I'd like to introduce our next presentation here at the Planet MicroCap Showcase Toronto, in partnership with MicroCap Club. Joining us right now is Andrew White from CHAR Technologies.
Thanks for being here. This is the first presentation I've been or seen today. I guess Robert's running between rooms, introducing everyone, which is great. Do I need to do anything with that? No. Just the mic? Cool. Right. Well, like I said, thanks for coming. Andrew White, CEO of CHAR Technologies. We'll go very briefly on what CHAR Technologies is, what the technology is, but I won't get too deep into that. We'll talk a little bit more about our approach to the market, what the market is, and how all our investors are going to be able to see some good returns from turning woody biomass into renewable energy products. This is a picture of our first facility. This is in Thorold, Ontario. If you go down to the lake and you're able to go straight across the lake, you're in St. Catharines.
That's where Thorold is, so CHAR was founded in 2009 to commercialize our proprietary high-temperature pyrolysis technology, so all that means, high-temperature pyrolysis just means pyrolysis is without oxygen. High temperature is 800-900 degrees Celsius, so without oxygen, the material we put in our plant can't burn. It just cracks apart into carbon and a gas, so we'll get into what that means in a couple of slides, but as we look at project deployments, our first revenue stream is from carbon, so that's from our Thorold plant right here, so that'll start production 2026. We'll be looking at CAD 4.5 million in project revenue, CAD 1.25 million of free cash flow to the equity partners, and then as we bring on our second product, which is renewable natural gas, that revenue goes up to CAD 28 million.
Nine million of that gets returned to the equity partners because we'll be financing a lot of the project through non-recourse project debt. So this is a really high level. So on the left, wood waste feedstock. So when we talk about Thorold, we're thinking things like shipping pallets or other urban construction demolition wood waste. We're thinking Northern Ontario. We're thinking tree tops, tree limbs, logs that for whatever reason are unmerchantable but have been brought out of the forest. Some of that high-fuel forest fire material that right now is left in the forest, we provide an economic output for it. So we take that product, like I said, heat it up without oxygen and create our two output products. So the first is renewable natural gas. So renewable natural gas is interchangeable with natural gas.
So as far as the pipeline's concerned, or the appliance using the gas, is exactly the same. The difference is we can get 20-year offtake agreements with utilities. These are completely independent of the price of natural gas. So it's a fixed price indexed to inflation 20 years with a pretty creditworthy off-taker. Pricing CAD 40 a gigajoule plus, because most people get their gas in cubic meters. To convert that, you pay about five bucks a gigajoule natural gas delivered to your house to run your furnace. The utilities will pay us CAD 40. So that gives you a sense of the market premium we can get for renewable natural gas. On the biocarbon side, we sometimes refer to that as biocoal. It's a replacement for metallurgical coal. So this is a drop-in replacement for metallurgical coal and steelmaking or other metal processing applications.
And what we're showing here on the bottom is just how the market has changed rather rapidly in terms of what the pricing you can get for these products. What's driving the biocarbon price is demand for green steel. So a lot of that is from European market players that want to see a lower carbon intensity of their steel. What's driving the renewable natural gas are minimum RNG mandates in the pipeline. So that's both in British Columbia and Quebec, where they want to see 10% of the gas to be renewable. And in order to incent producers like ourselves, they keep bringing the price up to get that gas into the grid. So important to us is really bringing on strategic partners to get these projects moving and moving quickly. So when we look at strategic partners, who's involved and kind of how are they helping with us?
So first is ArcelorMittal, so the world's second largest steel and mining company. They invested in CHAR in 2023. Across the lake in Hamilton is where their Dofasco facility is. Dofasco will be the offtaker of our biocoal from our Thorold project. And really, we've worked with them since 2017 to validate the drop-in replacement value of the biocarbons or biocoals that we're making for their application. The BMI Group recently invested in CHAR as well, and they put CAD 8 million into our Thorold project. They're the largest owner of defunct pulp and paper mills. How that works well for us and where the strategic alignment is, is most of those pulp and paper mills are no longer making pulp and paper, but they have all the infrastructure and access to biomass that we would like for our projects.
So we essentially can become a core tenant in their facilities. On Friday, they just announced the acquisition of two more facilities, one in Espanola, the former Domtar facility, which was Ontario's second biggest, as well as Mackenzie in British Columbia. They're buying all these facilities, and they need to re-tenant it. That's a really good alignment for us. Third is Lake Nipigon Forest Management Inc. They're our partner in our Lake Nipigon project. They have a tremendous amount of wood waste and biomass available, 500,000 tons a year without even having an outlet for it. They're our feedstock supply partner and our project partner on that project. Speaking of projects, this is what the map looks like for the next three to five years.
You can see in green Thorold, that's down in southern Ontario, more or less limited in size to be this CAD 28 million in project revenue a year because of the availability of biomass. There's only so much that you can collect in southern Ontario and work with. When we look at Lake Nipigon, you can see the numbers start to get much bigger because there is that availability of biomass. So we're essentially creating modular plants so we can grow it or shrink it based on biomass availability. But there's a lot more up in Lake Nipigon. We then look at the next set of projects that are in development. So that's Saint-Félicien up in the Saguenay of Quebec. If you know Saguenay, you know there's a lot of ferrosilicon production and alumina production up there. So there's still a good home for the biocarbons.
And then the third, and then Espanola, I just mentioned, was just bought by BMI. We're starting feasibility work there. One more is Baltimore. Baltimore is a project we built for Synagro, which is North America's largest biosolids processor. Biosolids are the dried sludge from a wastewater treatment plant. That project, we're destroying PFAS, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a couple of slides. In that market space, it's a slightly different delivery model. We're not building, owning, and operating the facilities. We're working with Synagro to deploy this technology on their sites. Like I said, renewable energy facility one, this is Thorold. This was, you saw the picture at the beginning. This was about a month ago. We've put a lot of equipment in place just over the last month.
million, so almost 13 million in non-dilutive government funding. As I mentioned, CAD 8 million from the BMI Group to bring it on biocoal offtake is signed with ArcelorMittal just down the highway in Hamilton. Phase two renewable natural gas production is targeted for 2026. We have, if it worked. Oh, didn't work, Galen. Let's try that again. Derek was right. The videos never work. Anyway, we can send you a great drone video, but we're basically doing a walkthrough. This is the Thorold facility now. That bin is still there. But now you can see a few other things. Biomass cleaning is basically what's on the left. We're taking out nails. We're taking out stones. We're taking out all the contaminants we don't want. Then inside is where the kiln's going.
We're not showing pictures of that anymore because that's where kind of our secret sauce is. Anyone going down to Niagara or Thorold, you want a site visit, give us a shout. We're always happy to walk people through the facility. I'm going to try one. No, Spacebar goes ahead. This is another video, and so hopefully it works. This is of our biocoal production. Probably don't need the sound. That's what biocoal looks like as it comes off the end of the line. Again, we're kind of keeping the video tight because we don't want to show everything going on in there. This is what a biocoal pellet looks like. It's a very cool like. It's a cylindrical pellet that we can pack in super sacks or put in a truck and get down the highway to Dofasco.
So a little bit more sort of by the numbers, what do these projects look like? This is, again, that first project, our Thorold project. You can see the total revenue increasing as we get gas online. The EBITDA is still positive for just the first phase of biocoal, and then that grows as we bring gas online. And then there's that free cash flow to equity. This is total equity. So in this project, we're a 50% owner. So we get 50% of that up to CHAR. We look at our second project. So this is the project site. There's actually been more work done since this picture was taken. But this is with our partners up in Nipigon. So Lake Nipigon Forest Management Inc., they operate on about a million hectares of forest land, which is one-fifth the size of Nova Scotia.
So they have a lot of access to biomass. They're building this facility already. So they're doing some work. They're aggregating biomass here. And so they put in roads. They've cleared the land. Just to the bottom of that tent is where our project site is going to be. You can see it's drawn here on the triangle. So there's a tremendous amount of biomass. A lot of the traditional uses of some of the lower value biomass are drying up, but there's a lot of requirement to find homes for it and to keep that working. So similar to Thorold, you can see kind of a ramp-up of revenue. So we can get to biocoal production rather quickly. That starts to drive the initial revenue. And then we get the renewable natural gas up and running to start to drive those bigger revenue numbers on the projects.
I said I would get back to it. This is our project with Synagro in Baltimore. This is our demonstration plant with them. They paid us to build it for them because these PFAS forever chemicals are a pretty big problem. To give you a tiny bit of context, Synagro's business model is they basically get a contract from a wastewater treatment plant to process the sewage sludge. They build a dryer. They make pellets. They package the pellets. They sell the pellets as a fertilizer. When the pellets are saturated with PFAS, and by saturated, it doesn't have to be a lot. The regulations for PFAS are in the parts per trillion. We can only really measure parts per million, but the regulations are ahead of our ability to measure.
But what that means is they can no longer sell the output as a fertilizer. Instead of making $50 a ton, they're paying $100 a ton to get rid of the product. So it's a really important challenge for them. We've been working with Synagro since about 2017 to show high temperature pyrolysis destroys PFAS. So now we're left with a biochar instead of a biosolid. PFAS is gone. They can still put it in those same value chains that they have in order to get rid of the product and start driving revenue again from the back end. So this six-month demo, the six months ends in December. So it's been running. The big test is going to be on November 15th, where we bring in third-party labs, or Synagro does. They're doing that to measure all the inputs, all the outputs, and really show that it's being destroyed.
But like I said, we've been working with them since 2017, doing a lot of scale-up work. And then how does that work different from the woody biomass? So those projects that I just talked about, the projects we will be a developer, we'll be an owner, we'll really capture the long-term value of the revenue streams. With the PFAS and biosolids, it really comes into a licensing model where we can get some recurring license fees and some engineering fees. But it's a very well-established marketplace, and we don't need to get in there. Let's see if this one works. This one does work. So this is a picture of the structure of the plant that we built for Synagro for the recent. But basically, this yellow bin is where we're collecting all the biochar, which we can sell at the end of the day.
One quick slide on corporate profile, and I'm trying to go quick to leave lots of time for questions for everyone. This is what things look like today. Small institutions are about 5%, CHAR Technologies, insiders, and management; we're at 15%. As I mentioned, ArcelorMittal is an investor. They hold 9%, BMI Group at 8%. The rest is out. When we look at project-level investments, this is money going directly into projects. We're at CAD 28 million that's gone into projects, both from non-dilutive government grants. Government of Canada and Government of Ontario, these are all non-dilutive. Of the Ontario money, only CAD 3 million is potentially repayable if we don't create 10 jobs, which for CAD 3 million, we'll definitely create 10 jobs. We can kind of count that as non-dilutive as well. What does this all mean altogether?
Of the three primary facilities that are either being built or in development, one is a brownfield at Thorold, one is a greenfield up in Lake Nipigon, and then the Espanola facility is integrating existing biomass infrastructure. So we're looking at these three development models. So they're all going to be proven out. We are continuing to finance projects at the project level. So both project equity and non-recourse project debt. So everything comes into the project level. So we don't need to go out and do huge financings to build these facilities. And what it really comes down to then is we have one de-risk platform sort of ready for global deployment. And that's the plan, and that's CHAR. As I said, trying to leave lots of time for questions here. So happy to answer them, and thanks for your attention. Questions?
Yeah. Synagro operates in 34 states in the U.S., and he guesses as to how many municipalities weeks before they might be dealing with.
Yeah, so Synagro has the very, very direct, like the dryers where this is directly applicable is 15 or 16. And then they have some other facilities that do other types of waste stabilization that could very much use this technology as well. But in terms of a plug and play, there's about 15 dryer operations where they could plug this into the back.
What you guys, so $10 million worth of your equipment, or with the response of you're not paying for it, but you're hoping you would license anything on it. Would it be $500,000 per location per year, or something with changes, something more interesting?
Yeah, so the equipment to go on the back end of these projects would be right in that CAD 10 million range. Larger plants than the one I just showed you, gas scrubbing, all the good stuff. The other benefit I didn't talk about is we make this for the biosolids project. We do not make renewable natural gas, but we make a gas that can offset natural gas in their burners. So there's additional revenue streams or cost offsets for them. So equipment-wise, it's about CAD 10 million. And then how that licensing arrangement works is still subject to negotiation. But to give you an idea, if you want to start playing with some industry averages of percentages that you'd see on a license.
And so the gas that it's stripped of its acidity, the kind of methane and carbon dioxide handling of food and waste and stuff like this?
Yeah, it's a mix of methane, hydrogen, and carbon monoxide are the three energy-giving gases. So that can go through a burner kind of behind the meter without any issue. When we talk about renewable natural gas, we have to bring that up to be 99% plus methane. So it can go into the pipeline. So it's slightly different gas technology, but we can still create value either way.
And that'd be part of the revenue that it's generating for the eventual facility and what else?
Yeah, yeah. Because it's in the U.S., the ability to capture sort of environmental credits behind the meter is less than in other jurisdictions. So kind of worst case, it's natural gas offset. Best case is natural gas offset plus some environmental credits. But again, that'll be state by state and depending when the project gets built. Yeah.
It's just a big $150 per ton of spread, so to speak, on what they were basing previously selling for $50, and now it's costing $100. Dump it, assuming it's 10,000 tons per year as a guess, and both of our sites are holding zeros. You're talking about the potential sense of urgency with regard to Synagro going, "Stop this pain," or something like that.
Yeah. It depends again on the jurisdiction, for sure. In some jurisdictions, like in Baltimore in the Northeast, that is the reality today. In other jurisdictions, like in Texas, they're currently facing lawsuits from people that they've spread these biosolids on. They said, "Your dried biosolids have contaminated our farmland, and that's a big deal." It depends. Like I said, in some jurisdictions, it's very much a monetary like Baltimore.
Baltimore, in terms of dry biosolids, is actually a bit bigger than 10,000 tons. So it's a big facility and a big concern. And that's why we chose Baltimore with them first. But even in jurisdictions where they could get rid of it cheaper, they have these other social license challenges like being sued. So it's urgent, for sure. And maybe another way to emphasize the urgency is they paid us to build a pilot to demonstrate our technology on their site, but it's paid by them because they really do need the solution.
Can you go through project economics on one of these facilities from a greenfield perspective?
Yeah. So Nipigon's probably the best one to walk through. So when we look at the revenue piece is what we're looking at here. So CAD 55 million, roughly, in CapEx. What that includes is everything, including putting the building up to put the equipment in, the equipment sort of all in. Then from sort of how the revenue comes down, we cover OpEx and funded reserves and labor and all that good stuff. Then we have our debt service. Roughly speaking, we're about 30% to cash flow, depending on the project from that revenue line. Cover labor, cover materials. That's the 30% is from the revenue line. The CAD 55 million, we get that first chunk covered in grants. Then there's a little bit of equity, and we'll be.
Without any grants, what's an IRR on the one project?
Yeah. Take all the grants, assume 70/30 debt to equity ratio. We'd be high 20s% to low 30s%. Sorry? Pre-tax.
That's factoring what for feedstock costs?
So I'm sometimes a little cagey about feedstock costs because it's a competitive market, but we do have to pay for it. It is our biggest line item, followed by labor. So that is factored into the model. But we do very much expect to pay for biomass. We're not expecting it for free. Yeah, in the back. With the Lake Nipigon project, it's ramping up, and then the RNG comes in at year three and four. Are you scaling up the project, or why is it a scale-up? Why does it go like that? That's a good question. So we're putting up a big enough building to manage scale-ups. So the way it'll work is we have the first two kilns. It'll be a four-kiln system. So the first two kilns come in. For 2026, they're not generating revenue for the full year. So it's a partial year.
2027, that's the full year production of two kilns. 2028, we add the revenue from the renewable natural gas of the first two kilns, and then we double the system. So we put two more kilns and the gas system all as one next step.
Is there a piping there? Pipeline, the offer for offtake, what we have?
Yeah, there's two options. You can't quite see it, but just at the bottom of this picture is another clearing for the TransCanada Pipeline. So it's directly across the property. And then there's a virtual injection station, which means they move the gas by trucks about eight kilometers away in Red Rock. So we have two really good options for how to get the gas to market. And that's my time.
Okay. Thanks, everyone. I'll be around.