The Biochar Company Owned by a Data Center Company Owned by Private Equity—w/ Alastair Collier, A Healthier Earth

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When you're trying to put together an enormous package, complicated structuring, a lot of money changing hands. The stakes are high. You really do need a good lawyer. I'm sorry to tell you that if you are a startup out there in carbon removal, you're going to probably pay a fair amount of money to lawyers. There's just no way around it. Your choice is basically, do you get a bad lawyer or a good lawyer? One really cool thing I can say, on Philip Lee, LLP's behalf, while one, Ryan Covington and I did a very fun show about how basically no one except for an elite view, really know what bankability and project finance even mean, and he lays it out very clearly. If you'd like to go listen to that show, it's awesome, and it's linked in the show notes, and also we ended up talking about Ernest Hemingway for a month, too. So, keep fit the tradition of reversing climate change. One also really cool thing is that they just won environmental finances, VCM law firm of the year. They put it three years in a row, 2023, 2024, and 2025. It's the only award for legal teams operating in the VCM, and they have offices in the US, Europe, and the UK. You should check out Philip Lee, LLP. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for listening to this, and thank you to our sponsors. We really make this so that it's something that, in a busy life, with lots of competing priorities, I'm able to keep coming back and making more reversing climate change. Thanks so much for what you do, and now here is the show. Hey, thank you so much for listening to reversing climate change. I'm the host of the show, Ross Kenyon. I'm a longtime carbon removal entrepreneur. Today, I have a show, unlike perhaps any other that I've done previously. Most of the time, when people think about carbon removal or climate tech startups, they think about them in the context of venture capital, if you're a millennial or younger, you think about venture capital probably in the way that it has funded so many of the software platforms and products that shape our daily lives. Maybe you've seen films like The Social Network or Silicon Valley, and you're thinking about young, brilliant coders who move to the Bay Area, raise a bunch of money on a dream and ship some product that eventually IPOs and makes everyone fabulously wealthy. That's an idea that many people have in their head. It turns out that for much of carbon removal, venture is a fairly poor fit. Carbon removal is about moving atoms, not bits, and that means it just can't scale in the same kind of way. Software you build at once and you can sell it a million times, and that just isn't true for pulling carbon out of the air and storing it someplace. For a lot of carbon removal businesses, venture is just inappropriate, and it will not generate the kind of returns necessary to make the conventional ten-year fund make sense for VC. Of course, there are venture capitalists involved in carbon removal and climate tech, but that kind of deals that they're hoping for are ones where they really are enormous runaway successes. They might invest in companies that have the ability to license their technology around the world, so even if they can't individually scale in the same way that software can, maybe by licensing their technology or their trade secrets or something like that, they might be able to duplicate the shape of the up-and-to-the-right exponential growth curve that VC's salivate for or their investing money in the various software platforms inside of carbon removal or climate tech, whether that's helping companies account for their emissions and negate them. Some set of specialized tools that help project developers just make their lives easier, but if you're just trying to be a very effective project developer for carbon removal and maybe you don't have a great technology mode, maybe you're just someone in dusty overalls, making biochar and trying to remove carbon that way, it's a lot harder to make the venture story work. The ability to have a breakout moment where you go from building something at a small scale and being able to bend the curve up very dramatically where you scale several orders of magnitude without a corresponding increase in your capital costs is pretty rare, and that's what makes today's show so interesting. Alistair Collier is the guest, he is the chief R&D officer at a healthier earth, which is a fully owned subsidiary of Pure DC, which is a data center project developer, which is owned by Oak Tree, which is a private equity firm. Alistair and I go into the details of exactly how this structure came about and how a healthier earth became a fully owned subsidiary of Pure DC, and it's really fascinating experience because it highlights some of the financial innovation and maturation that's happening within carbon removal. Private equity is the older, more conservative, big brother of venture capital, you might say, it's less low-key west coast VC, and it strikes me as directly more like the eye bankers of New York City. I'll explain what private equity is right now, I imagine it's a term that many people throw around, maybe you've heard it and you already know, but in case you don't, private equity is contrasted with public equity, which is when things trade on a public market, like NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange, retail investors are allowed to participate in public equities, but private equity is still something that one needs to be an accredited investor sufficiently wealthy enough to participate by signing an investment agreement as a limited partner in one of these private equity funds and they're typically interested in later stage deals, not exclusively, but often so. One of the things I think about when I think about private equity and we talk about this in the show is the idea of a roll-up. If you're in private equity, you might notice that, oh, the Cincinnati metropolitan area has a hundred different roofers, but many of these roofers are not especially well-managed. They don't have any standardization, they don't have great management, a lot of them are mom-and-pop shops and the owners are getting old and may want to retire. What if we bought many of the roofers in Cincinnati and brought them under new management? and gave them new tools that allowed them to generate leads faster, to close deals more quickly. We got better terms on their roofing materials because we can negotiate on wholesale rather than retail terms. Things of that nature, that's a case when private equity looks a little bit more benevolent. And there's a book I read not long ago that's very critical of private equity called bad company. And it details how private equity will oftentimes buy up small local and regional hospital systems and try to bring them under the same sort of business practices where maybe the local hospital system started as a way of making sure that residents in a rural or ex-urban community have access to great obstetric care. And that might have been guided by concern for the community, but if private equity buys that system, they might determine that those services are better co-located within another nearby hospital system, which is 90 miles away rather than 10. And that can very much impact the health services available to a community. Their job is to make things more efficient. And sometimes that means what I describe with the roofers and sometimes it means cutting services for things that are not strictly profitable, but may be good for the community anyways. And so private equity often generates really strong opinions. The Toys of Russ purchased by private equity is something that still gins up a lot of strong feelings for people, for example. And it's also covered in that book. That being said, there are companies within carbon removal who originated out of private equity. So private equity is also involved in supporting talent and starting new endeavors outside of the venture system. Private equity does stand up founding teams and put companies together that are very well capitalized in particular for businesses that have good fundamentals or that will have good fundamentals on a cash flow basis. The way that venture works is that you raise money. If times are good, you're told to like spend that money as fast as possible to get as much traction as possible and then raise another round. And at some point profitability catches up and you have so much traction that you've either created this market, Xnilo, or you've taken enough market share that now you can just start charging for it and you can go for profitability rather than traction and scale and out competing everyone else. But PE is a lot more conservative in this way. They're looking for fundamentally sound businesses, which is why I chose the example of roofing. People will need roofers no matter what. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler, the new PayPal app is like that. But for your money, shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pasquies, you're protected at every step. See PayPal.com/protectionterms. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at ND.com/podcast. That's ND.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Roofing is just stable cash flow oriented business. It's not looking for exponential growth. It's looking for solid growth and better management. When PE comes into this, it's a different kind of paradigm and they're able to take different kinds of bets. I don't want to belabor this too much though. You should just listen to the show that I did with Alistair. I'll cut to it right now. Quick plug, $5 a month, become a subscriber to reverse in climate change. It takes away all the ads I don't read myself and it gets you access to bonus content. If you're not ready for that, open up your podcast app, give this show five stars on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or whatever you use. If you're using Apple Podcasts, a really quick review is very, very helpful and so appreciated by me. That's all. I'm going to stop yapping and I'm just going to get right to Alistair. Alistair explains this so well. Be thankful I didn't try to do an Allie G impression here, which I feel like is a real risk when someone named Alistair is on the podcast. I'm going to skip that for now. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoy the show. Here it is. Alistair, thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks, Ross. That's great to be here. We got to hang out in New York. I don't even know if I can say this, actually. Yeah, we hung out New York climate week. It was really great week. I think you were on the frowls trying to find curve and businesses that have been invested in it by larger institutional sort of capital rather than typically what we're funded in. Yeah, we were talking. You're like, oh, yeah, do do some biochar project development. Yeah, I had an aqua exit to PE kind of thing. And I'm like, excuse me, what? What was that last part? We definitely need to talk more about that. I'm not even sure if that's the correct way to characterize it precisely. But you had a strange experience where I don't think a lot of people know what you did is possible. I'm not even sure that many biochar project developers know that they should be looking for deals like this. And this is a time when I imagine people listening are wondering what 2026 is going to bring and what options might be out there. And I think your leadership on this and doing this deal is really interesting. Obviously, we're going to talk about a lot more than that. But that's just the set to stage a little bit. Maybe let's start with, oh, what is a healthier earth and run me through the life cycle of the company to date. Yeah, sure. So if we start with where we are today, a healthier earth is a wholly insubstituary of a company called pure DC. So a little bit of background pure DC is a data center developer and operator primarily building hyperscale data centers. So think between 40 and 250 megawatts in size in Europe and the Middle East. And we're really specialized in doing that. We have about 500 megawatts developed to date. And we build primarily in urban environments. So we were brought into as a wholly insubstituary into pure about three and a half four years ago now. And for that, they were our major, our only customer when we were a fledgling startup focused primarily on research at that time, that helped them do some decarbonization. They had a real focus on sustainability as a core differentiator for them, being a challenger. Let's call it a data center market. We're able to drive some value and decarbonization work. And that led to us becoming part of pure as a wholly owned public, as wholly owned, sorry, insubstituary. What we do now is we have three core focuses. So within the pure portfolio, we first focus on the decarbonization of digital infrastructure. So actually, how do we make data centers less carbon intensive? Pure is being able to reduce about 22 percent, I think, of our carbon intensity of a megawa. Just by building less building smarter, building smaller, building standard, we build in kind of the new materials, so think biochar cement, biochar asphalt. These kinds of things, we look at how those materials can be cooperating to our data centers to take that next, that next bit. The second thing we focus on is we we regenerate the urban environments or data centers are primarily built in urban environments, because that's where hyperscalers want them. And when I say hyperscalers, I mean the major tech companies. So here we're talking about Google Microsoft Amazon Oracle Spotify, you know, the kind of core group. That's a core group of customers for us. And they primarily want availability zones for storage, which are in urban environments, AI is more remote. We're primarily at the minute in urban environments. And so we do things like we're supporting, we're building the one of the world's largest living walls around our London data center, which will have a biochar substrate within it. That would be the world's first living wall with a biochar substrate, reduces water usage by 60%, increased completely eliminates gray water waste management, gray water waste sorry and incorporates biodiversity gains into the urban environment, which is really hard to do. We do urban forests. So we did three urban forests last year, we've got three to do this year, urban allotments. We have a living wall at a school local to one of our data centers. So things that really engage with the community, support pure and gaining planning and permitting, pure will both build and operate. So run the facility for 30 years. So we're a long-term community tenant. And then finally, we produce high quality carbon removal credits, and we sell them to our customers. And so we have focused on biochar as a, we started looking at this about three years ago, kind of post coming into pure and really thinking about what a tree might, might what or won't be able to invest in. That's ultimately pure as a buster. So our investor, oak tree, or pure as investor, oak tree, you know, very large private equity-based investor, wants to deploy large amounts of capital. They're infrastructure property-based investor. And so we had to think about what would match. And in high quality carbon removal is on the many things. You've got biochar, DAC, BEX, first work weathering. And we just kind of went through like, what would fit. First work weathering, you just can't deploy enough money. Like, these types of equity houses don't want to look at anything less than 25 million. And that's a total minimum, like minimum, minimum minimum is what I've learned. BEX is too big. BEX is like a billion dollars. So that's too big. And the timelines are a bit too long in development. DAC, DAC just has a lot of commercial question marks about its long term that this type of investor who wants a quicker investment return, doesn't wouldn't be appropriate for. And so you were kind of left with biochar. I don't want to stare at biochar here at all. We're a major biochar developer. But we went through sort of three and a half years ago. It was like, well, biochar is really the only thing. So let's go and develop biochar projects. And we started actually backwards. We started with how much can we deploy? What is a profitable site need to look like? And how can we get capital? So anyways, in there, there's a little bit of a nutshell of kind of pure what we're doing in our background. It sounds like three and a half, four years ago, you are developing biochar as a project developer. You are building a biochar business. You have one customer that's pure. And you end up in an acquisition kind of discussion with them with your biggest slash only customer. Is that a correct characterization? I mean, actually, I'd say it's slightly different to that. We really didn't talk about biochar until post we came into the pure organization. Pre that we were really focused on biofuels. So pure has a global standard that they only use HBO in backup diesel generation. And also have a really big bio gas strategy for a gas power data center in Dublin. So carbon neutrality in our energy system. And that's actually the work we did with them. So we were focused on can you switch to HBO? What would it mean? What would it mean from a carbon intensity? And these were the kinds of problems we were working with. It was sort of post coming into the pure organization that we really set down and said, OK, what can we do? Now we're here with the benefits that we have. So the access to capital and with the access to customers. And that's where when we started looking at the strategic alignment and really asking the difficult questions about what does AHE do within this data center business, though we kind of came up with the three point strategy I just discussed with you, and then it was OK. Well, if one of our big strategic sides is that we're going to create value for the pure organization, we're not going to be a cost center. We're going to be a profit center. How did we do that? We've got to sell products. What products can we sell that naturally align to the opportunities that sit in front of us, right? Access to capital and the access to potentially hyperscalers. And that's where carbon credits came in. And we said, OK, what could we do in carbon credits? And that's what led us to that decision tree of kind of OK, what could we do in the next sort of three years? That would be meaningful. And that's how we ended up a biochar. So pre kind of coming into the pure organization, I probably didn't even really know biochar existed, like maybe of marginally aware that we're describing. Interesting. And so there's a part of the business that is offsetting, oriented, and revenue generation. But there's also an in-setting play here. You're a vertically integrated project developer for the development of data centers, urban data centers, but also you're selling credits to external partners as well. Is that part of the problem correct? Yes. Yeah, I mean, we've really struggled with the in-setting. I'm not going to lie, in-setting is really hard. And even with some of the way some of the hyperscalers draw their boundaries around energy generation and energy use in data centers, even if we had a fully index energy center, right next to a data center that a customer was taking from us. And we had both assets. They wouldn't be able to calculate that's in-setting because of the way they draw their boundaries. So in-setting is really difficult. Yeah, I've tried a few things. We've got a couple of things in the irons of the fire there. And it's just like, you hit these kind of weird, petitionality or weird carbon boundary challenges that until you really get into it, you'd never thought of. So in-setting's hard, we have tried it where with our biochar ash fault, for example, we're looking at doing now scaled trials in our data center environment, so an operational environment. So not like a little meter squared of the age of a parking lot, like an entire data center development or a large portion of it with a biochar based ash fault, which we've proven has some commercial value. For example, living wall, I talked about where we'll have a biochar substrain into it. I mean, our office, our new office in London has all over indoor plants have a biochar substrate in them, but it's small beer, right? What we've found is that actually it's easier to keep these things apart and create semi-state alone businesses. Let's call it that generate external revenue even though it may be coming from the same customer group. Fascinating. I think people are watching global policy right now and are concerned and wondering about the demand dynamics within carbon removal and are hoping that insetting and certain supply chains, whether they built environment or agribusiness, will be robust enough to keep them alive if offsetting isn't nearly as strong as maybe they hope. But it sounds like you're saying insetting is not nearly the magical Deus Ex Machina for carbon removal project developers. - Yeah, I mean, I think each industry is different. I think certainly in digital infrastructure, it's much more challenging because of the standards that we have to adhere to to build our actual digital infrastructure. There's not much flexibility. You don't necessarily see benefit in your data center buyer or your data center selling to them for being a carbon neutral or less carbon intense data center even though on the other side, they may be offsetting a huge amount of their operations or buying offsets. So even internally within organizations that I would say are really leading in this space, they haven't yet been able to fully reconcile that side of how the supply chain talks with the purchase they are. So I think any commercial organization is going to be customer-less. And when customers are sort of signaling different things, it sometimes it makes it challenging. Like my biggest problem is that there isn't a major scoring benefit for a selling a data center that has a lower carbon intensity even to a customer who may be very active in purchasing offsets. I imagine that dynamic is probably not going to be improving given the political climate around energy mix. Yeah, I mean, probably not, unfortunately. And I think it's why when we talk about politics, at least what I have found with the investors I'm talking to and specifically the investor types I'm talking to are large institutional infrastructure or property-based mid-cap to large-cap private equity funds, right? And what I've found with that group is that actually political contracts or contracts that are based on political will or political will, even legislation are not seen as credible as high-quality commercial contracts in G20 countries where you have a rule of law with large organizations that have a strong balance sheet. And the simple reason is you call it sewer government. Well, you can't. I mean, the US-styleness, you can't be sued, but it's a lot more difficult and costly to sue a government than it is to sue an organization for breaking a contract. And so if, for example, what's happening in the US with offshore wind, where, you know, is it worsted just one and a junction actually against the US government? Very costly, very difficult. Gotta have really high stakes. Our contract values are not big enough for that kind of thing. And so, you know, we would much rather have a 10 to 15-year off take with a high-quality third-party, kind of party with a triple-A rated balance sheet who in the US or in Canada or in the UK or Western Europe, where you could sue them. And you've got a good chance of winning because your contract is ironclad. And so actually the more your project in my experience with these types of investors or your revenue stream specifically rely upon any kind of legislative component. Actually, that reduces the investability at this scale. Now, at the median lower scale, like I think the VC world or the less sophisticated, maybe let's use the word investor, they're kind of like, oh, you have to have at least a portion of your revenue in, you know, Chrissia type or in these kinds of things. My investors are looking at 15-year yield returns and they see a lot of risk in that because what's going to happen in five years? What's going to happen in 10 years? We literally have no idea. Nobody has an idea. And so if that isn't actually part of your business case, but it's directly contractual, that actually increases your investability. - This episode is brought to you by PayPal. Sunscreen, snacks, a stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manager account, and earn rewards all in one place. And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use indeed sponsor jobs. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit at nnd.com/podcast. That's nnd.com/podcast, terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for indeed sponsor jobs. - Wow. Many people in carbon removal have a typical startup founder, heritage where if they do have access to investors so far, it's likely angel investors or venture capitalists, but they're not interacting much with PE private equity. They're not interacting with the Ontario teachers pension. Organize it like it's a usual investors are like something that like you read about on TV with Warren Buffett and somewhere else and like Whatever What's it like doing business with those people versus the VCs and angels that maybe people are more used to? Yeah, so I mean, I've got I probably there's probably two tangles of tangents to this one is my opinion of what is the right type of capital for our Type of projects and then the second would be to answer your question directly What is it? What is it actually like to work with them? So maybe you might opinion person then yeah, go ahead So I fundamentally think that that VC and even angel investors or high-knit with individuals are the wrong kind of capital for our projects The reason is is that VC models are generally based upon Quick cash turn around so high off X low cap X so lots of you know A bunch of people sitting in a cafe running on a on a computer to get code out to get the scale, right and in climate There is some of that registries certifiers braiding agencies. They fit that model But the core people who are actually delivering the credits we dumped right we need to spend millions of pounds even for a small Machine if we think biochar here To get to any kind of Not even scale, but just production to get to to revenue and it's don't like I can subscribe someone up Who's going to then pay me 50 pounds a month for however many as long as I get 20,000 of them my revenue model works Like it doesn't work that way and so the VC return profile generally they have like a cost of capital of between 30% plus And it's really hard in a biochar like my projects don't help make a 30% return right so if you've got to make a 30% return hurdle Just to get your investor back to even in their world plus then make above that that kind of have any exit trajectory Like it's not going to happen the second issue with high net worth individuals. They're really important They're a great part of it, but they take too many risks. They accept too many risks What that means is like maybe they'll build the first pilot or the first sort of subscale But then the money so let's say you spend five million pounds building a biochar facility and you say loads of risk you gotta You know, um less Less well deployed machine or your speed stock is not that Sure of or whatever, but you get there you build it you kind of muddle through you make the biochar you make some credits you certified like you're winning Um, and then you go for like okay now I'm gonna go buy like four more of these machines I know all the problems like I fixed them and now I need like 15 million 15 million still too small right for the type of investor We're about to talk about and also there's so many risk holes in your business model that those institutional investors are gonna Not look at it. They're gonna look at I go and I would never accept that risk. Why did you enter that contract? That is not the way I would do it and they won't invest The other problem is generally like this five million kind of mark where a lot of people are sitting This is the only money right all your proving is you can make biochar and you can kind of sell it And yes, you can make customers for your for your credits But what you're not proving is that your business action makes money and so they're gonna want to see your track record Show them your track record thinking like I'm a good businessman. I've done this, you know It's bootstrapped all this kind of stuff and it's gonna like you're just losing money You're literally you're unlippered lealed is like negative five percent. I'm not gonna do that Even if you go to the oh yeah, but if you scale and if you if you as soon as you get into that world of if you if you if you No, they're not interested And that's like what is nicely to what your actual question is which is what is it like to work with these people Um, and I mean that the nicest way like what you want is your like to work with these people Um, so I described myself as oak tree trained and I say this to their check so I don't feel bad about sharing this And what that means is And um oak tree have been really supportive in helping me understand What they need to be able to make an investment decision That I feel extraordinarily fortunate because Most people pitch, you know, if you do get the chance to pitch a PE like you make pitch once you get told no And that's there so then you go to the next one and you try them and they say no and you know I Didn't work you go to the next one they say no and like you're not really getting anything When I say that oak tree've been supportive it has said no a lot more than they've said yes But what they have done is they'll explain to me like why why are we saying no to you right now Um, and so the first time to get the development funding for world wouldn't bass it which is our first project in the UK About a 24 million pounds sterling total investment in a biochar facility Um, which we announced just the end of last year Uh, the first nine months they said no I think I went to them five or six times with investment decks each one probably 20 to 30 slides And each time they said no So the first time I went I went with like what I always see right in three years ago now like whatever it always has right Which is loads of preamble on the potential upside right like a broad market theme Right sort of an investment thesis raised abroad a broad market theme and directional travel they can see referencing things like hey look like the biochar market is exploding It's 84% of global delivery of high quality carbon it's growing at this rate and it continues to grow This is where go and the ebc says that it's going to grow this fast and by the way look Microsoft and Bane and bcg and all these people are taking all these credits so there's going to be huge credit demand that biochar has always amazing things it does that you know solves Flood risk it you know fixes agriculture and it's the future It fertilizer whatever right hold the upside. Oh the amazing us I'm by the way we can make five of these facilities and it's gonna cost us much of what make up is gasoline dollars, right? I like I made that deck right which is whatever it does like my financial model was slide 35 or whatever Is right and and like I remember sitting there and the guy from from from oak tree was called like you know on the meeting with me There's how like sitting there like you know I was giving my pitch Look at all sorry I read the deck. I think it's really good. I'm done like how does this thing make money I don't like okay. Well, I mean we have like we have to sell biochar and then we just release carbon credits and then we sell this energy here and he's like Yeah, okay, great. It's a no for now, but you know, can we come back and like Just say to me how does thing makes money? So like learning slide number two Revenue model. How does this thing make money right slide number one executive summary? This is what we're trying to do By the way side number one says like requesting 2.4 million to do whatever, right? Like this is the development But this is the work we've done. This is what we do Slide number two is revenue model. This is how it makes money great same thing what up you know to say Oh, sorry. Yeah, great. Yeah, I can see how it makes money um What are the key unit economics to drive the profitability of the business model and what are their sensitivity to the underlying risk in the market And I was like Look at back to you on that Google what is you know, you know economics not quite that no you're kidding. You didn't have you go that did you really? Yes, but so then so slide number two is like what are the five key unit economics the drive this business case and the profitability and then where are we on that so I made these like It's like we always use the slide it's um like a sound sounds you know like the sound dials you have like a switch you on a soundboard They're literally that and what we do is we put in triangles that are like external reference points and then we have a circle Which is our target and then we have a square which is what we are today and the square is either gray for it's an estimate blue for it's Kind of semi-quatified or it's green. It's contracted And what they want to see if they want to see it contracted or proven with tests So carbon credit multiplier carbon credit price Feed stock price biochar price biochar off-take and I think those were the five And so yeah, literally that then you'd economics so You know, what is it like working with these people? They're interested in how does it make money There should in how it generates an unlevered yield So infrastructure and then we'll talk about that and talk about that in a bit and they should be the economics so in my decks now like I'm literally doing an approval deck right now with without trading and You know, like biochar he's mentioned probably on slide 12 in the appendix They may say like yeah, I get the upside but get a tool. Yeah, yeah, and I get it's I get it's really good for the apart rates But I can only do this investment if it financially works So like all of that stuff only sell me after I've already cited this financially works And what I need to know if the financial works is what's its unlevered yield So yield investors infrastructure investors are looking at unlevered yield Unlevered yield is your Stabilized EBITDA when you're at full operations over the total capex it costs you to build the same This is literally with no debt. So take that out literally that number And that gives them a really good way to pay this infrastructure investment and the risk they're taking versus others So give you an idea Like a bridge build a bridge makes like 4 to 8% A levered yield super like stable, right? Like you're building your bridge. It's going to be there for 60 years And the government's going to pay you every year whatever a hundred million for the bridge to be there Right, probably like you're a bond or something like that. Yeah, exactly right. So data centers are like 8 to 10% because 15 year off Take with a high holy third party Hyperscaler with a great balance sheet with a suitable contract. Yeah, like pretty low risk One revenue stream locked in for 15 years low risk Commercial real estate 12 to 14% maybe as low as 10 if you've got like the long term tenant like a mirror linge staking You know half your building before you build it. Yeah, you can probably get lower um Frontier Climate change or you know climate 17% That's your unlevered yield right now a 17% of the livid yield takes for account the fact you've got multiple revenue streams, you've got risks because you probably only ever going to be able to get 40% of your revenue on a long-term offtake. You're going to have feed stock risk. You're going to have long-term spares for your machinery. Your buy your machine now is the manufacturer of your machine going to be around in 15 years to supply you with the spares you need to keep your machine running. Nobody in the biochar market, but maybe PyRag, could say that they have any chance of being able to say that that will be true. These are the risks they're taking. That's why it's 17%. But that's an attractive number. It's a double what I make building the skyscraper. Now I'm interested. Now I kind of want to make land. I try to deploy 50 million. I'm not going to get a bank. We can talk about the banks in a second of debt. It needs me around 50. Preferably 100 million? Should we get there? I mean, I've talked more. I've talked to more people. I wanted to deploy 50 million in the biochar, but I just don't know where to do it or who with. The problem is not that the money is up there. It's that generally speaking, I think we're thinking too small. We're not speaking their language. We're approaching it like we're trying to save the world, or we're pushing it from a very use case perspective rather than like the core fundamental financials. Wow. And when you're having these conversations as a fully owned subsidiary, are you selling project equity? How this deal works? Yeah. So the way that, and this now leads to the debt, right? So any equity investor is looking to deploy equity and then to back that equity out with debt, all right? Now the way that project finance works, which is the typical type of finance that a normal, non frontier climates business would get like a bridge or a building, like I was saying, is that the equity will build the building. So the equity will put up the money to get the thing to COD. So from FID to COD, it's 100% usually, not always, but we can say an infrastructure is often, often equity. And we're simplifying here. Obviously, at major deals with multiple phases, you're refinancing as you go, but let's just keep it simple, okay? So equity is deploying your money. So let's say like like take my project 24 million, that's an equity deployment. Once you get to commercial offer to COD, now the banks will come in and refinance the equity. So what they'll do is they'll say, okay, your site is now running. We believe in the contracts you've signed for the revenue. Our interest payments and our repayments will be made. What we'll do equity is we'll give you 70% of the equity you've put in. So let's we use simple numbers. Let's say make a site cost 10 million. We're going to give you 7 million back. And you can go build the second site with your 7 million, right? A will finance 7 million of this. And they're looking for a five to seven year payback period on the debt. And the attractiveness of the project finance is that if you get really, really boring, like vanilla, plain project finance, which I don't think anyone's got in our sector where we're trying really hard. But it's still hard with with our backing. Like your interest rates are much lower. Like you're talking maybe you can get into single digits, like high single digits, maybe you've heard of even kind of like mid single digits. But that's where project finance gets you. And that is super attractive because if you're making a 15% on levered yields and your investor wants a 12% return and now you've come in with a 5% debt, everyone's happy, right? And that that's the sweet part. That's why like VC, it just never works. I cannot generate 30% return even with my biggest projects. So it's never going to work. And they're never going to give me 24 million when I've got zero revenue. But I've got contracts for revenue. But I don't have the revenue coming in. It's not how their model works. Yeah, when I think about private equity, I think that oftentimes they're acquiring businesses that have solid fundamentals that are maybe in a bad cash flow position. But with better management that they can maybe install, they can make the company better. Alternatively, they buy companies and sell them for parts, which also is a reason why people don't always love private equity. I imagine the truth is that both of those things happen. They're about success stories and horror stories. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. They're standard models, right? So you've got the Rola, which is I buy a whole bunch of businesses that you're saying might crash them together, create synergies by cutting out a whole bunch of management and I make extra return and I sell the business song. Second will be by failing business and asset strip and do it that way. But I think if you look for growth PE, which is, you know, or special situations, I think they're called PE, they're really looking for growth businesses where they can deploy capital in businesses that have a repeatable model. The key is it's got to be repeatable. So this isn't like, oh, I'm doing a fire chore business in Kenya focused on some type of search grass. And then my second project is I'm in Australia using a waste or non-indigenous weed. And then my third project is in South America on coffee beans. These are not repeatable projects. Private equity would not be investing in this kind of model. Private equity would want I have a very clear model that I use a very specific feedstock from a certain type of customer. I use that to produce a very specific type of biochar that goes into this exact type of industry. I have to man for that biochar up to 60,000 tons. And each site produces 10,000 tons of biochar. And so I need to produce six sites. And so I'll build the first and when I'm home with you building the first, I'll start building the second. And by the time I finish building the finished the first, it's operational. The second is halfway and the third is starting. Wow. That's what they want to invest in. Sunscreen? Snacks? A stapler? Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsored jobs. That's Indeed.com/podcast. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. I just spoke with a project developer the other day, and they were telling me about how important it was for them to distribute their risk geographically and across project type. And I had a similar reaction where I'm like, "Wouldn't you just get better at doing the same thing over and over in different places?" Maybe that would be a safer thing on Net. Assuming you chose the right political geography to make sure that this did happen in that way? Yeah, I mean, I think that's, so it depends, right? Like if you're a developer and you are developing in less developed nations, in the global self maybe, then, or nations that don't have a strength of the rule of law, which is really key for these kinds of investors, then yes, that might be a strategy that works. For G20, let's call it countries, it's repeatable. These investors want a cookie cutter approach that they know works with a management team they believe can deliver, and they want to be in the check sizes of $25 to $15 million per site. And that is what they want. If you could do that, it'll be very interesting. This is totally a tangent, but is this why basically every city looks exactly the same? They have the same condos, they have the same strip malls, everything is just a pattern that can be repeatable for financiers. Is that why this exists? I mean, it's probably, there's a little trick in that. You know, once you can do it once, it doesn't, doesn't necessarily pay to be different or unique. It pays to be simple and to be repeatable and to be able to turn the handles and do the same thing over and over again. Unfortunately, it does create maybe urban sort of, you know, kind of similarities. But in our world, actually, you know, that's what we need to do, right? Like, we don't need to buy a chart project to look different, we just need a lot of them and we need to pass. Such an interesting point, such a deep, deep tension for aesthetics and ethics and so many other questions about the entire world turns out most of these questions end up touching the entire world when you start asking them. What advice might you give to a company that is working in biochar right now? I suppose it could be any type of project development, but you're closest to biochar at this point. Even though, historically, you have not been, what advice could you give to someone who, 2026, might be a hard year? People are looking for potential exits or partners or financing that might be different from the 10th VC telling them no after spending a lot of time in their data room. What should they do? Yes. Well, I mean, first we actually wrote a guide, which we launched a Culp 30 that goes through this called the Biochar Blueprint, which you can download on our website at healthyearth.com. It's about 60 page reports. It's going to be 12 different collaborators that go through this in a lot of detail. I think, and it's a really great, great resource and it was designed to share a lot of our learnings over this journey. I think, again, it all depends on where you are in the development journey. So, if we talk about biochar, stop pitching the benefits of biochar and start pitching the business fundamental and the financial fundamental. So here's my pitch. I'll give you my pitch. This is the pitch that I give. It's a pitch I was giving at New York Climate Week, and it's proved to be very effective. My pitch sounds like this. So if you ask me what I do, right? You go to these New York Climate Week events. You're open some tower with the lawyer office and like some investor guy comes up to you. The way you do, or woman, what do you do? And I go, ah, you know, my company's called to help your earth. We produce high quality food, real credits, but it's really boring. I don't think you'd be interested. (laughs) They're like, well, I mean, what does your business do? Like, what does it, I don't even know what current renewable credits are, like, what does it do? And I'm like, well, we generate a 15 to 17% of leverage yield, a 19% IRR. We do that with having 40% of our revenues locked up in 15 year off-takes with high quality third-party counterparts with a triple-a rated balance sheet, or check sizes are between $15 and $25 million a piece. We have about 10 to 12 of these to deploy over the next 18 months. Like I said, I don't think it's for you. - You sound like an alien, first of all. And I also, I like the way that you're distancing yourself. It's like, oh, you probably aren't interested. I'm gonna go walk away. I love classic technique, dating, classic technique of business, okay, fun. - But also, like, just speaking their language. They're like, no, that actually sounds super interesting. Like, what are you doing? And I was like, at a single bio-char, it uses high quality carbon renewable credits that we can sell to customers who want to buy them. Also produces product called bio-char that we can use to create agriculture, or water-cultural building material benefits. And we have facilities that cost between $15 and $25 million to build that produce this product and we sell them into the market. I'm like, okay, yeah, I thought it sounds interesting. I was like, yeah, multiple revenue streams can be downside, can be an upside, and you kind of then get into detail on their questions. But then all of a sudden, instead of it being like, dude, I've got this thing called bio-char. It was invented like 2,000 years ago. It's got a literally revolution, I think. So bigger than coal by 2050, okay? Well, let me tell you about it, right? And literally, me, they're like, just switched off, not interested. And so, like, don't make your financials page 35 on your slide deck. And like, you know, press releases about big investment in the bio-char from pure DC and Microsoft off takes and Google off takes. And like, that stuff in the appendix, number two slide is the Cup 4 Corp Fundamental Financials of your business. That's what you need to be selling. And you need to be selling it. And if you're not making money, then don't sell your business yet. Figure out how you're gonna make money before you try to invest in your business. Or get investment in your business. - Very sensible advice. But you seem very confident to do this alone. Like, you could probably be successful and not be fully on subsidiary of a hyperscaler project developer. So why go down that route? Why not just do it yourself. You keep all the equity. You get all the upside if you're successful at it. Why even bother with this weird structure? - I mean, it's because there is no way that I would be sitting at the tables that I sit at. I would not, you know, I would not know. I know what I know now because I've sat at those tables. Three and a half years ago, four years ago, I was pitching the wrong way. I was doing it all wrong. And I would have been just as unsuccessful as I think something that didn't mean. But I wouldn't have secured the funding, right? Like I would have just been no. Like just a smart guy. And then this thing seems interesting that like, stop for us, like sorry. And I think that for me has been so valuable. Like I could not put, and that's why I served myself as an oak tree trade. Like the God, whatever you were calling it, like I measure success on how quickly we can get money approved from oak tree, right? You know, how well are we doing at speaking middle average? And I think nine months was the first time it took me to get something approved. My personal best is negative 18 minutes. So 18 minutes before we were supposed to sit down to review the deck, just got an email saying, Alistair, we don't need to read the deck. The money's approved, it was up to date. Thank you very much. And that was not an insubstantial amount of money. Now with their world, it was an insubstantial amount of money. In our world, it was a very substantial amount of money. And so like, there was no way I was ever to get access to that, where I retain equity, where I am fighting for whatever portion that I get. You know, private equity has its own way of a different way to kind of BC or the traditional model of hold onto equity as much as you can. That's not the PE model. The PE model is I only equity as an investor owns the equity. And so there are mechanisms and approaches that they use that still incentivize management to be very engaged that are different than you owning the equity. And I guess kind of one year in, it was pretty easy. Some eyes is like, do you want 100% of nothing or maybe a small percent of something very big? And I'm sorry if it overshipped. You called thinking about that way, but if we kind of make the comparison. Yeah. It was a very easy decision to make. It was very well aligned. Sure, it had been a huge part of the evolution of the original company as well. So really from the outset, it was very well aligned. And it helped some of the people, some of the leadership up here I'd worked with before, before all of this in my previous career. So I had a bit of relationship there that made it easier. And yeah, like there's no way I would, there was no, there's no way I'd get into the rooms I get into. The banks that want to lend with us the government institutions, the other financiers that I talked to, there's so many rooms I've gone into that I shouldn't have been able to get into that that has got me into, that's been, you can't calculate the value of that if you get my drift. I do. OK. But someone listening here may not be super fluent in finance in the way that you are very comfortable walking into that room. I'm sure you have the right clothing to fit in with the PE folks. I imagine it's different for most people making biochar. It's a different kind of community here. What's your lose you lay? You want to really fit in? White shirt, blues you lay, blue slacks. And like one of those lean white trainers with the whites, the white band around the bottom. I don't know what they're called, but that is the uniform. Listen up people. That's that's a good advice, I think, for constantly getting in. But what do they do though? Because this is also rooms that they don't have access to. You have a previous career that prepared you for this moment where you could take your business and know that you're getting a deal that's ultimately worth it. You're losing control of your company in a certain kind of way. But you're getting access to rooms that you wouldn't have otherwise access to, a lot of financing. This is a great deal, even if you're not going to see the billion dollar IPO, which by the way, like many project developers will probably all of them, maybe 100% of them will never see anyways for product development within CDR. Like that's probably not going to happen anyways. But the idea of having ownership and being a founder in this kind of way where you own the company, maintain control. People watch things like the social network and they think about the ownership struggles of startups. They want to be in control. PE likes to own everything that they can because they want management decisions to be in their hands and make sense. It's their money. Where do they line up to take meetings like this? How do they prepare themselves? Or is this just you because this is your previous career and you speak the language already? No, I mean, I thought. I wasn't accountant before this. But my background was, yes, I have an NBA and all that kind of fun jazz. But I definitely did not speak the language going in. And that's why I'm thankful they said no so much. And I think, look, the problem is we are not startups, all right? Everyone needs to stop thinking about outside of like the registries and the certifiers and the rating agencies and, you know, all the soft stuff. Like we're not going to app our way out of this problem. But everyone who's building an app, okay? Like, yeah, you could probably think about it that way. Like you want to retain ownership. You could think about it like a, you know, any type of Silicon Valley sitcom, like, yes. But we are not a startup. We are an infrastructure development company. And other biochar developers are building infrastructure. They are not building startups. So firstly, stop the key or building a startup. So unless you can stump up 5 million quid, you don't have a startup. You are building infrastructure. And nobody owns infrastructure except for the people who are putting the money in. It's like, I'm not being a ****, that's the way it is. So if you want to get access to the volume of capital, you're going to need to get to real scale without, you know, really struggling with their strapping, really struggling with getting grants. Like this is the way to get access to the level of capital you need to do your business. Now you need to be clever in how you negotiate your management package. Right? There's no question about that. And there's loads of lawyers out there that can help you do that. You just need to pay them a bit of money. Go get a really good lawyer, right? If you get to the point where someone wants to buy your business or invest, let's, that was even bad language. They're not buying your business. They're making the investment in the infrastructure that allows the business you want to exist. That's what's happening. Even though that is what happens on paper, like you lose ownership, what they're actually doing is they're investing in the infrastructure equity required to make your business run. And that's how you need to think about it. And you are at that point where you have an investor, let's imagine you've got an interior teacher's pensions on the line, right? Somehow. And they want to deploy 50 million into your party. You've got them, you've, you've pitched them right. You're at that point, get a really good lawyer, right? This isn't like term sheet stuff. You're not going to be going through term sheets like you would in Silicon Valley startup. You are going to be going through a management incentive plan or a long term growth equity Share plan. that will align to certain objectives that you need to deliver that will then reward you commensurally so that you benefit when the company benefits. So you still have a benefit structure but just get a really good lawyer. Right, I cannot stress this enough and there's loads of them out there or expensive but get one. Okay, you don't have to know everything. But to get to that point, I think your question also Ross there was how do you get to that point. You have to think big, you have to, like $5 million is not big enough. It's not going to float anyone's boat. It's too big for the small guys, the small honey with individuals might do it, like the smaller honey with individuals. And it's too big, it's too big for them, sorry, it's too small for for any of the private equities. Like $20, $25 million kind of the minimum scale, you need to have a really core product and you need to have contracts. So like, is your EPC contracted? Do you have draft contracts for your machinery? Not like I've been to China and I've seen the machine. Now, do you have the draft contract that's been through your lawyer that is ready to sign? Do you have planning and permitting for your facility? Do you have certification already as much as you can done? Do you have a pre-offtake contract for your credits? Do you have biochar offtake for at least three years of your operation? And when I say like biochar time, I'm also like, oh, the guy down the road said he's going to take it to put it to spend. No, I mean like a signed letter of intent minimum draft types of terms better, like draft contract best, signed contract absolutely the best, but very difficult to get without that. Show up with those things. Tell them that you have a, you're, you can, you have a business that can generate a 15% or higher unlibered yield that you need to deploy 20 to 25 million dollars, a pound sterling, whatever, that you have these contracts progressed to the point where they would be ready for signing or close to ready for signing subject to an FID and that you are looking for a million pounds to get yourself to full FID to use the right lawyers they want you to use to do the work they want you to do to finalize all of these bets. And then once you've done that, so they're only putting a million on the door now. And yes, you might be giving up, it might feel like you're selling your company for a million dollars, but what you're actually getting is a real chance to them to to to to to to to to build sorry the business you want to build. They'll spend the million with you, you do the work you do you do it on time, not early, not late, on time. Do not be early. It's not good. Doesn't look good. Okay, I've done this. I've been like, hey, they're like five months early and I need the money now. They're like, um, so we don't have the money right now. You told us it was going to be needed five months. So you're going to need to wait for five months. Why did you do that? Don't be early. Don't be late. Don't be over budget. Don't be under budget. Be on time and do what you say. Show up with the million spent. I spent $995,000 of your million. This is what I spent it on. Yes, there was a bit of booling between it, but it was all right. Here's the contracts now at the state that you said they would be. We're now ready to go. We have strong confidence in our abilities to deliver the 50% delivered yields. Can we now have the $24 million to actually want to build this? By the way, I only need six million to get me over the next 18 months. The rest of it comes when the 60% balloon payment is required for machine machinery. So I actually only need six million now. And by the way, if this whole thing goes up like completely wrong, we can sell the site to these people likely recover 20% of the value. We can sell this. We can make the people unfortunately redundant right away. Therefore, your total equity exposure is maybe only about four million. So really, you're only risking four million for the subset. That is what you need to do. Again, the biochar stuff, that's in the appendix, unless it's relevant to the contracts that you have, it's in the appendix. That great things that's going to do the world in the appendix. The fact that dealing with your biomass stops, I don't know, algae flows into the great barrier reef that kill loads of things, great in the appendix, like last night in the appendix. All just upside. The new PayPal app is like that. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit and indeed.com/podcast. Need a hiring hero? This is such a fascinating conferion take. I don't know that I've ever heard. I barely had to do anything in this podcast, by the way. I just let you let it rip eventually. But just fine for me, I'm just like, this is great. Stuff people should know about this. Is anyone else thinking about it in this way? I know of some PE originated companies that just grew out of private equity from the very beginning. I know some of these deals that do exist, but I never hear anyone talk about it. It's mostly people who are very sophisticated who have done things in their careers that previous. This is not their first experience doing serious big business deals with other people. They're not just startup founders with a dream and a pitch deck. It's a different kind of person that comes at it from this angle, but is this happening? Are you seeing more of it? I'm trying to not really. I want to see more of it. I'm seeing a couple of funds, like mid cap funds, so we should have a billion and two billion dollars sort of in cap size. The one to deploy exactly into these markets, exactly these prices, but qualifying the people. It's part of the reason that we wrote the biochar blueprints to try to share this way of thinking and this approach so that more people can access so the things that we learned and also some of the key, like our lawyers are in there, so if you want to use lawyers, you can probably use them. They're probably pretty good. There's a sponsor to this show, too. It's Philip, Philip, we all appreciate it. So, Philip Lee, I've commented there, it gives people maybe a pathway to get to this. But there needs to be a lot more, but what I can say is if you can do this, there is a lot of money out there. I literally had at least three conversations with other equity houses who have said I've got 50 to 150 million dollars to deploy in biochar right now. I've been looking and I can't find it to deploy, and because they don't want to write checks for less than 25 or 30 million dollars, and they want to back institute people who manage their teams they believe can deliver. If you're a guy with a dream and you don't have infrastructure experience, your number two should have an infrastructure experience. Like, you need to be credible that when you get given six million dollars, you are going to deploy that, and you are going to sign contracts that will move the project forward and not, you know, not do that. Party mansion. Yeah, what exactly? This is not to be led. Like, that's what BC does. BC throws money at you and like, do what you need, spend your money. This is not that. This is, I would describe it as forensic, right? They will be through your contracts. Like, oak tree is deploying billions of dollars, and they will literally question me on 150,000 pounds that I want to spend. Why are you spending a hundred? Like, that feels expensive. Oak tree signs off every single contract. So just to get out of your legals, we have external legal council writer contracts. We have internal pure legal review them. So that's internal my parent company. And before I'm allowed to put them up for signature, they go to oak tree and oak trees internal legal council reviews the contracts. This is for like 250,000 pound a year contracts. And they come back with comments. I've already done the negotiation. I've done three months worth of legal work. And the oak tree guys compared to like, uh, we'll like this class. Like, why is this clause in there? And then I have to explain why the clause is there and why we can't negotiate out or what risk mitigation I put into overcome them. That's the level of detail they are going to be in even on the small stuff. One cheeky question before we leave. Do you ever consider it ironic that your last name is Collier and you ended up in charcoal? I have never thought of that actually. Um, that is, uh, yeah, I've never actually thought of that. That's how I'm going to end the show. I wonder what advice they thank you for being here. Listen up everyone and then links in the show notes for everything that you need. And thank you so much, Alistair. When you shop, Croger delivery, you can expect the savings you love and fresh groceries delivered right to your door. Our refrigerated trucks keep your items fresh while our associates are committed to getting every detail right. Carefully selecting and packing your order with care because bringing you fresh quality groceries is what we do best. And right now, enjoy $20 off your first online order of $75 or more. Restrictions apply, see site for details. Croger, fresh for everyone. Regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. 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