Green Doers

Aug 1, 2009

Christianne Carin
Ceo, Earthrenew Organics Ltd.
Calgary

For a company with less than $1 million in revenues in its most recent fiscal year, EarthRenew Organics has some high expectations to live up to. The 10-year-old, privately held company has developed a patented,
energy-efficient system for cooking manure into an earth-friendly fertilizer product and last February opened its first processing plant at Cattleland Feedyards in Strathmore, with scores more to be built at locations around North America. The company has been getting more attention outside Alberta than in it, with CEO Christianne Carin invited to speak at international conferences such as the National Clean Energy Project in Washington, D.C.

AV: I gather you have an MBA and some experience with running some other businesses. What led you to EarthRenew?
Christianne Carin: I was working in corporate finance in B.C. and also living on a ranch. I was raising animals [and] the more I fed them, the more they pooed. I was composting and trying to follow the protocol from the feds about composting manure. Then in the spring I took it and I used a land spreader and land-spread my manure on my wonderful, pristine hayfields and came out with the worst infestation of weeds I’d ever seen…. I just don’t think composting is a good idea because it’s a huge pollution problem, it smells like hell, it emits all these greenhouse gases. So I ran an experiment with my kids in my farm kitchen and I cooked [the manure] at different temperatures. Over 400 degrees, I got a constant kill of weed seeds, and the material I was getting almost looked like peat. So I hired an engineer, got a grant and started developing the technology till it evolved to what it is today.

Describe your business model.
Our first unit in a feedlot just outside of Strathmore, we have a contract with the feedlot owner to supply the manure on a daily basis. We take that and cook it at high temperatures and convert it to granules and pellets. We sell it to a large fertilizer company. They take that product and they put it into different marketplaces plus we sell other products ourselves to other marketplaces. Our key marketplaces are organic farming, and we also sell it to high-value produce [growers] and to turf (golf courses, parks) and then we sell it into reclamation and remediation like oilsands and pipelines. So those are our four predominant marketplaces.

Where did the users get their fertilizers before this?
They didn’t. This is a new product in the marketplace. Now, the advantages of this being a specialty product is that currently fertilizers have only about 30% efficiency, which means that if you put 100 pounds of synthetic nitrogen down, only about 30 pounds of that is used by the plants. The rest is lost through greenhouse-gas emissions, runs off into our lakes and streams or runs into aquifers past the root zones…. We are the only viable mass-produced product for the organic farming industry. We can’t produce it fast enough, so we are in the lucky position that we are growing very, very fast.

I read an interview with your chief financial officer, Mark
Kennedy, estimating the enterprise value of EarthRenew at $300 million. Oh, that’s a long time ago. We are substantially more than that now.

Are you still looking for financing or are you set for now?
Actually, I am right now in Toronto at RBC Capital Markets. They’re our financial advisers and we’re doing a private placement for between $50 million and $75 million.

You have been doing a lot of travelling and participating in international gatherings. Why were you invited?
In the U.S., our technology is considered as one of the answers to renewable fuel because of our energy efficiency. Our energy efficiency is at 85%, which is substantially higher then the average in the [fertilizer] industry. So if you took industrial energy efficiency, you are looking at about 30% or less, so they see our technology as a way to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. I spoke at the Reform Institute in April on a panel on energy efficiency and talked about energy efficiency being our fifth fuel, because the more we increase our efficiency, the less fuel we are going to have to use. I went to Geneva with the premier to the Alberta Economic Forum and was one of the presenting companies.