A default ruling on a $15 million loan from the Wyoming State Loan and Investment Board has been tossed out for the Gillette, Wyoming-based company.
A spokesman for one of the five state officials on the investment board said that Atlas Carbon recently made a payment of $436,656.70 to catch up on its overdue payments from last year.
“Atlas recently made a payment and, as a result, we consider them in good standing,” said Jeff Robertson, a spokesman for State Treasurer Curt Meier and one of the five state officials on the investment board.
Atlas Carbon, which has worked for about a decade to build a commercial enterprise in Gillette turning coal into activated carbon for filters needed to strip contaminants from water and air, had its financial lifeline cut short by the investment board at a Feb. 1 meeting.
The company had tried to line up financing to expand in Wyoming’s coal heartland with state and private equity money and had pinned its hopes on such a strategy by renegotiating the terms of an outstanding $15 million SLIB loan.
Despite an appeal from Atlas Carbon CEO Reza Hashampour to give his company a respite, the board ruled that Atlas Carbon had failed to fulfill its obligation to fully repay the $15 million in debt.
The state rejected Hashampour’s argument, placing Atlas Carbon in default on the terms of the loan.
First Loan Recipient
Atlas Carbon has been held up as an example of developing other valuable products using Powder River Basin coal other than burning it to generate electricity.
Atlas was the first recipient of a loan from SLIB’s Economic Development Large Project Program, which began in 2014.
As a research and development company, making the transition to commercialization has been.
In July 2019, Virginia Beach, Virginia-based management firm Polaris Asset Corp. was hired to bring Atlas Carbon to its next stage of growth.
Then two years ago, Polaris Chairman and CEO Hashampour stepped into the position as CEO of Atlas Carbon when the founder and principal backer of Atlas Carbon — former CEO Frank Levy — stepped aside to spend more time with his family.
Levy remains chairman of Atlas, but stepped back from his day-to-day duties.
Since then, Hashampour has said that he had advanced the company along on many fronts. It has more than 40 clients to sell its products and has had conversations with international prospects from Poland to Colombia.
“We simply need time,” he told the SLIB in February. “With that time Atlas can continue its existing operation and begin expanding our facilities on the existing infrastructure and expand its product and customer base.”
Rebuilding
The ruling default effectively gave the state the power to send auditors to Gillette to review the books of the Powder River Basin operation to “protect the state’s interests” and seize assets, with Meier vowing to go himself to check things out.
In an interview last month, Meier said that the economic exercise of visiting Gillette was needed to ensure the state recovered any money if things grew worse, or if the company stopped functioning as an ongoing concern.
Atlas Carbon made two quarters worth of payments on the loan from 2018, but had missed most recently a quarter of payments plus part of another quarter, Meier said.
“It’s a substantial amount of money that they owe,” said Meier at the time.
The company had tried to line up financing to expand in Wyoming’s coal heartland with state and private equity money and had pinned its hopes on such a strategy by renegotiating the terms of the outstanding $14.9 million loan with SLIB, Meier said.
Hashampour couldn’t be reached for comment on the removal of the default status on the $15 million loan.
The company had plans on the drawing board to add a second manufacturing facility at a cost of $23 million on its Gillette land that could churn out 23 million pounds of activated carbon.
However, Hashampour told Cowboy State Daily that the expansion was dependent on another cash infusion from the state and private equity backers.
One such investor in the company, Harold Callais II, managing partner and chief investment officer of Callais Capital Management LLC in Thibodaux, Louisiana, told the SLIB members in February that the financial performance at Atlas Carbon has improved, but that some of the overhang in uncertainty with the $15 million loan needs to be cleared up.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
