Industrial Symbiosis

Galen Nelson
Hello, and welcome to Thoughtful Climate, where each month we highlight experts, pioneers, and practitioners from a variety of existing and emerging climate tech sectors, as well as subject matter experts who can provide insights into the broader economic, social, and technological dynamics shaping the climate tech industry. My guests today are Christopher Sorensen, who is the founding CEO of GreenLab Denmark, and Kyle Gittchell, the Circular Economy Development Director at the Washington State Department of Commerce. Welcome, Christopher and Kyle, and thanks for joining me today.

Galen Nelson
Thank you. So, we are going to be talking today about industrial symbiosis. Before I turn to Christopher and Kyle, I want to briefly set the table, as I do each time, for our conversation. You may have heard about symbiotic relationships in the natural environment. Fungal species, for example, that grow on the roots of trees and provide critical nutrients to trees in exchange for carbohydrates. There are many more examples of symbiotic relationships in our natural environment across species and even across kingdoms. So what can we learn from these natural symbiotic relationships that can help inform our approach to industrial efficiency, wastewater, and environmental impact reduction, while creating new solutions and business opportunities? In e-fuels manufacturing, for example, low-embodied carbon product manufacturing, building heating, and more, we have seen limited adoption of relatively simple bilateral forms of industrial symbiosis, where, for example, one facility's waste stream becomes another facility's feedstock, benefiting both, increasing efficiencies and profit, and reducing environmental and climate impacts. But increasingly, and particularly as our energy mix becomes more complex and technology cost curves come down, we are seeing opportunities for more multi-layered, complex, synergistic relationships between a variety of industrial market actors. These new technological opportunities beg the question: do we need new economic development and planning frameworks to fully leverage synergistic sectors? So that is what we are going to be talking about today with Christopher and Kyle.

Galen Nelson
Christopher and Kyle, thanks again for joining me. I think this is going to be a really fun session, and I am glad we will be bringing two very different perspectives to this conversation. Christopher, I would love to start with you if I could. Please take a moment to introduce yourself. I would love to hear your kind of elevator pitch on industrial symbiosis. I think you have been in this space for a while, and I think you have really honed it. I think part of what I really appreciate is you have figured out a way to talk about industrial symbiosis that I think is really compelling from an economic development perspective, but also resonates with climate hawks as much as it does with investors. So Christopher, I would love to hear your perspective first.

Christopher Sorensen
Thanks, Galen. Thanks for the invitation, and happy to meet you all online. I am originally from New England, born in Connecticut, and began with Accenture out of Manhattan as an international project leader, which launched me into my global career. Accenture sent me to Paris about my fourth or fifth year in, and I never came back. I have been working globally since then. I have gathered experience in innovation, technology, smart cities, renewable energy, and industry. This has led me to create resilient growth platforms by doing systemic solutions for different stakeholders. More recently, Masdar Group in Abu Dhabi, and then as founding CEO of GreenLab in Denmark. Right now, I am based in Denmark with my family. I work as an independent advisor for the Danish Foreign Ministry and for the Director General of ISA, which is Global South Eco Development, and for companies, regions, and boards which seek to create these symbiotic platforms. The quick elevator pitch is to reduce CAPEX for the industrial participants and to make quicker operations startup for the installations. Because you are doing this as a cooperative effort, you can create shared value by making a cooperative investment, which speeds up everybody's infrastructure efforts. Being the one point of contact for public and private entities means you can get umbrella permitting and have land use all lined up on behalf of a large synergistic group of stakeholders. So there are a lot of advantages other than CO2 which one can play to in creating these platforms.

Galen Nelson
Okay, great. Thanks, Christopher. That provides a good foundation for the beginning of our conversation. Kyle, turning to you, I think it is really noteworthy and wonderful that Washington State has an industrial symbiosis program at all, and that you lead the department's circular economy work. So I would love to hear a little bit more about yourself, and if you could, what is the origin story there for Washington State's investment in circular economy programming and market development?

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, thank you. And to echo Christopher, thank you for having us on to have this chat. I would be remiss not to talk about some of the other folks that have really stood up the industrial symbiosis and circular economy work for the state, because I actually came to this relatively newly. I started this role in July of last year after working in other areas of policy around diversity, equity, and inclusion, housing and homelessness, and really having a lens on systems improvement from a government lens. That is my passion, bureaucratic systems, which is a weird passion to have. I should probably examine that at some point.

Galen Nelson
Nobody has to care about that, Kyle.

Kyle Gitchell
Someone has to care, right? From this government systems approach, how are we making things work? Department of Commerce specifically does a lot of grant making. Washington State's Department of Commerce is a primarily pass-through entity for state projects. What the symbiosis work looks like from our point of view is back in 2021, through some hard work from folks like Center for Sustainable Infrastructure, CSI, iSustainable, and Scan Design Foundation, and many others, really pushing for, hey, Denmark, Kalundborg, they have got this model around the symbiotic relationships between manufacturing facilities. Now, that is not to say that work was not already happening to some degree here. We do have some examples of folks that either vertically integrated systems where they were reducing waste or already had symbiotic relationships with each other without really knowing it or using that language. But 2021 is when the grant program really kicked off, and that is when the Department of Commerce started funding these community projects. Another part of my role is also as a part of our Recycling Market Development Center, which lines up really nicely with the circular economy piece and the industrial symbiosis work. That is a partnership between Commerce and Ecology that started in 2019. When you come out to Washington, people do care about the climate impacts, but we also have to have conversations really rooted in matching climate impact with economic growth when we are talking about these things. That is why Commerce has this program, and why our Office of Economic Development, where I am seated within Commerce, has this program, so that we can have those conversations really concentratedly. The other piece of this that has been successful in bolstering the funding behind the grant program has been the engagement with the legislature. Our state legislators, several dozen, have been on these foreign study tours to go to places like Denmark to see the infrastructure, to see what it looks like to do symbiosis at scale, and that is bipartisan as well. We are talking both Republican and Democrat.

Galen Nelson
No, that is wonderful, Kyle, and I appreciate what you said about this being the evolution of perhaps the next natural step for us to take with regard to industrial efficiency. There has been a lot of focus, and I think a healthy embrace, of industrial decarbonization and embracing clean energy, not simply for the sake of or in service of climate objectives, but to reduce energy costs and improve resilience. I feel like the next natural evolution in this space is to take it a step further and begin to think about the symbiotic relationships between industrial players. I think that is what I find so intriguing about this space. I do want to provide for both of you, for our listeners, some concrete examples. My sense of this space is very similar to how I have been an observer of the microgrid sector for a long time. As the saying goes, if you have seen one microgrid, you have seen one microgrid. Similarly, I am wondering if you have seen one industrial symbiosis park, you have seen one industrial symbiosis park. In other words, there are probably many different permutations of what industrial symbiosis might look like at many different scales. I would like to provide some concrete examples for listeners so they really understand what we are talking about here. That can involve, for example, the exchange of materials, including waste. It could be the exchange of thermal energy, or water, or some combination of all three. There do seem to be some symbiotic relationships in the industrial space that perhaps are a little bit more repeatable, more common, including the exchange of thermal energy, for example, where one facility's waste heat is used productively by one or more other facilities, waste-to-energy and waste-to-fuel solution examples, novel uses of treated wastewater, carbon capture. So maybe we could start with heat first. Making use of waste heat. There is no doubt that higher natural gas costs in Europe have encouraged the creative use of waste heat there. I was shocked to learn recently during a visit from a delegation from Denmark that waste heat in the EU is estimated at approximately 2,800 terawatt hours per year, which to put into perspective is roughly equivalent to the EU's total demand for space and service sectors. So an enormous resource that is going untapped there. I am wondering if you could both quickly provide an example. Maybe we will start with you, Christopher, of industrial symbiosis that specifically involves the productive use of waste heat.

Christopher Sorensen
Yes, of course. I think Denmark is probably the leader in Europe in this domain. However, the prevalent structure has been combined heat and power and industrial waste heat to residential users. So we have been very good at creating these district heating systems. I can mention in Abu Dhabi, they did district cooling systems, so both thermally based and very effective. However, most of us are familiar with the Lawrence Livermore Lab analysis that shows 60% plus of heat going to waste in industrial processes. This is where we took a conscious decision in Denmark to do something about that. Kyle mentioned Kalundborg, which is an industrial area around a harbor where the neighbors, organically, over decades, started connecting themselves and making more cost-efficient use of their heat and waste heat. While GreenLab, which is the first operating example of a built-for-purpose mesh and resource symbiosis net—in fact, we trademarked SymbiosisNet as part of our recognition—couples industrial partners directly B2B. So this conscious infrastructure design and the proportional storage and conversion elements enabled heat to be reapplied. Specifically, in the GreenLab example, we had protein extraction dryers, a biogas plant with methane upgrades, pyrolysis plants, and green hydrogen electrolyzers, and residential district heating all as part of the symbiosis. We could see temperatures cascading, so we got one source of heat cascading from 300 to 220 to 180, 130, 80, and 50 degrees Celsius. If you have one high-temperature heat source as waste heat, you can reuse it at these different levels of input and output streams as long as you create the infrastructure to make that work. Economically, that works best if the distances are relatively short, because the thermal pipes to exchange are, as we all know, quite expensive. So we designed this cluster to make the best use of that unified cascade. In fact, this year, GreenLab will complete a renewables-powered thermal storage which can provide up to 1200 degrees Celsius to the park and attract new industrial users who need that higher temperature as well. So not just waste heat at maybe 60 or 80 degrees, but actually high temperature heat which can become part of the top side of the cascade effect and then provide input and output streams to various different processes. That just requires, of course, a lot of stakeholder engagement, but once you do the conscious design, you can also create attractive profiles which attract new industries, and you can then enhance iteratively the infrastructure and the exchange process.

Galen Nelson
In a more sophisticated or granular sense of what the specific heat needs are.

Christopher Sorensen
Exactly.

Galen Nelson
You have the higher temperature waste heat, which may be useful for some processes, and the low temp heat, which could be very useful for space heating in the residential sector.

Christopher Sorensen
Or even, Galen, one of the things we found interesting was there is some preheating in some of these industries as well, because they need to maintain temperatures. When they have input streams coming in, like biomaterials, they cannot just toss them in and figure it is going to work out. They need to manage the gradients, so even 50 and 80 degree heat could be used in preheating processes so that you maintain balances, for example, in biogas plants, where the bacteria have to thrive at certain temperature thresholds. So there are a lot of nuances which are underserved in many industries.

Galen Nelson
Kyle, in terms of the productive use of waste heat in Washington, are you seeing examples of that?

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, I can give a couple of specific examples. I am not going to be as elegant as Christopher. I think he has got quite a bit of knowledge and that direct experience with GreenLab is useful. From our area, though, we have, for example, an Amazon facility in Seattle that is centered between multiple other buildings that have data centers, different sorts of types of waste heat. I know data centers are a part of the conversations in economic development right now, so it is really timely to note that Amazon has taken the waste heat off of a data center where our Department of Commerce's Seattle office is located and is pulling that waste heat into their facility to use as part of their heating infrastructure. If you have this corporate building sitting there not having to generate their own heat, they are able, because of pulling off multiple buildings' waste heat, to many times of the year just not even run their own heat generating systems. It is just using that waste heat. Another example, which we had touched on a little bit before the call started, is the project we have got going on in Longview, where there is a set of companies that are very closely co-located with each other. There is a pulp and paper mill, a packaging company, and a lumber mill. The pulp and paper mill and packaging company sell steam heat. One sells steam to the other. That reduces the amount of generation of new steam that happens in the area, which obviously lowers the energy usage for the facility. But it is a cost savings for both as well, because then they are not having to pay for as much generation from the one facility, and the other facility is able to have another revenue stream by selling off steam. So it is really interesting to see something that would have just gone up into the atmosphere, with both facilities having to generate their own heat, you can then take that waste and sell it and actually create a new revenue stream for a business off of something that you would have just otherwise been dispersing.

Galen Nelson
Yeah, absolutely. I think that this came up conceptually. One of the projects has been pulled back here in Massachusetts, but I had a conversation with a colleague of mine also in the economic development space, and we were talking about a data center that was planned for a community in Massachusetts and a food processing facility that was also planned for that same community. The immediate thought there was food processing is very thermally intensive; you have to produce a lot of hot water, and data centers produce a lot of waste heat. So I think this requires a new way of thinking for economic development practitioners to apply this energy knowledge to help inform economic development decisions, resource allocation, incentives, and technical assistance in a very concrete way. So thank you for those examples.

Galen Nelson
I want to shift now to the materials side. I think there are a number of interesting examples, including the use of municipal solid waste and agricultural waste to produce e-fuels. In Massachusetts, we have what we call the "copiousness of organic waste," which is a resource that we have been working to better utilize. Through those processes, you can blend those resources with CO2 to produce biofuels, to produce methanol, and other useful byproducts. In some cases, you can also destroy PFAS in the process, which is a goal that is broadly shared. I am wondering if either of you could speak to examples here of symbiotic industrial relationships that are leveraging waste materials and MSW in some cases, municipal solid waste, to produce e-fuels or other useful byproducts. Christopher, do you want to lead us off?

Galen Nelson
Oh, and you are on mute, Christopher, sorry.

Christopher Sorensen
Classic conversation with myself. It went really well, by the way. So there is one consideration: PFAS and other wastewater products, which often are difficult to process and difficult to find a home. We found some nice solutions where you could treat the water just enough, for example, getting rid of heavy metals, but then PFAS could be applied to electrolysis, which splits them, so it is taken care of that problem, which is really difficult. We have got a lot of research in Denmark where we are quite eccentric about our groundwater. We want 110% pure, otherwise it just does not work. So we work extensively on that, and electrolysis is one of the best applications to get rid of PFAS. You can use wastewater or industrial water sources to do that, redirecting that from the current treatments for pesticides and the like over to getting it just enough—not to potable water, but to electrolysis level, which is deionized and no heavy metals, but otherwise quite tolerant for these types of things. The other side of it, as you mentioned, is pyrolysis. I have seen pretty much the spectrum of pyrolysis. One of those I really like is agricultural waste to pyrolysis, which provides biochar. If you are very, very good at the pyrolysis, you can get organic-level biochar that is non-contaminant with tars or other things, and that can go direct to the fields again, increasing soil quality. So that is a great CCU process. Other pyrolysis I have seen is on plastic waste. In fact, we had a startup at GreenLab which became acquired by Viridor, a global waste company, after three years and has been globalized already after five years. So this is an economically viable reuse and upcycling of waste plastics. Then finally, landfill and organic waste in particular. I am aware of CORE in the USA, K-O-R-E. I believe they are out of Massachusetts, in fact, or New York State, but very close to where you are, and starting to globalize their landfill organic waste processes to energy and to fuels. There are also microwave systems which we have trialed in Denmark, again, to organic waste direct to fuels, and of course, steam reforming and biogas. What I am seeing more and more is the biogas process turning into multi-value streams. So you have the CO2 capture for biogenic CO2, which can be used for fuels. You have the waste streams, which are fiber—a lot of fiber involved—which can go to pyrolysis for agricultural biochar. Then you have direct steam reforming for turning biogas into fuels, which are biobased fuels, which means circular CO2. All of these are in what you might say are growth and commercialization phases. So it is a question of finding the right sites with the right needs and the right clusters so that you make them more and more viable and then can scale them up appropriately.

Galen Nelson
Yeah, thank you, Christopher. I do want to not underestimate the challenges there. I have had a number of fascinating conversations recently with really thoughtful colleagues in state government here in Massachusetts about supporting and advancing advanced waste-to-energy approaches. There are a wide variety of technology solutions, but you are absolutely right that the siting can be very challenging, and then the financing for those projects aggregating enough waste. In the context of industrial symbiosis, thinking about whether it might be possible to locate facilities near an anchor feedstock producer, if you will. A number of different challenges, but given that the tipping fees are so high for waste removal in this state, it is certainly a good time to be looking at new solutions.

Christopher Sorensen
You touch on a good point, Galen, with the input streams, and often that is really the key factor, and co-location. So, for example, biogas, continuous process, provides these residual streams which are fiber-heavy. The farmers do not want the fiber; they want the nutrients. So if you sort out the fibers, and the biogas is already clustered around the input streams, then you have a direct relation between the biogas and the pyrolysis, which becomes very positive products, like biochar and fuels. But input streams and the competition for input streams—where you have tipping fees, suddenly the waste becomes more and more valuable, so everybody starts competing, which means you get a fragmented market. In this case, public-private partnerships and community working to consolidate these input streams to processes becomes an important element of putting these clusters together. There is some nuance there. You cannot just show up as a commercial actor and hope you can consolidate these input streams and make it viable. Often it requires a good consortium, including the public and private entities, to make sure that this becomes viable by consolidating those input and output streams.

Galen Nelson
Yeah, agreed. Specifically, I have heard that it is very helpful, for example, if you have off-take agreements that may be anchored by the public sector to provide, for example, e-fuels for sanitation trucks, just one example. Kyle, to you, either if you feel comfortable speaking to this, or toward examples of symbiotic materials exchange between industrial facilities in Washington state, whichever approach you would like to take.

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, no, I have got a few examples. Actually, I think we could send it out after this, but the Washington State Industrial Symbiosis Program webpage has a litany of examples of things that we have funded, and a lot of them go towards renewable natural gas from anaerobic digestion, the materials exchanges. There is a bunch of things there. One I wanted to highlight specifically at this point, though: Pasco, City of Pasco over in eastern Washington here, they have been developing a wastewater reuse facility. What they are doing is pulling wastewater from multiple food processing plants. There are a few things that are beneficial there. One, they can pull this wastewater off of these plants, use algae to reduce the nitrogen content in it, and then use that water for agricultural usage. So, lots of agricultural land, lots of crop use there, but because of the slight nitrogen content that is still in the water, it reduces the fertilizer need on the land. In addition to that, the algae is then being used as a fertilizer source itself, which is another product that is created from that process. They are adding on renewable natural gas to this as well. So for those things that are not pulled out by the algae or not pulled out in the treatment process, they are able to use the anaerobic digestion process to then pull natural gas off of it. So you have got multiple food processing plants that are pouring into this one wastewater reuse facility that is then getting co-products and multiple uses, revenue streams off of these that are having environmental impacts, revenue stream generating benefits, and it is really cool to see this sort of multi-purpose approach just to something like a wastewater treatment facility. There is a lot to be captured there. These things are happening at both a very large and a very small scale. To speak to something on the other end of the scale, we have a company that is pulling shellfish waste out of the waste stream prior to even entering the wastewater treatment facilities. You have got fisheries around Washington state that are able to partner with them, sell off the shellfish waste, and that is being turned then into a biopolymer. Kaidosan is the name of the material, but they are turning it into a biopolymer and using that for other industrial processes. It is cool to see at both ends of the scale you have companies that are privately being able to take advantage of some of the symbiotic relationships and some of the recycling innovation that is happening within those materials exchanges, and then also at the large public sector scale, public works scale, you have cogeneration and this other revenue-generating benefit coming off of this work.

Galen Nelson
That is great. I think this is a good opportunity. I thought we might have time to get into carbon capture and storage or sequestration, but I think I would like to pivot now to: okay, this all sounds great, how do we encourage this kind of activity? I think a lot of people would be very curious about that. Those are the two broad topics I would like to cover in our time remaining: the kind of regulatory or economic development programming structures that encourage and support this kind of development, and then I also want to talk about how these deals are papered, what type of contractual relationships exist between industrial symbiotic partners. Kyle, let us start with you, because that sounds like a fascinating example. How did that relationship start, right, between the shellfish waste producer, if you will, that waste stream, and the biopolymer manufacturer? I mean, did they meet at a cocktail party? How do these things happen? And how are you in your role facilitating this matchmaking and this relationship building? Some of it may happen through natural networks and market forces, but this is a big part of your charge in leading circular economy activities, that you are trying to facilitate and encourage these types of strategic partnerships.

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, and I did say at the top of the hour that I was into bureaucratic systems, so this is my time to shine. Really, what a lot of this looks like, honestly, in that specific example, this is something that the folks over at Tidal Vision, the company there, they have developed the technology, the research, the engineering, all of these things. Where the state is able to step in, and where our role within the circular economy as a state entity is able to step in, is catalyzing in a couple of different ways. There is a ton of innovation, a ton of great thinking, folks that are able to say, hey, I see a problem, and I have got a solution for it. However, to a point that was made earlier, the financing can be a barrier. Knowing about each other, knowing about where to site, who to partner with can be a barrier, and some of the permitting can be a barrier. An example of permitting issues, we had a project that we funded through our grant program that the county they were siting in did not really know what to do with it. It is like, do we need the air quality permit to look like this, or do we need it to look like that? That put some delays on. They ended up successfully implementing their project, but some of these things take additional time because it is new. Part of our role at the state level is in the connecting, the educating, and the funding of these projects. I think the grant program specifically that we have, in the last grant cycle, 51 applicants applied, so that was a huge amount of interest. We only had enough funding to fund 11 of those projects. Right now, we are working through a current grant cycle, and we are seeing similar levels of interest. That is great to see. That means a lot of people around the state have all these projects that are ready to go, but the financing is an issue, the funding is an issue to really get them over that hump into commercialization or actually doing the activity. That is a part of it. The other part, when it comes to sort of that matchmaking or learning like, where do I site, who do I partner with, that comes into, honestly, having conversations like these, where I am able to come out and say, hey, I am me, who are you, what are you up to? Hey, now we know there is another company that is doing this that is really interested in this stuff. Let us connect, let us talk. A lot of talking, a lot of connecting, and that, frankly, goes a long way. It is the relationship development, the relationship building that is important. In addition to that, we have got a program that we are just starting up this year for technical assistance, where we are able to contract, we are working on contracting with one or more entities to get out there and do some more deliberate feasibility design, education, some of the community design and engagement work. There are two of us in the circular economy team for a whole state of people, so having that contract will be really helpful in getting some more focus in on specific community projects that are interested in doing this, that maybe funding is not always the issue, maybe it is an education thing, maybe it is a networking and connections thing that they need, and we will be able to support that more readily.

Galen Nelson
So I am hearing a mix of technical assistance, there is some straight-up business development, connecting folks. But tactically, are your funding solicitations supporting feasibility studies? Are you supporting actual projects, like steel in the ground? How are you actually deploying your funding?

Kyle Gitchell
It is a mix of those things. The trick is how we evaluate and prioritize different types of projects. We have got an evaluation process that helps us to pull out sort of those ready-to-go projects, those ones that are like, hey, I just need this amount of money, and we will be implemented, and we will be commercialized. That is not to say that we do not also fund feasibility, engineering, design. Folks really like to see the shovels going in the ground, something is getting built, particularly when there is a clear both climate impact and jobs impact for the area. It is really great to see when there are jobs that are being generated from this work, and I think it helps to highlight the ongoing success of the program and make sure that that funding continues to happen for folks to be able to get out there and put these projects into motion. Jumping back to the Tidal Vision example, with the Kaidosan going into biopolymer, there was one fishery in the state that was not going to do their shrimp season because they could not afford it. Because of the funding that we provided to Tidal Vision, they were able to take up this partnership with them, buy the shrimp waste, and turn that into their Kaidosan process. What that allowed that fishery to do is continue that season. They were able to fish for that season, which is several jobs in a rural area that would have been greatly impacted by the loss of that employment.

Galen Nelson
And then diverting that waste generated funds.

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, exactly. We diverted the waste and created jobs all at the same time.

Galen Nelson
Great. Christopher, how about you? I remember when we first sat down and talked about GreenLab, I was wondering how did that all come together? Was there a master developer type approach? I am also reflecting on the conversations we had about what an exploration like that might look like in Massachusetts. I think we had begun to have some very rich conversations around gathering together experts who have a sense of the kind of waste streams that are available in different regions and the different assets of different regions around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and how that might inform a more detailed exploration or audit of industrial symbiotic opportunities. I would love to hear how GreenLab came together and whether or not that same approach might be useful for us here in the Commonwealth.

Christopher Sorensen
I have worked on initiating these platforms from top down via sovereign wealth funds and billions of dollars as a strategic effort in Abu Dhabi, and from community base, which was GreenLab. They were losing citizens, losing population, and just needed to renew their region to attract new citizens to the area. So they had a burning platform, basically, and they said, what do we do? So they started a community effort, and then we started mapping and building up what one could achieve there, based on some of the experience which we did in Abu Dhabi, where we had the budgets to trial a lot of things and make it work in the end, so to speak. Both approaches are valid, but if you just want the quick win, the basic attractive proposal to get some momentum, then I would suggest, whether it is a rural area, or ports, or a dense industrial area, looking for those opportunities where you can develop added value streams which can convert typically cost centers to profit centers. Often, you have to get rid of something, and that costs you money, and it is not your core competency, it is not your product output, it is just what happens when you produce something. What are the other industries that you already know or have adjacent that could take that waste stream? But if you can convert that CO2 which goes up in the air to a synthesis product for green fuels, suddenly now you have converted that cost of upgrading into a potential revenue stream, because you can now sell the CO2 as biogenic CO2. That is a good economic value for the plant you have already invested in. On the other side, the degas material has the fibers which you have to get rid of. In Denmark, that costs money, and perhaps the tipping fees in Massachusetts would be the same. You could just send that over to the pyrolysis process, create the organic biochar, and again, synthesize fuels, which in turn could create heat input for your biogas plant to upgrade. So it is simply, in the beginning, looking at waste streams converting to profit opportunities. Multiple value stream models give the industrial-centric, the egocentric, what is in it for me, begins to say, hey, there is something in it for you here. Let us just start sitting around the table. You take some sectors which need to be regenerated for continued longevity of the throughputs, or some industrial areas up near Salem, where you are doing the offshoring of wind parks, or the western region, where there are some underserved areas and you want to attract new competencies and new businesses. Those are the anchor points of a new symbiosis. Then you are developing, okay, what are the gaps? But most importantly, the stakeholder engagement is the most important key. Does the community want to do something, or are they against anything? If they are against doing anything, just do not go there. Go to the next community. And the infrastructure which will serve those purposes? You can then create integrated energy, water, material, data, and preferably attract new industries to help the rejuvenation process, help bring in new competencies, and create new economic value, both for the public and the private sectors. New, resilient, profitable models will emerge as those stakeholders become more and more involved, become more informed about what their potential value streams can be, and then how the symbiosis will actually create more resilience for their process and lower costs. This is interesting: you will notice I have not mentioned CO2 yet. The challenge with CO2, it is an intangible, invisible, you cannot see it, smell it, or use it for much of anything. We exhale it. So what is that going to do with anything? And you can have your climate views, whether plus or minus. But if you put that on the shelf, you will find that designing these systemic solutions and creating more value streams will inherently reduce the CO2 footprint because it will be repurposed as part of that process. So you do not need to make that the top-line issue. The top-line issue could be value creation, and more resilience, and a future growth model which has longevity, with built-in reduction of costs and increase of economic values.

Galen Nelson
Yeah, that is very, very helpful. It is very important to underscore the sheer economic development and economic efficiency benefits of this approach, and you are absolutely right that the carbon benefits can be kind of a byproduct.

Christopher Sorensen
Exactly.

Galen Nelson
You are reducing waste, increasing efficiency, increasing profitability. I think particularly in this environment right now, that is what we should be emphasizing and leaning into.

Christopher Sorensen
Just a note for you, Galen, just as a U.S. context, the collaboration with the USDA and the Danish Foreign Ministry, which was signed about a year and a half ago, looks to generate economic value for communities where, for example, invasive species are taking over the natural ecosystems. The USA has been struggling with, what do you just rip these pinyon junipers up, also up in Kyle's domain, the Northwest, and down through Nevada. This stuff is just taking over everything. Well, then you would have a bunch of wood product, the pinyon juniper, excavate it, re-establish the natural balance, but then trade economic value out of that input stream and involve the community in building these industries and new fuels and new synthesis processes and pyrolysis processes. These are new competencies, new processes which generate value for the community, which means new schools, people moving in, outlying areas become more populated with higher-level competencies. Then you tie those hubs together so they start increasing the regional trade and enhancing each other's symbiosis, and then in the end, you have delivering to the coastal regions, or increasing trade to the Asia-Pacific. They create rings in the water as you build out from these core challenges and turn them into economic opportunity.

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, and just to highlight something in there, the economic viability part of this is a really powerful conversational point for a lot of people. I grew up in a rural community very heavily focused on logging in its economy. Growing up, the conversations about environmental protections, these types of things, talking about spotted owls, and oh, I cannot log the forest anymore because of the spotted owl, it was difficult to have those kinds of conversations around environmental protection and climate change. But when we are talking about revenue generating, we are talking about jobs creation, we are talking about industry creation, I am having just as much conversations with folks that would have been resistant if I was approaching this from a protect the spotted owl sort of conversation approach. I am having just as much conversations with those folks as I am with anybody from more traditional urban areas that care about this stuff traditionally more around the climate aspects. They are just as excited. It is not that they do not care about the climate benefits of things, it is that jobs are very important in the rural communities. Industry is very important. Rural America needs the help, needs the additional economic development, and this is an opportunity to do that.

Galen Nelson
It does occur to me that this is maybe not so much a question, but just an observation, that in thinking about the waste streams, there is some amount of waste reporting that I strongly suspect industrial actors, it is a regulatory burden, right? There is a certain amount of waste reporting in our state, and I am sure in many, many other states. But if you flip that and think about it in another way, it becomes a waste audit in a way that allows you to begin to identify opportunities. We cannot begin to contemplate what the opportunities might be with regard to industrial symbiosis without a better understanding of the various waste streams in any given region. I just wonder whether conducting those types of waste audits, which I think are already required, could be leveraged in some way.

Galen Nelson
I did want to talk about how you paper these deals, because again, I remember being kind of fascinated by our first conversation about what the contracts look like between industrial symbiosis players, and particularly the kind of contracts that anchor the relationships at GreenLab. So I would love to hear about that side of the story. Obviously, the technology component is critical and fascinating, but let us be honest, unless we can pay for these in a way that is respected by all parties, these projects will never get off the ground. So I would love to hear about that.

Christopher Sorensen
Yeah, it is an interesting evolution. We started with bilaterals, which became trilaterals, which became more and more complex. In the end, we determined this is not going to pan out. Each new element you turn in becomes an exponential increase. We know how adding one factor creates a lot of complexity on the design and investment in the infrastructure. We basically designed to suit, but also with a dynamic and agile approach, an iterative dynamic approach to the design. So not quite design as you go, but we could phase it appropriately to the arrival and commissioning of the various industrial partners. The anchor partners, which were three or four of those, mainly agricultural-based extractions, biogas, pyrolysis, and the like, and then the electrolysis came in, and we could design the infrastructure for that. We built our own wind and solar park, and we said, okay, we will provide the energy, you plug and play. That means we are already saving you money on your energy infrastructure, so there is already a CAPEX incentive. However, you are committed to a 20-year connection to that infrastructure. So we can depreciate appropriately and provide this energy as a service for your processes on that basis. Then we began to get the back-to-back installation going. Then as we became more nuanced on the heat exchanges, on the material exchanges, serving hydrogen to abate natural gas, or even using our pyrolysis to create heat to abate natural gas in the biogas plant, we said, look, we will take on the investment if these two, three, four parties would agree to be the off-takers. So we invested a couple million dollars in the thermal exchange infrastructure based on committed service contracts per commissioning. In the end, we became what we called Facilities as a Service. You can design this at scale. We are at about 100 megawatts of scale, which is reasonable, and it works. You can actually make an operating profit once you complete this, and it is today making an operating profit after just five years from a grass field to installation. But if you do it at a larger scale, it is even more economically viable. Once you get up to these 500, 800 megawatts or gigawatts, the economies of scale and infrastructure become much better, which is why we have utilities, right, to consolidate sources and uses of energy. At scale, these platforms can actually provide lower cost of energy, reduce the CO2 footprint, and create, for example, renewable energy parks are the quickest way to provide new energy. Instead of waiting for a nuclear plant or a coal-fired plant, combining the two means that you can create lower cost of energy and quicker service tailored to the needs, to the projected needs, and to the attraction profiles which the community and stakeholders are seeking as an outcome. So essentially, this model of Facilities as a Service is the basic context for doing these types of engagements. The other ones I have done around the country are more multilateral. So you can have, for example, in the San Joaquin Valley, you are looking at wineries, food processing, certain industries, and they can, because they know each other relatively well, a lot of them have grown up family-owned businesses, we can get people around the table and say, okay, which input and output streams could we recombine here to create new value streams for everyone involved? In particular during market downturns, or where you are looking for higher margins than just delivering tomato paste or Gallo wines in big paper containers. Working in these iterative processes with the industrial people who are looking to create new value can be very, very productive. So these are the two models I have best success with. Of course, the public side and the community side is a critical factor here.

Galen Nelson
Thank you, Christopher. I do want to get to at least one question I see in the Q&A. There is a good question here, and I have also wondered the same. I love this concept, I think there is a lot of promise. I would say the one kind of concern I would have with this, and you can think about this in terms of any of the eco-industrial or industrial symbiosis park models we have discussed, is that at the end of the day, these are private entities. Markets change, market conditions change, and you have built some infrastructure, perhaps with some shared infrastructure pipes that are exchanging maybe water or thermal energy, and then one of those companies moves on, or folds. So how do you plan resilience into these industrial symbiosis parks? Is it just fair to say that there may be changes along the way, and you have to design some degree of flexibility into your park design?

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, a couple brief points on that, and then I think Christopher probably has a really great answer for this. I would also be thinking about the resilience that some of these processes add as well. There is always going to be variability, there is always going to be volatility in some of these supply chains and demands and things like that, but when you are making your supply chain more localized, more domestic, you are also increasing the resilience of that supply chain. So while you do have some of the variability, you also have some reductions in variability because of the domestication of the supply chain, the shortening of that. To Christopher's first point around the GreenLab model, or where you see this entity that is actively managing these partnerships, that is where that really comes in handy. You have somebody actively looking for the continued growth and the sustainment of that industrial symbiotic relationship.

Christopher Sorensen
I can just supplement that. Regionalization is one of the keys, and then that region becomes a trade partner for other regions, whether overseas or internally. I call this piece, the regionalization, the cooperative advantage. That outplays competitive advantage, which I think is becoming obsolete in our circular economy. I am trying to work on a thesis for this so we can publish it, and everyone can just read the weight of this. But the manage of risk of these ups and down cycles in industry, number one, you can design for that because all these industries know what their cycles are. You know the cyclical nature of industrial processes, energy and output streams up and down cycles. So you can design for counter-cyclical symbiosis, and then in the end, the diversity of these clusters or these integrated systems becomes your resilience. If you design your business model as a cooperative one in which everyone participates in the shared outcome, we all have an incentive in the group outcome rather than our individual outcome. Of course, you have to run your business like you always did, but there is something more to gain by sharing resources, lowering costs, and having mutual incentives for the group profits, the group results, the community outcome as a holistic approach to creating these interdependencies. That means everybody is doing the best for the group outcome. That is not always an easy journey to conclude, but it is very, very resilient, and it does work.

Galen Nelson
Well, that, I think, is a wonderful way to end the conversation on a positive and hopeful note. I wish we had more time, but we are out of time, and I want to respect your time and the time of our listeners. I want to thank you, Christopher and Kyle. It has been a real pleasure to talk with you both, and I just really want to appreciate you both and your time and your contributions. I think it has been a really wonderful dialogue. Thanks so much, and thanks to everyone for joining today.

Kyle Gitchell
Yeah, thank you.

Christopher Sorensen
Thank you for the conversation.

Galen Nelson
Wonderful. Take care, all.