Green Entrepreneurs Assemble—The newsletter for green entrepreneurs and professionals.

A rising tide lifts all boats 🙂 

Hi, I am Akhoy, all the way from North-eastern India.

I put in 100s of hours every month to reach out and interview business people around the world, who are working towards creating a more sustainable future for the planet. Some of them are just starting, while others are generating millions in revenue. There are invaluable lessons you can learn from people at different stages of growing green businesses.

I live in a biodiversity hotspot myself that is undergoing rapid urbanization and deforestation (these two are BFF, to be honest). I understand the importance of successfully monetizing activities that are meant to protect the earth’s ecosystems.

Interestingly, there is very little first-hand content online on green entrepreneurship, which is why I decided to create this newsletter.

I have also highlighted important words and phrases to make each interview a quick read.

Without further ado, let’s welcome today’s guest—

Table of Contents

1. Backstory

2. Target Customer

3. Problems and Solutions

4. Customer Locations

5. Biochar

6. Voluntary Carbon Markets

7. Certifications

8. Project Eligibility

9. Unique Thing About Grain Ecosystem

10. Non-dilutive Capital

11. Assesment of Project's Profitability

12. Biggest Success and Challenge

13. Advice

14. Collaborate with Jason

15. "1 Minute Summary" of the Interview

(Note: I have preserved Jason’s voice, but made slight edits for readability)

🟢Tell us about your backstory and how you started.

I've been in the decarbonization space throughout my entire career. I worked in the Middle East, Africa, and India on access to energy with Schneider Electric’s circular economy initiatives. I believe that society has largely moved away from its connection or bond with the land. Millions, probably billions of people have transitioned into cities.

This shift has led to major issues, particularly when it comes to waste and fossil fuels. And we saw that there wasn't enough capital going into the space to finance carbon sequestration for waste-to-value projects.

That was the lifeblood of Grain Ecosystem, our company today. We wanted to figure out how to help people who have a waste problem or are looking to implement an economic waste-to-value solution. For example, producing biochar, which is great for biodiversity, communities and sequestering carbon, and has many valuable end-use applications. That was our vision.

We wanted to build out a digital tool and we ended up winning a “dare to disrupt” challenge put on by a company that happens to have a very large presence in India— it is the world's most sustainable company according to Time and Statista—Schneider Electric.

And that's what ultimately brought us here today to focus and try to achieve this major sequestration, circular economy problem that we're faced with as a society.

🟢What is your target customer?

The target customer varies, but it's ultimately anybody with organic waste byproducts—coffee byproducts, cacao, bagasse from a sugar mill, chicken litter, manure, pistachio shells, etcetera. All this material can be decarbonized and turned into valuable outputs. for instance, 20 billion tons of coffee waste byproduct per year ends up in landfills. This waste can be pyrolyzed or gasified to produce biochar, which can be used for soil enhancement, water filtration, or cement production.

We also work with big companies and help them in the process of achieving their scope 3 supply chain mandate. It all goes hand in hand.

🟢What are the main problems that the customers face? And tell me a little bit more about your solutions.

The main problems include two big things—One is getting capital into the right projects. There's a big gap between the funds that investors allocate to renewable energy projects and the money being invested in farmers, waste to value initiatives, crop resilience, farmer livelihoods, livestock, animal support, and ensuring optimal use of available resources.

The second thing is getting the companies that have massive scale to get involved in championing these projects.  Many focus on the lower lift items, scope one, scope two, switching to renewables, etcetera.

At Grain, we tackle these challenges head-on by first compiling comprehensive documentation that aligns economics with factors such as profit, expenses, and revenue streams. This documentation is then presented to our network of Grain investors. Additionally, we provide an equipment matching tool to address a significant issue: approximately 70% of our clients have either not selected a technology suited to their geography and feedstock type or have chosen one that is suboptimal economically for their project. These are critical challenges in our field that we aim to mitigate and support.

Regarding the second issue, we are actively collaborating with companies that have large value chains to help them reduce their scope 3 emissions. By partnering with Grain, these companies can integrate more closely with producers, thereby making significant strides towards managing their emissions footprint.

🟢Are your customers from all over the world?

Yes, we have customers across the world. We are working with projects in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, South America, the United States, and Europe. Right now, anybody in the world can go to grainecosystem.com, create a biochar project and see if they're eligible at no cost. And we are eager and ready to work with people in India, where we’ve got some cool partners already.

🟢Do you mainly focus on biochar?

Today, I believe focus is really critical to be a part of the solution. The top minds in the world have said biochar could account for two gigatons of carbon removals and carbon sequestration. So our big focus is biochar executing, scaling, and proving that these solutions not only derive the right economic returns for investors, but they're also doing all of the things that are stated and we know about.

🟢Your work is a part of the voluntary carbon market, right?

Correct, this is one key part of the solution offering that can often times unlock other forms of capital into the project when you have credit pre-purchase commitments. There’s a regulated market, but there’s also the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which is it's roughly a $2 billion market today. It’s shifted a little bit over time.

The goal of Grain is to bring transparency, risk management, permanence, additionality. Grain projects have gone through a rigorous process. And that's important, even though we're digital first, we're very clear that projects on our platform have to have an end-use application assigned to them.

The VCM can be confusing, with many acronyms, rules, and documentation—such as CDP, TNFD, TCFD, DCMI. We aim to make it easier for people to navigate.

CDP: Carbon Disclosure Project

• TNFD: Task force on Nature-related Financial Disclosures

• TCFD: Task force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures

• DCMI: Digital Carbon Market Infrastructure

🟢Tell us a little bit about certifications.

The Grain process acts like a pre-LCA, a pre-life cycle assessment. Because we have digitized the methodologies and the corresponding calculations, and we've worked with the different registries to ensure that there is alignment with the questions, a product developer can go through the standard Grain Digital Platform, essentially be eligible or stamp themselves to be able to negotiate for spot or forward contracts for pre-purchase. The beautfy of being agnostic is we want the power to be in the hands of the project developer, ensuring the entire lifecycle of services is optimized and aligned with their actual needs.

🟢What makes a project eligible for carbon removals?

What makes it eligible is aligning with the methodology. There are standards bodies out there that have created the methodologies.

These are some of the brightest practitioners and scientists in the world, and they're building these out, validating and stamping them.

These go through a very rigorous process.

We're taking those methodologies, digitizing them, improving on the questionnaires wherever we think we need to, and then we're rolling those out.

We're constantly analyzing the space, again, being agnostic and making sure developers have access to those methodologies.

If they have questions, we'll address them. We always want to try to make sure they pick the best methodology for their project, because with biochar, you've got low tech and you've got high tech as well. So, these are some of the things that the Grain process helps developers be able to do.

🟢What makes your company different from the other similar companies in the field?

It’s a fantastic question because there's a lot of ways you can slice it. I think there are a couple of big things. One is we're laser-focused at the front end with project developers.

We spend a lot of time in the field visiting with developers and making sure we understand their problems.

Secondly, what we've done around the technology matching is really unique, trying to make it fast and painless to pick the right technology.

And then three, we have deep expertise on the financing. We're very good at understanding based on the type of project, how to optimize the capital stack, how to think about non-dilutive versus dilutive capital, and then ensuring that we get the right investor with the right developer because we want to speed up LOIs and term sheets.

I'd say those three buckets are how we are really differentiated—and then we do it in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost.

🟢Tell us a little bit more about non-dilutive capital.

For the non-dilutive capital, we're always looking to understand what are the grants that are available and what is the state or federal funding option. In the US and other parts of the world, farmers can get reimbursed to take biochar, as other incentive programs. And, obviously, debt capital as well. We're always trying to guide—particularly if it's the first project—, we want to make sure that project developers are getting capital and not giving away tons of equity in their company.

But vice versa, we also help them think through the credit, and this is why credits are great, because they're non-dilutive. You're selling the stream of carbon credits in various scenarios.

• Non-dilutive capital: Any capital a business owner receives that doesn’t require them to give up equity or ownership.

🟢How do you assess a project's profitability?

That's pretty straightforward. One of the things that we are really excited about is we've built in standardization. There's no longer everybody having their own financial model. We model the project.

As they're entering the information around the technology, the inputs, the throughputs, etc., we're calculating and computing the cost structure of the project. Then we will do an NPV analysis based on a standard vintage period for the project.

These registries are getting different documents from everybody. So, with Grain, we standardize on the set documents, the registry documents, the GHG quantification documents, the calculation documents, and the pro forma.

The farmer or the mill owner doesn't have to worry about building out their own model. We do that for them and we model it out that way.

• NPV: Net Present Value

• GHG: Greenhouse Gas

🟢What has been your biggest success and your biggest challenge so far?

There are some days when you're very excited; other days can be difficult. It’s a part of being a founder, creating a business, and dealing with challenges, particularly when you're so passionate about what you do.

I think that the successes have been just how many projects we've been able to support so fast. You can go on our YouTube page and listen to one of our projects, for example, where what took them two years without Grain took them a month to get to after they started working with us.

That's what's been positive, the number of people we've been able to have a positive impact on in such a short period of time.

I think the challenge is, and it's the challenge for many people, just not going fast enough.

I told you at the beginning, you've got to find champions and instead of going side to side, you've got to get big companies that have access to a lot of ways to believe.  Until we get faster working there, it's always going to be a challenge.

And if you think about it, and this is where it gets really tough, the statistics are there, that point to how difficult this is.  If you think about last year, every day global temperatures exceed one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Half of those days surpassed one and a half degrees Celsius. We are really in a tough spot right now, so the question needs to be: How do we move faster? And it comes back to technology, and it comes back to working with these big companies that have massive reach.

🟢What would be your advice to other entrepreneurs in the Green industry?

You've got to look and engage. I've said this on a couple of podcasts before, but if you are starting something, make the reversible decisions quick.

Don't be afraid to tack, maneuver, but when you have conviction, you have to double down. And always seek out the virtues in others. We need to figure out how do we come together in a virtuous cycle to solve problems, because it doesn't matter if somebody could be a competitor down the line.Have conviction, be collaborative, and engage in organizations.

There are a lot of nonprofits that are looking for help and looking for guidance for people who are thinking about becoming entrepreneurs. Go volunteer in those organizations, go read some of Vaclav Smil’s great books on energy. We need more people though in this space.

Have conviction, do the work and really validate it in your free time. That's what we did. We had our day job while we were validating this business. It's intense, but it prepares you because it's a Monday to Sunday nonstop progression. That's entrepreneurship.

🟢If there's anything you need help from readers, what would it be?

It’s three things. Encouraging people to try out the tool, not be afraid. It's easy to use. See if you can do a project, if you think, or you have an idea, give it a shot, sit down. We'll talk to you. We're happy to help. That's number one.

Go to www.grainecosystem.com

Navigate to "Join the Ecosystem," click "I'm a developer" and then create an account.

Once completed you will be logged out. Click "Sign in" and enter your email and password.

Upon completion, you're ready to create your first project!

Number two, we are always looking, particularly for catalytic capital, philanthropic capital, equity capital, looking for the big loss and damage fund on top 20A, the development banks. We encourage them to reach.

And then, for all the big corporates that have supply chains in India give me a call. We want to help you to get decarbonized, work with your suppliers and build long-term partnerships versus transactional relationships with the farmers. These are the few that feed the many. We've got to take care of them.

I encourage readers to watch our recent webinar on Scope 3 emissions and biochar applications, focusing on project execution. You can view it here and learn firsthand how one of the largest sugar mills collaborates with us on biochar and circular economy solutions: Watch the webinar.

Connect with Jason on Linkedin: Jason E. Dodier | LinkedIn

🟢“1 Minute Summary” of the Interview

• Decarbonization Background: Jason Dodier has a career history in decarbonization, focusing on access to energy and circular economy work with Schneider Electric.

• Urbanization Challenges: Jason highlights the challenges posed by urbanization, including waste management and reliance on fossil fuels due to a shift away from rural living.

• Capital Gap in Green Projects: Grain Ecosystem addresses the lack of capital in financing carbon sequestration and waste-to-value projects, a critical aspect for sustainability.

• Biochar Focus: The company primarily focuses on biochar as a solution, emphasizing its benefits for biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and diverse applications.

• Target Customers: Grain's target customers include those dealing with organic waste by-products like coffee waste, cacao husks, and agricultural residues, aiming to convert these into valuable outputs, and big companies trying to deal with Scope 3 emissions.

• Technological Solutions: Grain offers a digital platform powered by AI and machine learning to streamline access to carbon markets, assess project eligibility, and facilitate investment preparation.

• Global Reach: Grain has a global customer base and collaborates with partners worldwide, with projects spanning Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Europe, and the United States.

• Voluntary Carbon Market: The company operates within the voluntary carbon market, leveraging commitments from reputable companies to attract private capital and de-risk investment opportunities.

• Team and Expertise: Grain boasts a diverse team with expertise in financing, AI, carbon markets, and project development, ensuring comprehensive support for biochar projects.

• Advice: Jason advises entrepreneurs to seek partnerships, make quick reversible decisions, and stay focused on validated convictions to drive progress in the green industry.