The Seidner Legacy.

The Summit Timber Concession — the largest American timber concession ever in Africa, totaling more than 1.5 million acres — was created by the father-and-son team of Leo S. Seidner and Marc A. Seidner with the endorsement of then-President William V.S. Tubman of Liberia. Through Summit Lumber Company, the Seidners built a fully integrated, value-added logging, sawmilling, veneer, and plywood industry, pioneering the first American timber operation in West Africa where none had existed.

From the outset, ecological protection was an operating condition — structural to the business, not layered upon it. The Seidners instituted sustainable harvesting standards and built a market for Tetraberlinia tubmaniana, a Liberian timber species named in honor of President Tubman — exemplifying a lifelong pattern of finding value in an underused natural resource.

In the 1970s the Seidners formed FibreForm Wood Products and built the first medium-density fiberboard (MDF) moulding and millwork plant in the United States, in Rocklin, California. Expansion followed across four continents — Martell and Eureka, California; Juarez and Tijuana, Mexico; a distribution operation in Taichung, Taiwan; and plants in Australia, New Zealand, and Chile focused on plantation-grown, cultivated Radiata pine.

Seeking production efficiencies, the Seidners invented and patented more than a dozen U.S. and foreign technologies for high-speed, high-quality manufacturing of mouldings, millwork, and furniture components from MDF — increasing single-machine output by 15× to 25× against existing methods. Customers included The Home Depot, Lowe's, Georgia-Pacific, Huttig, and major U.S. home builders.

Shortly after September 11, 2001, Permanente and the Seidners were asked by Afghan Americans on the Task Force for the Reconstruction of Afghanistan to help bring reforestation and an agribusiness industry to the country. The principals — by then Leo, Marc, and Marc's son Daniel — formed Afghan Development Company and led a consortium including Burchell Nurseries, Langer's Juice, Netafim, Seminis Seeds, Sunsweet Growers, and the University of California at Davis.

Under license from the Transitional Government of Afghanistan, they established the largest and most productive tree nurseries in the country, built infrastructure including buildings and wells, and trained hundreds of people — with separate sanitary accommodations enabling the participation of both men and women. When a USAID contractor failed to deliver, the Seidners supplied more than 4.5 million seedlings in their place; on exit, they donated several million Afghan pine seedlings and three million cultivated pomegranate trees to the Afghan people. No U.S. government funding was provided for this work.

The Seidners formed Permanente Corporation to shift from value-added forest-products manufacturing toward green-energy fuels and engineered products derived from waste cellulosic biomass — determined to bring millions of tons per year of unused waste biomass into viable business and trade. Three generations of the family are now named as inventors on the Permanente patent record: Leo, Marc, and Marc's children, Daniel and Hanya.

Their green-industry patents include those covering GRC88®, a drop-in, carbon-neutral marine fuel free of sulfur, toxics, and heavy metals; the densification technology of U.S. Patent No. 12,595,340 B1; and the patent-pending co-processing of bauxite-process red mud with cellulosic biomass for simultaneous biofuel and mineral recovery — the subject of U.S. Provisional Application No. 63/884,446, filed September 19, 2025.

For more than a half-century, the Seidners have built successful international businesses grounded in a sensitivity to what was “green” before the word and the mission entered the zeitgeist. Each iteration anticipated what would be next in global environmental importance — Summit's 1960s wood-waste awareness, FibreForm's patented MDF technologies, the charter-vessel operations that deepened awareness of shipping's environmental consequences, and decades of development across Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

Permanente's decade-long development effort now positions it to deliver what governments and industry alike seek: green fuels capable of sustaining existing operations, scaling with global demand, and doing so without subsidy and without increases in existing cost.