From Landfill to Power Plant: The Future of Energy with Sean Collins

From Landfill to Power Plant: The Future of Energy with Sean Collins

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to episode 132 of the business development podcast. And on today's expert guest interview, we are chatting with the CEO of Varme Energy Canada, Sean Collins. This is an episode you are not going to want to miss stick with us.

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Welcome

Kelly Kennedy: to episode 132 of the business development podcast. And today we bring an absolute rockstar expert guest for you with over 15 years of hands on experience in the energy transition and renewable energy project development, Sean Collins.

Seasoned leader in the global push towards sustainability from securing pioneering geothermal resource rights in Alberta to speaking at the United Nations on multiple occasions. Sean's journey is marked by relentless dedication to driving positive change in the energy sector as the CEO of Varme Energy.

He pioneers North America's first specialized waste to energy carbon capture and storage projects, envisioning a future where garbage is both landfill free and carbon free. In addition to his leadership roles at Varme Energy and Remora Ventures, Sean's entrepreneurial journey is marked by the founding of impactful initiatives such as Terrapin Geothermics, Student Energy, and the Next30.

Through these ventures, he has not only contributed to technological innovation, but has also nurtured the next generation of climate leaders. Sean's influence extends beyond the boardroom, as evidenced by his recognition in the Top 40 Under 40 in Edmonton and his award winning radio show, Energy Voices.

From his pioneering work in geothermal energy to his advocacy on the global stage at events like COP21 in Paris, Sean Collins is a force to be reckoned with in the fight against climate change, embodying the ethos of sustainable development and leaving an indelible mark on the world. With a track record of innovation, leadership, and unwavering commitment, Sean continues to inspire and drive forward the transition towards a greener, more sustainable future.

Sean, it's an absolute honor to have you on the show today.

Sean Collins: Real joy to be here. I definitely need to bring you along as a hype man. No, I really appreciate that. Thank you very much. Great, great to be here.

Kelly Kennedy: No, thank you. And, before we get started. Congratulations on the announcement for the Edmonton facility.

That is absolutely amazing. I can't wait to talk with you about that. And I know that's been a long time in the making. I'm sure and something that we need super badly here in the city as an Edmonton residents who only gets my garbage picked up every second week. I look forward to more garbage being picked up.

So Sean, you know, you've been in this space for an incredibly long time. You're a climate focused entrepreneur. Amazing, very commendable, especially here in Alberta. Take us back to the beginning. How did you end up on this journey? Who is Sean Collins?

Sean Collins: Yeah, I would say just hook, line and sinker for the energy transition space since a pretty young age, just sort of found it to be incredibly compelling.

I would say I've always thought these were the smart risks to take early career was that this seemed like a long term trend line of a new successful industry. So you kind of sort of, where did it start for me? I'm, I'm born and raised Alberta boy born in Rocky mountain house my dad was in the RCMP, so we bounced around a decent amount growing up, but sort of early childhood, mostly in Edmonton area, in Sherwood Park, and then end of elementary, junior high, and high school, all in Fort McMurray.

So my dad got posted up there in the mid 1990s, boom time Fort McMurray, as it was getting going. Yeah. We moved up to Fort Mac, and so yeah. It's a pretty cool experience getting to watch the largest industrial project on earth get built in your hometown. Also boom time, Fort McMurray, my dad ran the drug section of the the RCMP up there.

And so just crazy stories. And most heated the Canadian economy ever got was sort of mid 2000s on the Fort McMurray oil sands boom. And so. I would say, for me, pretty, I would say, dual, dual grabs emotionally. One that holy heck, we can build really large things. The sort of rock capacity we have, like, Edmonton's got the largest construction company in the country.

The largest even things like the Syncrude Tailings Pond was the largest dam by volume in the world until the Yangtze Dam came online. Just the sort of magnitude and scale of the, the oil sands is like a sheer, Feet of engineering and construction. And then I would say kind of grabbed also by the environmental challenge of it's also the highest emitting polluting industry in Canada and, and kind of how you, how do you score that circle that we can I would say it was sort of compelled to this idea that we can pursue large scale.

Decarbonization projects with the same sort of ambition and that we've pursued traditional energy projects are sort of a large part of my thesis is just do both things like carbon capture is build chemical plant plus the carbon capture plant. And now you're the net zero chemical plant. So it's, it's always grabbed by that, that sort of, we need to reconcile with mother earth, things like climate change and atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

And that that's a feat of engineering and policy and economics. And so, so I was, I was sort of a, I went to business school at the U of A I paid for university working for a road builder on Suncor base plant in Fort McMurray. So I don't think there's, I haven't maybe had one of the more blue collared ways of paying for business school and working at 24 and four shifts for the road builder.

That same thing, just sort of the appreciation of like, we're pretty damn hardworking province in Alberta. Yes. Yes. And it. Now, at 18 years old, you can make equivalent of 80 grand a year just working as a pressure washer for a road builder just sort of economic opportunity created by wages in is in pretty like valuable value trading to Albertans.

And so, yeah, so for me, I would say the real passion for energy transition, like at a young age was more the sort of environmental passion that sort of in business school. Ran into a few folks, and we started this international student energy summit event that we did in 2009 in Calgary. And so and then out of that, a couple years later, we co founded a charity called Student Energy, that was really focused around how do you accelerate the transition to a sustainable energy system.

Really focused at the university audience, sort of where you first gain real like agency and autonomy over your education. And you're sort of deciding what you want to do with your career. That was sort of our, our sort of theory of change was that if you could activate, educate, inspire, connect resource and get a seat at the table for young people and energy transition that would help accelerate the energy transition.

So early part of my career I, I had my own consulting company for a little while. And then really focused on student energy. So myself and Kaylee two of the three co-founders, we sort of made that our full-time job for a few years. So we, we've done this first summit in Calgary in 2009.

Then we second student Energy Summit in Vancouver in 2011, and then kind of tried to see if we could make a breakout outta Canada. And so incorporated as a charity, did our next event in Trondheim, Norway, where we sort of bid the thing out to the world. We had teams compete from around the world to sort of bid to host the next Student Energy Summit.

And so, the idea being that it's like a community, like a self driven community. Of whoever wants to put in the effort to sort of and always a little bit of that threat of like healthy competition is healthy. It's sort of it brings out the best in people that you want to give the summit to the people that wants to host it the most and sort of put the most effort in.

And so really cool moments, sort of, like, 2013, 2014, 2015, like, pretty focused on student energy. We built this big energy literacy platform. Some of our YouTube videos have done sort of. Two, three, four million views. Just really on how do you simply educate people on energy? Sort of what is hydropower?

How does it work? What is good about it? What is bad about it? Like we, we, we some of our thesis was it was really hard for young people to get involved in energy because only thing that existed was these like 65 page white papers where somebody would be like, I'm curious about coal. And he'd be like, here is a book.

And this is sort of for people in 2012, like a 19 year old in 2012 is not going to go read a 90 page white paper about pipeline. You need to sort of meet people where they are in terms of content. And so again, educational charity, we interpreted our charitable objects as being like, you Education sort of focused on like accessible content, accessible educational materials.

That was sort of our first push. Build this like interactive energy systems map and so it was cool being part of the creation of some of that stuff because it sort of forces you to go down being like now I will watch 47 videos on all the types of energy generation in the world and you sort of it's funny when you, when you, and then you map out the whole energy system and you're like, well, this entire multi trillion dollar energy system winds up at like heat, power, transportation, transportation.

Products that's sort of it. There's like this actual end uses of energy are like pretty discreet. And then the sort of recognition that like, most of the way we get there right now is through combustion of something to generate that energy. We want that energy. Like, I think sometimes there's a, there's a sense of like, oh, we should just do it.

do without everything and sit on our hands and like, not eat. And you're like, okay, well, we're going to continue traveling. We're going to like, humans are going to use energy. It's the unit of the economy. We just need to deliver that energy in a way that reconciles with. a net zero, not atmospheric CO2 climbing reality.

And so, so yeah, so for me, that kind of wraps the student energy story. Maybe I'll pause there and then sort of post student energy got more involved in the for profit side of life, but maybe happy to pause there. If you want to poke on any student energy stuff.

Kelly Kennedy: You know what? The thing that really wraps me is just the length of time that you've spent.

You've literally spent your whole life in the energy sector in one way or another. You're the first guest we've had that that's been their experience. And I think that that's pretty impressive actually. And kind of wild, sorry, sorry, Sean. I was just going to say, and kind of wild that this is the avenue that you kind of went on.

Like, It's not that far off from, from, you know, the basic energy sector as it stands, right?

Sean Collins: Yeah. Like I would sometimes say I'm like very happy at decisions. 22 year old Sean made I would say even like, was towards the end of university was working with a really cool look at Edmonton marketing company.

Started my own consulting company. It was doing pretty well. And then went from making like 140 grand for myself to making 50 grand for student energy. And at the time I was, I was just like, extremely conscientious being like, whatever. Like, you can always go do that again. If you now need to go wrestle up clients and customers and do consulting again.

But like, I'm fresh out of university. My rent at my buddy's house was 500 bucks a month. It was just sort of a moment where you're like this is worth really diving into and sacrificing, like the sort of immediate short term financial upside or the opportunity, like the opportunity to work on student energy, I think, was such a we like the first summit in Calgary, we had students from, like, 25 countries come and so you're just sort of part of an entity where it's sort of by default, giving you exposure to some of the youngest, hungriest Climate and energy folks in a hundred countries around the world.

And so just really happy that that was sort of the, the, the risk to take and the reward sort of out of that has been like a lifelong passion for the space. It just kind of keeps getting better.

Kelly Kennedy: Could you have ever seen your future today from that moment then?

Sean Collins: Like, I would say like this, this for us was sort of the point of it.

We thought that I think for us, like pretty intentional that even, like, one of my co founders, Kaylee, she's moved to Geneva. She's working in sustainable finance for the UN and has sort of helped craft the, how the global financial industry, like, integrates and finances sustainable energy projects.

Like, it's sort of the whole group. I think it was fun to be a lot of us. I would say we were like caught and inspired by things like an inconvenient truth when it came out in 2007. I think that was the first time you're like, well, obviously we're causing climate change. This is sort of it's not. And then you're, you're now seeing things like wildfire 20 years later, like emerge at pretty obvious even more obvious sort of physical.

But I would say for a lot of us, and again, a lot of us in business school too. So there's just a general like. Competitive hunger to be part of the new growth industry, and it's been, I would say, so interesting to see by how much demonstrated volume youth are building with their feet by wanting to work for clean energy, renewable energy, like jobs that are in that space, get 500 applicants, jobs that are in like traditional energy, sometimes get none.

Calgary, you've see close their petroleum engineering program two years ago. That's crazy. They had no applicants. No one wants to be a petroleum engineer in Calgary anymore. Just sort of these like moments where it's such a market generational shift of interest into this space. It's winning elections on climate policy is sort of set the federal context for 10 years now.

And so just interesting. It's like to be part of that early days, I would say for a lot of us, like kind of knew it would come, like we're going to hit a net zero energy system at some point in time. And I'm more interested in sort of helping drive that faster than sort of waiting for people to tell you we should wait.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, and you know, I'm just going to ask you a question regarding climate change. I would consider with the amount of time that you've spent researching climate change that I could probably call you an expert in that at this point. And one of the questions that I know I would get slammed on if I didn't ask you was, How are we able to tell what is different from baseline climate change that happens all the time versus human generated climate change?

How are we able to differentiate how much different that is?

Sean Collins: Yeah, a very direct and clear answer I would give is atmospheric CO2 concentration. And you look at the one million years preceding the Industrial Revolution, and we like never wavered. Much around 280 parts per million of CO2. So for the 1 million previous years to US combusting things, the CO2 concentration never got above 300.

And now we're like, well, north of 420. In 200 years, we're nearly doubling the atmosphere. CO2 concentration. Because we combust things that release CO2 to the atmosphere. Yeah. That's how we know it's our fault.

Kelly Kennedy: I see. I see. Because I think that is, that is the argument that everyone will say is like, well, the world climate always changes.

How do we know that it's us? But you're right. Like what you're saying is there is a measurable way to see that it is us.

Sean Collins: And like, happy to screen share. I don't know if that's the vibe for this thing. But it's a parabolic curve. If you look at, this is where it's interesting. It's a parabolic curve. The moment you figure out.

like coal and biomass and steam in the UK and the industrial revolution starts. You see the global use of energy parabolic curve, the global GDP parabolic curve human population, parabolic curve where And primarily due to the value, like we as a species have sort of thrived because of the energy we've been able to extract and how we put that into work and now it runs everything in society is run off of energy, but it all runs off of emissions as well.

And so I just, I always sort of give people the thought exercise of, like, think about the exhaust stacks of every single power plant operating on earth right now, every single furnace operating on earth right now. Every single car operating on earth right now. Stack all those next to one another.

That's the amount of combustions happening in real time, all day, every day, since the 1700s. It's a marketed material impact on the atmosphere, and now has created things like this. greenhouse effect. It's sort of impossible to ignore the science on global warming.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, we had the worst fire season that I can even ever remember last spring.

I, I don't remember in my lifetime a worse fire season in Alberta. I don't remember a stranger winter than the winter that we have just experienced where basically we didn't get cold. We didn't get cold until January. Like I've, and even then it was like, what, a week, two days. And then we were back up to like a warm Alberta is experiencing changes in climate, unlike anything that I have ever seen in my life.

Sean Collins: Yeah. And it's, I would say. As someone who's dedicated their career since 2007 into this, it's kind of sucks it's taken this long to the point where people, I even find it still a bit crazy. You're like in Edmonton this year, you have a hundred days of high air quality. You can literally physically see the carbon in your eyeballs and in your lungs.

And when you cough we're still sort of like, is this worth it? Responding to and then, yeah, my, my wife she's one of the longest serving employees for Canada wildfire. And just like the wildfire scientists spend more time talking about climate change than the renewable energy folks do.

All the fire seasons have shifted. They've started earlier. There's even through this winter, like, In winter, they were talking about off highway vehicle bans in northern Alberta, you're like starting in winter there's like a hundred fires burning in northern Alberta and northern BC all through the winter, this winter.

Wow. And so again, like these moments where, for me to try to orient, there's like one atmosphere that we all share. And there's 4 times, from my understanding, it was like 3 to 4 times the amount of emissions from trees combusting this year than from the traditional economy. And so stuff that kind of needs to start entering the realm a bit on, in terms of national emissions reduction strategy, if we can intelligently manage forestry biomass in a way that leaves it less likely to combust.

We should do those things. And it has the same impact as I find sometimes I would say like we're focused on these like millimeter exhaust stacks where it's like my Honda CRB. It's like cool 4 percent of the trees in Canada burn this year. So if we can get that to happen, there's so much of the oxygen and dialogue is caught up in these like inconsequential consumer decisions.

Where the macro picture is. It's not that great and needs a bit more attention, in my opinion.

Kelly Kennedy: Well luckily, we have you putting some attention on it. So, we appreciate your hard work, Sean. So, take us past Student Energy. What happened next?

Sean Collins: Yeah so we, we gave a pretty good few year run at that and pretty good growth to the organization.

You you know, quickly deviate from being close to being students. And so we were sort of pretty conscious that sort of for youth by youth was always the sort of design and structure of the organization. I, I started to precipitate a bit of that. Me and Renee, we had our first child. And so like, it's, I don't know, I'm not that close to being a university student anymore when we're getting ready for first child.

Janice, our third co founder, Well, I was going to move to New York to go to Columbia and Kaylee was moving to Geneva. And so we sort of managed a transition. We brought in Meredith Adler is a phenomenal executive director to sort of lead the chapter 2 and she's now transitioned to Helen, who's the sort of chapter 3 executive director.

So we sort of turned over the student energy baton to the next wave of. of hooligans and they ran and did a great job with it. And then, and for, for me, I would say sort of itch into only downside of a scaled charity is there's no equity kicker. There's no, there's no sort of did, did still have the business degree in this sort of marketing and finance.

DNA was sort of grabbing me and so for, for me sort of coming out of that, I mentioned that I'd done a radio show as part of student energy. I got, I did sort of different interviews on geothermal and nuclear and solar and wind and sort of tried to do topic. Deep dives on a bunch of different generation categories and sort of that helped educate me a bit on, on different energy types.

And I would say coming from Alberta was, was pretty stricken by the geothermal opportunity. It's the only renewable you drill for it's the only basal renewable energy source, heat source in the world. And so one where I thought there was just some sort of natural competitive advantages for Alberta.

And so myself and a couple of business partners that I'd met when the, the super first interactions with Tim Grover and then Ryan Maxwell we started Terrapin Geothermics. So you originally under the thesis you learn these things as you go. Originally our thesis was that if you could modify power generation Technology to operate at a lower temperature.

That was the secret sauce to unlock it. We later sort of just got into it as conventional geothermal project development. Nobody really tried that yet. And and a lot of the reasons that there wasn't There wasn't a regulatory rights framework. It's only sort of only recently that the provinces put that out.

So, so in 2016, we started Terrapin spent about the first year and a half working on sort of more of a engine development thesis and then pivoted into conventional geothermal development. We were successful in securing a large federal grant and put together a partnership with the municipal district of Greenview to work on the Alberta number one geothermal project and so really, really Fun, challenging experience.

Still to this date, no real structural supports provincially for geothermal this I would use the language of like tough sledding and, but still making progress. And so really, really phenomenal experience. The took us about a two year process to two and a half year process to get.

Provisional geothermal resource rights. So this is one of the, the more fun contracts of life. We got issued a contract from the Queen of England for resource rights to the core of the earth. Cool all, all contracts with the crown or with the Queen of England. And the language in the first draft is to the, to the core of the Earth.

And so just sort of that those moments where you make progress, you sort of, that was the sort of pilot. Resource rights framework that the province built the sort of now sort of accessible geothermal resource framework on top of and so, yeah, the, the whole that experience to raising capital and putting together partnerships and still still ongoing journey we're, we're just in, in May of last year issued the surface development permit and the drilling permit.

And so the average geothermal project takes seven to nine years to generate first power. And so sort of midstream on the Terrapin story, I'm on the board. So as we set up the first project, the Alberta Number One Project, we brought in Kathy Hickson as the CEO of the project. She's the, Drilled a number of really great geothermal projects in Iceland and around the world.

And so I'm on the board and largest shareholder for Terrapin and then jumped into Remora as a more of an investor front and then into Varme as we got going. So I would say sort of 2016 onwards now sort of entirely in the for profit project development world. I would say like, Very stricken by the opportunity in project development in energy.

Kelly Kennedy: Well, so like what you're saying essentially is before you did this, there was absolutely no framework at all for geothermal projects within Alberta, or is that in Canada? It sounds like potentially?

Sean Collins: No, just in Alberta. So it's all, it's all regulated provincially. So the deep project in Saskatchewan was had resource rights from the province of Saskatchewan.

There's a project in B. C. Alberta was the laggard in the space. And so there was no general regulatory framework that existed. And so we had to go, we wrote a number of white papers. We did Workshop at Upward Energy with 23 ministries, sub ministries, agencies, regulatory bodies, and sort of had to walk hand in hand with the province and it wound up with an order in council and cabinet from Minister Savage for the first time.

And structured as activity rights. So sort of what is heat as a resource. And the thing you're trying to prevent is someone else also executing on that activity. And so sort of using essentially the oil and gas rights framework, but structured as exclusive activity rights.

Kelly Kennedy: So the project will take place in the MD of Greenview, but what, like, how does a geothermal project work?

Exactly. I know you have to drill very deep. How deep do you have to drill?

Sean Collins: Yeah. You're sort of two pathways per drilling. Closed loop systems and open loops, a sort of open systems where your dynamic production and injection ever, and a few other folks have done some phenomenal work in the closed loop world.

Mostly it takes away the drilling risk. You just, you kind of know how hot the rocks are. The pro of the ever system is you sort of know how much heat you have. You don't really have any drilling risk, but it's a bit like a heat exchanger in the earth. And so you're slowly cooling your reservoir down.

There's a view that the Alberta number of project is a dynamic production and injection where you have. Production wells that are bringing up hot water and injection wells that are re injecting now slightly colder water that you've extracted the thermal and so generally project sort of sub 3, 500 meter drill depth, so like three and a half kilometers Downhole pretty wide diameter wells geothermal, sort of the whole name of the game is get as much water as you possibly can to the surface to extract as much heat as you possibly can as power as heat.

And so they're, they're similar. This is just sort of a bit of a cop out, but they're like similar to like saying the wells where they're big. Yeah. You kind of want big wells. But for us, those might go 300 meters. We're going 10 times deeper for a geo. Yeah. And so one where we have good, we're a hot sedimentary aquifer system in Alberta.

And you need to get, if you want to produce power you have to get sort of at least above a hundred Celsius. You generally want to be at least above like 105 Celsius. And so in the, in the, if you sort of go. 3500 meters below, you're getting into the 120 Celsius plus range.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Wow. Is it, is that the only area that makes sense in Alberta to drill?

Sean Collins: No, so, like Ever did, they did a pilot project, their Everlight project was actually in Rocky Mountain House region Lisa Mueller and her gang at Uterra, they're doing a project where they're essentially, like, co firing geothermal with produced gas, so in some reservoirs, you'll, like, a lot of gas wells are 95 water, so, There's some gas that comes up and gets extracted off of it.

And so some sort of novel engineering concepts where they're doing sort of a coal fire, you take that gas and you lift the temperature of the geothermal that maybe is coming up that and so that one's like, you have some emissions in there, but that's still sort of a pretty innovative energy delivery mechanism.

So as a rule of thumb, generally closer to the mountains, the better mountains sort of pull up your geology. You want to be as close to the core of the earth as possible and so again, sort of even Grand Prairie area, Hinton Rocky Mountain House like Slave Lake like White Court area, there's, there's lots of pockets especially areas where if you only need it for industrial process heat a lot of those processes are made.

Like, even if you could like a kiln, if you could eat that to 80, 90 degrees Celsius you could get that at lower depths and temperatures.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Wow. So it's a solution for actually a lot of, a lot of applications.

Sean Collins: Yeah. It's not a magic bullet.

Like some people are like, could it power everything? I'm like, it's expensive.

You're, you're. Now, it costs you money to go get your renewable resource. You have to drill like the hardest part about geothermal is definitely like an area of necessary supports is on the drilling supports. It's really challenging because. As in oil and gas, you can drill dry wells, you can have bad temperatures, you can have drilling issues like there's drilling is not no risk proposition.

And so I would say from an investment perspective, tends to get out competed from a risk perspective by. Wind and solar, waste energy, other things where just like, I'm on land. I know that land is there. I know the sun is this bright. I know the wind is this strong. I know garbage has this much energy in it.

Yeah. There's just more sort of certainty that you know what you're going to get in terms of your energy resource. Whereas in geothermal, you might have to drill it. If you're doing a whole field wells to make sure that that stacks to deliver the energy required, it's a lot of capital upfront and there's not really any risk share supports that exist.

Kelly Kennedy: Interesting. What do you think the future will be for it?

Sean Collins: Yeah. I go back to the like, it's the only renewable baseload heat source on earth. I think for heating applications, it should be thought of as a primary solution. I think for power solutions, it's not as compelling unless you're in volcanic systems.

But anywhere there's heating, like again, the ambient air temperature in our office is 21 degrees Celsius. You don't have to go very shallow to get 21 degrees Celsius in homes, geo exchange systems, geo loop systems district heating systems fed by geothermal resources again, like even pools and rec centers, the water is like 36 degrees Celsius, 37 degrees Celsius for heating, it should be thought of as a primary solution, in my opinion, and one of the most obvious ones where it's just sort of tapping into residual available heat below our feet.

And these drilling jobs. And so that's 1 where I think I would also say, like, a bit of surprise at the lack of investment from, like, the, the drilling industry in geothermal. They've generally been reticent to sort of put some of their own money in. It's sort of financing the future of the drilling economy.

It really benefits the sort of core industry that we're in. And there's just an obviousness in the heat source, especially industrial process heating. If you're now subject to carbon pricing for anything you combust there's no combustion in bringing up geofluid from subsurface and extracting heat.

And then re injecting so can be thought baseload industrial process heat source.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. Have you had much government investment in, in any of your your projects so far?

Sean Collins: So the, the Alberta number one geothermal project, Secured a 25. 5 million grant from the federal government through their emerging renewables power program.

So pretty market support from the federal government to date, there's been no provincial support into the project.

Kelly Kennedy: Do you want to take us now then into Remora Ventures?

Sean Collins: Yeah. So yeah, we would go back to the now being in the more of the for profit phase of, of, of the career. I'd say also really stricken by the project development business model for bleeding the blood to get the resource rights and the land agreement, the municipal partnership and the, the grant efforts and all that you now have a valuable project that is worth something that people will invest into.

And that's a recognition that there is far, like almost one of the issues in energy transition is that there is. So much of the project money available, the sort of large corporates, pension funds, sort of, if you can present a low risk investment opportunity there's almost too much money in the world for that.

The challenge is who if you look at the sort of whole value chain of where venture capital and private equity investment goes in the clean tech value chain, the least invested cog of that. world is project development. It's sort of about 40 percent of the money goes into new technology, sort of, you're going to invent the new battery, you're going to invent the new engine.

We spent money there at Terrapin sort of chasing engine development. It was easier to raise that money when you're like, I'm going to build this new engine that's going to change the world. It's sort of easier to raise that type of money. And so again, about 40 percent into technology lot into operations and construction.

And only about 4 percent of capital is allocated to project development. And so it's I would say, so the sort of Remora Ventures thesis for me was that this is the primary area of value creation in terms of new infrastructure delivery is in starting and launching new project development companies in the space.

And so. We sort of became a traditional project developer at Terrapin over the years and then found success in that model and you could raise capital and it just sort of, it's an ecosystem that's healthy. And so, so with Remora, this sort of the, it's right now structured as a venture studio focused on Starting project development companies that can originate investable projects in the energy and climate space.

So we'll sort of 1st kick at the can help start a company called pressure court. That's based out of Houston, and it's doing waste pressure to power project development. Sort of quick pitch there that at all the high pressure. Gas distribution systems, they all step down from 700 PSI to 100 or 0 PSI and generally just blow up all that pressure and that can turbo expander to produce power.

So, so anyways, the thesis for me that sort of now specialized project development companies that are again very specialized in the asset class that they're trying to develop creates value. And so pressure corp was an example of that I'm on the board and an investor in a company called Toroto.

It's the largest carbon offset developers in Mexico. Doing about a million tons a year plus of nature based solutions, carbon removals as the project developers. And then kind of under that thesis and so I hold my equity in pharma under Remora Ventures. Okay. And so this the same thesis that so kind of married, married perfectly in timing.

About three years ago, got a call from a good friend from the Student Energy days, Andreas Carlsen. He was the chair of our 2013 student energy summit we did in front time Norway. And then now fast forward to 2021. And he's working at a Norwegian private equity group, green transition holding that is doing waste to energy with carbon capture project development and looking for growth.

Opportunities. And so as he sort of explained to me the carbon capture model in Norway I was like, we have a way better carbon capture ecosystem than exists over there. I was like, if you can make this work in Europe, I was like, it would definitely work here. And so I would say like, Like I'm pretty hook, line and sinker on like the waste energy with carbon capture business model is being particularly compelling.

And so jumped in sort of two feet about two years ago to, to run Varme and we've been sort of off to the races ever since.

Kelly Kennedy: So with Varme, can we introduce the world to what they are? Obviously if you live in Alberta, you've seen Varme everywhere. If you've been to any oil and gas summits or anything like that, Sean has been speaking.

You've been, you've been out and about. I'm actually impressed. I thought you guys were much older than you are. I was surprised when I kind of realized you've only been doing Varme specifically for a couple of years. I do, I do want to make sure I have that correct. Is that correct? Yeah. Yeah. We're a two year old.

Wow. Wow. It is actually almost unbelievable how much you've done in two years.

Sean Collins: That's good. I'm glad to hear that. That's good feedback. And we're, yeah, we brought a pretty specialized team together, I would say, for this one. We we've got the 1998 Chicago Bulls working on this thing, it feels like. Yeah.

We get to tap into a lot of pretty sophisticated Norwegian expertise, there's 1000 operating waste energy facilities in Europe. And so within our parent company, and there's experience in refractory inside the furnace of a waste energy facility, they do some of that work in the largest facilities in Norway.

And so just like guts and nuts and bolts of how these facilities operate, where they have issues, sort of just there's like a living, breathing experience that exists in sort of the asset class and category. And then our sort of team in Canada. Pretty specialized. So our, our CFO, Mikael Blom we, he was sort of 20 years in London doing project finance, investment banking, financial advisory in, in London with some of the largest sort of investors in the world, specifically in waste energy, anaerobic digestion, sort of.

It was like a pretty sophisticated project finance community that exists over there. And then we get to import that he lives in Toronto. And so we get to import that level of sophistication and expertise in the sort of structuring the projects. And Wayne Carey, our COO he was the senior manager for Pembina's Redwater vaccination and storage facility in Redwater for the last seven plus years.

And so he's managed a couple billion dollars in construction, execution. In the industrial heartland has operated the largest, most profitable asset for one of, I think, 25 million plus oil and gas company he was the chair of the Northeast Capital Industrial Association has a regulatory capacity.

And so just the sort of the experience in bringing large industrial facilities to life in Alberta, I would say I'm the one that's sort of most pokey on the regulatory front. And we not quite the same as, as geothermal where there's, you're starting from scratch, but in this, there's lots of places where there's not solid fuel regulations in terms of some of the regulatory streams.

Our project. Sort of is multifaceted. And so it's good. It's really fun. Rory is our VP development and Samir is our waste manager and sort of everyone's got pretty specialized experience. And so been really fun experience so far.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, absolutely. And I think we have a lot of people in the audience right now wondering, you know, what is waste to energy?

And I was hoping you would maybe give us a bit of a one on one on, you know, why essentially it's so important.

Sean Collins: Yeah. The, The very simple 101 is the waste and the garbage trucks, instead of going to the landfill and dumping their garbage into a landfill and covering it instead that garbage comes to us.

We put it in a specialized furnace so high temperature furnace and it's combusted. And then from there, it's essentially traditional power plant. We have a steam boiler turbine generator producing power. The energy value of waste is about 80 percent ish of the energy value of coal, depending on seasonality and whatnot.

And so kind of like weak coal in terms of energy value. But. Produces a reasonable amount of energy. And then our, our feature is now at the exhaust stack as part of the flue gas cleanup process. We also layer in another gas cleanup process of carbon capture. And so that's where we're sort of most novel in the space.

There's 4 large scale operating waste energy facilities in Canada right now but 1000 plus in Europe. We're, we're trying to be pioneers in the waste energy with carbon capture space. And so now you can be a landfill free carbon free solution. And then the CO2 is captured put into a pipeline and put into a sequestration well.

And so we use the language a little bit of it closes the carbon circle. You're now the plastic that was created from the natural gas underground that we used and bought it in the happy meal and then throw away, we combust it and capture that CO2 and put it back underground. Yeah. And so, so expensive power generation if you're just looking at as a pure power generation, but the sort of model for us is, instead of the city paying the dump to tip their waste there, they instead pay us. We sell the clean electricity to the grid. And then now the sort of financial model for the assets. You can generate, you generate carbon credits with the carbon. We're a physical ton of actual CO2 gas that you capture and sequester.

So, these are pretty high quality credits. And so, right now the market, As people are worried about sort of is an avoided emission, a real carbon credit, our stuff's pretty genuine. It's actual physical ton of CO2 gas. And so we've been able to get pretty good prices for the carbon credits on off take agreements.

Kelly Kennedy: Could you also give us a bit of a one on one on what is carbon capture?

Sean Collins: Yep. So I would say overwhelmingly most of the active carbon capture in the world is amine capture plants. Shell's Quest project in Edmonton, it's been doing a million tons a year since 2015. Most are where you have carbon capture.

Like an amine solvent that binds to the CO2 in the exhaust gas. And so you can sort of think about it that there's a structure built within the exhaust that you spray your amine solvent and it captures the CO2. And now you have fluid that is both. You're, you're aiming solvent and you're CO2 and then you have to boil off aiming to now be left with pure CO2.

And that gets compressed into a pipeline. And then you're aiming, you regenerate and use for the next go around and that process. So you do have some degradation, the aiming also captures if there is any sort of sort of like an additional safety net. And so it does have a slight degradation over time, but now all the chemical companies are pitching their own proprietary aiming solvents and you're getting the business cards all around, but that's, that's generally the process for carbon capture.

Okay. So amine captures the CO2, you boil off the CO2 and you put that into a pipeline then into a sequestration well.

Kelly Kennedy: Man, why have we not been doing this for like forever? Like, to me, putting, putting garbage in a landfill seems so, I don't, I don't want to call it barbaric, but barbaric? Like, if this has been around, like, this doesn't sound like necessarily a new idea.

Why has it taken so long to catch on?

Sean Collins: So we, we may be the first greenfield waste energy with CCS. Facility they want in the world. So the CCS stuff is newer like it just is. And it's such large scale processes that are so expensive. And even like shell had to do with carbon capture what I had to do in geothermal.

They had to in. They had to create a protocol in 2015 for shell to be able to generate a carbon capture credit. They had this like fancy math for the, it was like for projects commissioned by this state, there's special rules, but there's like these fancy shell rules in the protocol. And so that, like that project, like they, Now Shell globally sells the CanSolve solvent.

That's their preparatory solvent that was developed for the Quest project in Edmonton. And so, so really like Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan, Quest, Northwest Refinery, Nutrien. These are some of the world's, like, most advanced carbon capture projects. And now that I don't say always people with this, like, well, the CO2 is going to leak and it's all going to come back.

There's always these sort of like darts that have been thrown at carbon capture and people like, this is an excuse to continue combusting. And look, yeah, because you captured the carbon, like, well, where do you want, like, we want stuff, we want the energy, like we're, and so I think there's been like narrative that you have to overcome.

And so it, and then I would say the, The explosive gasoline on top that now in 2022 budget federally, you added a 50 percent tax credit. Just before COP the provincial government added a 12 percent Alberta carbon capture incentive program. And so these are still expensive plants. Carbon capture facility is not cheap.

It's and then you're, you're paying money for your aiming. You're paying money for your compression. You're paying money for your transportation. You're paying money for like, it's not cheap. And. I would say also there's these sort of giant question marks on is somebody going to rip away carbon pricing and is the whole totem pole like there is no economic case to do carbon capture transportation and sequestration if you're not generating an economic credit for that.

And so I think a lot of it's been like wrapped up in compelling, compelling, like the Thermodynamics and physics of it is like solve it's more the policy regime, the investment certainty, you're asking pathways alliance to spend 10 billion on a carbon capture pipeline on all these capture plants to then maybe rip away carbon pricing.

It's horrible to overcome.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, yeah. I know, like, some of the questions that I've heard come up are, like, Canada, we're doing so much, right? Like, we are. We're doing a ton. I don't know whether we're necessarily leading it, but we are doing an absolute ton to do with what, you know, carbon capture you know, trying to be environmentally friendly, things like this.

But, you know, I've also heard the argument that Canada is pretty small in the grand scope of the world, and if we're kind of doing all this stuff a bit like martyrs, If the rest of the world isn't on board, does it even matter?

Sean Collins: I go to, like, the amount of, like, it's a global, it's all of our atmospheres, and If we're, I just find it so non compelling that message of like, Hey, should we even try? You're like great, inspiring leadership, Canada. We're also the second largest forest in the world. And so it does matter what China and India and the rest of the world does in terms of their missions that impacts our lungs and our forests.

And so I don't know, it's just one of those, like, I think we met lots of reasons to not do stuff and just like It's not, not have to act and change. And this is one that always felt like it's coming whether we want it to or not. Like the impact on climate is coming, the impact on the economy, the impact on oil consumption, like it's coming whether you want it to or not.

And rather than spend all of our time debating of like, does what we do matter? Maybe we should just try to make as much money as we possibly can while all of the capital in the world is being invested in this space. Just find there's so much like reasons to be laggards and not try and frustrating.

Kelly Kennedy: How do we. How do we get the rest of the world on board? You know, like it, cause you're right. Like what a piss off. If, if Canada, if, if our, our environment gets destroyed, if you know, the, our place burns down or we're polluted, we can't even breathe outside, but it's not our, like, you're right. Like it's a shared atmosphere.

How, how does that move forward? Like, how do we get the world on board with this?

Sean Collins: Yeah, some of it's like, I don't know, China's leading everyone they're already, they're already way past all of us in terms of actual execution on renewable energy spend, like I would say it feels more and more like Yeah.

It's not even as much of a challenge of how do you get the world on board as like, there's a competitive race underway and be part of winning that race. The amount of it's happening, it's happening, like coal phase outs are happening at a more accelerated pace than anyone thought. The amount of displaced oil demand from the growth in EVs is faster than people have thought.

And so I don't think that's a problem anymore. I think it's like, you go, you go see what those governments are saying and doing, and they're massively investing into some of these industries. I think, I think some of the ways, like, this is where I think Canada has huge leadership opportunities in, man, shouldn't we be building 20 giant new mines?

to produce totally sustainable, ethical, critical minerals for the future economy. Even some interesting stuff like apparently Fort McMurray bitumen makes phenomenal carbon fiber. You're like, you can knock out 40 percent of the weight volume of all vehicles on earth. If you could figure out cheap carbon fiber, we have the best.

bitumen feedstock, just some of those, like, just feels like we're, we're so caught up in like, should we try that we're getting lapsed on the future economy that's being built as it, as it in real time.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. But you're right. It's like, there are people working behind the scenes, figuring this stuff out, and it's kind of one of those things where once we know about it, It's impossible to unknow it, right?

So hopefully, hopefully it does move forward in the right directions. You know, we've talked a lot about the wild successes you've had at Varme. I really, I'm really impressed. I think most Albertans are very impressed with the work you guys are doing. One of the things that I wanted to know is, could you talk about some of the challenges that you've faced along the way and kind of getting this rolling?

Sean Collins: Yeah. This one, you're. The complexity of the Varme facility from a, like a regulatory and a monetization perspective. You're sort of jealous of like I'm a big fan of Dan Balaban and the Green Gate Boys, but sort of wind and solar is a little bit more linear of, I have this much land, there's this much sun, it costs me this much for the panels, you make this much money, or you ride the market, like you're, it's a little bit more linear inputs, outputs.

And this, this one. So to stack all the different pieces where you need long term waste feedstock agreement, you need a power agreement, you need a CO2 physical CO2 pipeline for the actual carbon to go somewhere. You for, for us a lot of work around the, the carbon offset protocol system by default, you're not, you don't stack multiple protocols, but we avoid methane at the landfill and we capture carbon and sequester.

And we displaced great electricity. So you need approvals for all those pieces. And so and then again, you're now in a new designated industrial zone in the heartland that didn't doesn't have some of the contemplation for facilities like our type. And so each of those is just sort of a significant.

Effort to crystallize. And so yeah, each of those is and still like for us, we're, we're not fully through the regulatory approvals process. We're not sort of shovels in the ground on construction. Just yet. We've got probably about a another year ahead of us for some of these processes. And so.

Maybe, maybe ask me again in a year. We've solved to the point we've solved today. And then lots more to go. This isn't sort of a fully baked finalized deal yet.

Kelly Kennedy: Absolutely. Well, you know, I do want to congratulate you on on signing your agreement with Edmonton earlier. I guess it was mid last month at this point.

That's a huge step in the right direction. 300 million project happening. I think just outside of the city, 40 kilometers or something like that. That's that's pretty wild. I'm pretty excited to see it.

Sean Collins: Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. You said that at the start, sort of you're excited to put your garbage. Are you excited about garbage pickup?

Kelly Kennedy: My god, okay, so I just moved to Edmonton. I grew up in Spruce Grove, where they do weekly garbage pickup. We have a fairly big family, and in Edmonton right now, they only do bi weekly garbage pickup, which, I get it, it's fine, but My gosh, if you have like a six person family, it is not an easy setup. So I hope we're able to get this online and start burning this garbage so that I can get hopefully weekly pickup again.

Sean Collins: You can make that pitch to the city. We're, we're happy to be partners with us.

Kelly Kennedy: I will, especially when this is up and running. I'll be like, you have no excuses. Now pick up my garbage once a week.

Sean Collins: Feels like years of reason to be excited about your waste. There's also, I would say, like, a sense of grief for some people, of like, Ugh, I can't believe I'm throwing this away. And like, that should be, think, like, volume wise. Edmonton sends about 99 Eiffel Towers a year in weight to landfill a year. We all like produce a significant amount of volume.

And so it's fun to think about being excited is like now you close that carbon circle. It's like we get all the energy out of it. We sometimes use the language of. We use the whole buffalo, the waste the energy out, we capture the carbon sequester it, you can get the metals out, depending on the ash quality, you can use the ash for, for some soil amendments or other purposes, and so it's sort of the tip of the spear of the circular economy and changes the narrative a bit if you're now getting all of the energy out of the plastic bag or the paper bag and it's carbon is being sequestered often that stuff now counts as a carbon dioxide removal And so all of the like organic biogenic stuff that takes CO2 molecule out of the atmosphere into the banana peel or the hamburger bun.

And now we sequester that underground. And so it does technically remove carbon from the atmosphere from all the biogenic stuff. So it's, it's just yeah, we're, it's still, still for us about, We didn't get into 2027 is the in service date for the facility. But my wife says that all the time. Can't wait till our garbage gets burned at this thing.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, I'm on board, man. I can't wait either. The other thing that I wanted to talk to you about too was just that you were talking about just the sheer mass of garbage. So, And when I was doing the research for the show, I came across that statistic on your site where you guys were talking about there's going to be, what is it, 70 percent more garbage than there is today by 2050.

That is ridiculous.

Sean Collins: Yeah, we it's a weird this one where I would say it's weird. Some people sort of like, oh, like, is waste energy giving up? Shouldn't we like, reduce, reuse, recycle, reprocess? And we're like, all true. We work hand in hand with all those processes. It's sort of the raw math of waste volume generation says a different story.

And, and so generally most projections are like, At least a 50%, if not 70 to a hundred percent increase in per person waste volumes by 2050. If you take, so right now Canada, like Government of Canada stats, we landfill about 26 million tons of garbage in Canada last year. Almost one ton of waste per person per year.

So like 2,200 pounds of garbage per person per. Generated that volume goes to landfill every year. And so we run the numbers that if we just flatline, like say none of the growth happens. We just flatline what we landfill today. In the next 20 years, Canada will landfill 1. 2 trillion pounds of garbage. Not to be like bananas when Rory and I were in the office.

I'm like, is that a trillion? I was like, so it's pretty staggering. The amount of waste it is. And Alberta. Is the highest per capita in Canada and Canada is amongst the highest per capita in the world. And so interesting moment for reflection as well. But again, we think it's part of our normal.

This is how our society operates and we can choose to do environmentally progressive things with but we said the thing with landfill that really sort of grabs me is we, we pay for that as a society. We buy that 1. 2 trillion. Tons of disposal. It's not like that's sort of just something that we do.

It's like it's paid usually to private landfills or sort of regional landfills. We like compensate others for putting it into the earth. You can compensate facilities like ours and just try to create new markets for this. So we're, we're really passionate about the opportunity to create a landfill free future in Canada.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, your timing is absolutely perfect. And yeah, I hope that you build an absolute ton of these things. Sean, it's been amazing. That takes us to the end of our show today. But before I go, you're talking to an absolute ton of entrepreneurs. And you are an incredibly accomplished and inspiring person.

And I just hope that you would give them just a little bit of advice. What's the best piece of advice that you could give to all these aspiring entrepreneurs? You know, maybe they're climate entrepreneurs looking to jump in, but they're a little afraid. What would you say to, you know, 22 year old Sean?

I'd say ambition is free.

Sean Collins: You're Your ambition and the scale and scope of which you go after it sometimes sets the likelihood of success of what you're pursuing. And it's sometimes easier to execute on larger things because they're more material. And it's one of the few things where it doesn't cost you anything to sort of set your sights on aggressive targets.

So ambition is free would be my sort of tone. And we took some pretty ambitious steps. Positions with student energy and Terrapin and now with pharma and generally found that that inspires confidence in people that you have aggressive goals and targets it makes it more material for them to get involved in supporting.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. Amazing. Ambition is free. I love it. I love it. This has been episode 132 of the Business Development Podcast. We have been graced by Sean Collins, CEO of Varme Energy Canada. It was an absolute honor to have you on, Sean. Until next time. This has been the business development podcast, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020, his passion and his specialization. Is in customer relationship generation and business development.

The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca