Craig Scott and the value of what gets left behind

Craig Scott had been associated with Bion for more than thirty years before he became its interim chief executive. By then, he had spent years answering the questions that arrive before anyone buys an environmental technology: what does it do, who needs it, and how does the arithmetic work? In June 2024, those questions became his responsibility in a different way. He joined the board and took the CEO’s job. Explaining the next chapter was now only part of writing it.

The subject was livestock waste, which has seldom suffered from a shortage of supply. Scott’s commercial task was more selective: help recover useful nitrogen from an inconvenient waste stream, turn it into fertilizer, and find a way to finance the machinery between the two. It is a business proposition with both chemistry and paperwork attached. The paperwork has proved quite capable of holding its own.

Scott is based in Billings, Montana. Bion’s corporate office is in Old Bethpage, New York. His working world stretches between agriculture, engineering, renewable fuels, and the capital markets. That combination explains more about his career than the CEO title alone. He has spent much of it translating among people who need the same project to work for different reasons.

An unlikely apprenticeship

His route to Bion began in securities. In a filed professional biography, Scott describes joining his father’s investment advisory business in 1981, then working through retail, management, due-diligence, and investment-banking roles. He first became associated with Bion in 1993 through Denver brokerage William Barton & Co. A full-time position followed in 1996; consulting and work with other public companies came later. He returned to Bion in 2006.

The useful detail is the work itself. Scott handled investor and broker relations, fundraising, marketing materials, and presentations. He describes addressing hundreds of groups. His audiences included investment conferences, branch-office meetings, service clubs, and economic development councils. Years before becoming chief executive, he was already practicing the difficult business of making a technical proposition intelligible to someone deciding whether to support it.

Bion’s communications role also encompassed business intelligence, development, and corporate and project finance. Those responsibilities put the environmental case beside the financial one. A compelling explanation might get a meeting. A project would still need an operator, suitable conditions, money, and customers. Scott’s eventual move into management brought those interconnected demands together.

His December 2021 shareholder update had an unexpected item of corporate housekeeping: Bion had recovered its stolen domain after a court order. Waste treatment was difficult enough without a disappearing web address. Scott had to explain that episode, too, alongside the usual account of technology and business development.

The nitrogen has somewhere else to be

Bion’s proposition begins where another useful process leaves off. Organic waste can be digested to generate biogas. The remaining material contains ammonia-nitrogen. Managing that nitrogen matters to the operation producing it; supplying nitrogen matters to the grower who needs fertilizer. Scott’s job is to help connect those interests through a product that can be transported and sold.

The company’s Ammonia Recovery System is designed to isolate and stabilize ammonia from that material. Its ammonium bicarbonate fertilizer combines recovered nitrogen with carbon dioxide. At a renewable natural gas facility, Bion sees an opportunity to use carbon dioxide captured during gas upgrading. The commercial ambition is to bring treatment, resource recovery, and fertilizer production into the same transaction.

The attraction is easy to state. The execution asks for engineering, product validation, and a dependable supply arrangement. Scott has increasingly focused Bion on adding its recovery system to biogas facilities. That narrows the task compared with developing a large integrated livestock operation from the ground up. An existing facility can offer a starting point; Bion still has to establish that the particular project works.

The product needs permission, too

A fertilizer intended for organic production needs more than a persuasive origin story. In August 2024, Bion announced that its commercial nitrogen fertilizer had received an Organic Materials Review Institute listing for organic use. For Scott, this put an important product qualification alongside the technology work. Organic growers and distributors need to know what they can use before they can decide what they might buy.

Then came the operational question. In December 2024, Bion reported that it had finished testing its recovery system at Fair Oaks, Indiana, and was preparing for final design of commercial systems. Scott tied that milestone to more than twelve years of third-generation technology development. He credited the team and shareholders. The implication was consequential, but specific: development work had advanced; commercial installation remained ahead.

By June 2025, the company had completed a technology-optimization report. Bion said the system could operate continuously at steady state and meet ammonia-reduction targets while evaporating less water than modeled. That mattered because evaporation carries costs. The report described operational improvements with an expected economic benefit; it did not constitute an operating commercial project’s financial results.

“What a great time to overdeliver!”

Craig Scott, June 2025, thanking Bion’s team and engineering partners

Scott’s brief celebration was directed toward chief technology officer Steve Pagano, the rest of Bion’s team, and engineering partner Buflovak. It is a useful glimpse of how the work is divided. Scott can negotiate and explain. The machinery also has to behave. His praise put the technical achievement with the people responsible for it.

A buyer is interested. A plant still has to supply it.

During 2025, the discussion became more concrete on the customer side. Bion announced letters of interest for its organic liquid nitrogen fertilizer. A July announcement brought the stated total to 250,000 gallons across three prospective offtake arrangements. Two previously named participants were Perfect Blend and Yield RMG; the third counterparty requested confidentiality.

That volume was a measure of prospective demand. The arrangements were non-binding until projects to supply them were identified and development began. Product requirements and delivery arrangements would still need to hold together. Scott’s immediate commercial challenge was therefore visible from both ends: interest from buyers, and a need to establish the production that could serve them.

The Perfect Blend letter made the discussion unusually tangible. It expressed interest in approximately 50,000 gallons annually of a liquid product with at least ten percent ammoniacal nitrogen, subject to conditions. It specified pricing per pound of nitrogen and transport responsibilities. There is a pleasing lack of abstraction in that document. Someone has to make the product, store it, and arrange for it to leave.

Scott also set about widening the company’s commercial capabilities. Bion’s August 2025 talent announcement brought in experience spanning digesters, renewable natural gas, engineering, and market development. The practical objective was to improve the company’s ability to select partners and projects. A technology seeking a market needs people who know how that market actually operates.

The cleanup inside the company

Some of Scott’s work involved a different set of accumulated materials: old convertible obligations, deferred compensation, warrants, and options. In September 2025, Bion announced agreements intended to simplify its capital structure. It described exchanging legacy instruments for fewer common shares, reducing the potential dilution attached to those obligations.

“When new leadership came in, our goal from day one was to simplify Bion,” Scott said. He connected that effort directly to prospective partners. A company asking someone to join its next project benefits from a structure that can be understood. The negotiations behind that sentence may be less photogenic than a treatment system, but they belong in the same commercial story.

The Fair Oaks facility also came with construction-related litigation. In July 2026, Bion announced a settlement with general contractor Hamstra Builders, alongside a separate contractor agreement, intended to dismiss outstanding liens and litigation. The arrangement involved a convertible promissory note and provisions tied to future financing. Resolving a dispute became another step toward making a financing discussion possible.

Scott described that dispute as one of the substantial challenges inherited by the new leadership. The resolution did not manufacture fertilizer or establish revenues. It addressed a particular obstacle. That distinction gives his tenure its shape: the CEO’s work has included negotiating the conditions under which the company can try to become the business it has described.

A partnership, with the verbs still in the future

In December 2025, Bion announced a memorandum of understanding with Kimmeridge Energy Management. It outlined shared work on engineering, samples, testing, and commercial planning around a potential renewable natural gas facility. The parties would evaluate and negotiate a possible joint venture. Scott’s search for a strategic partner had produced a defined framework for exploration.

The September 2026 annual report added an update: Kimmeridge had shifted Bion toward a different proposed project, extending the evaluation timetable. Engineering and pilot work remained part of the path forward. Bion reported no revenue for fiscal 2026. Scott’s story at this point contains progress, negotiation, and unfinished business in the same frame.

There is a person behind those stages, with interests beyond the next agreement. Scott lists travel, fishing, hunting, and wildlife and habitat conservation in his professional biography. His public career has required a long engagement with less recreational questions: how to explain a process, how to fund it, and how to persuade different participants that they have a reason to proceed.

After decades of answering for Bion, Scott now has to assemble its next practical answer. The useful nitrogen is one part of it. A suitable facility, credible engineering, financing, and a customer are the others. The question that organizes his work is straightforward enough to fit across a table: who can use what gets left behind, and what will it take to get it there?