Earnings call transcript: Northstar Clean Technologies Q2 2025 unveils production strides

Northstar Clean Technologies (Market Cap: $36.37M), a company focused on sustainable asphalt production, reported its Q2 2025 earnings, highlighting significant advancements in its operational capabilities and strategic positioning. Despite a comprehensive loss of $3.1 million, the company has completed its first commercial facility in Calgary and is on track to ramp up production. The stock price saw a modest increase of 1.49%, closing at $0.34, maintaining its strong momentum with an impressive 88.89% return over the past year according to InvestingPro data.

Key Takeaways

• Northstar completed its first commercial facility in Calgary.
• The company aims to increase production to 80 tons per day by year-end.
• Strategic partnerships and patent protections bolster competitive positioning.

Company Performance

Northstar Clean Technologies has demonstrated notable progress in its operational capabilities, completing its first commercial facility and developing the ability to produce high-quality asphalt. The company’s focus on innovation and strategic partnerships, such as with TAMKO Building Products, positions it well within the industry. However, the comprehensive loss of $3.1 million reflects ongoing challenges typical of early-stage commercial scaling.

Financial Highlights

• Comprehensive loss: $3.1 million (compared to $1.4 million in the prior period)
• Capital expenditure: decreased to $1.7 million
• Raised $3.6 million in an oversubscribed private placement
• $150,000 in convertible debentures converted
• $730,000 in warrants exercised

Market Reaction

Northstar’s stock price experienced a 1.49% increase following the earnings call, closing at $0.34. This movement indicates cautious optimism among investors, likely driven by the completion of the Calgary facility and the company’s forward-looking production targets. InvestingPro data reveals the stock has gained 11.48% in the past week and is trading at 78% of its 52-week high of $0.32, suggesting strong market confidence. Subscribers to InvestingPro can access additional insights through comprehensive Pro Research Reports, which provide detailed analysis of the company’s valuation and growth prospects.

Outlook & Guidance

Northstar aims to ramp up its Calgary facility to a production target of 80 tons per day by the end of the year, with full single-shift capacity at 150 tons per day. The company is also developing expansion sites in Hamilton, Ontario, and has identified a U.S. facility location. With an estimated $10 million EBITDA per plant at full operation, Northstar is poised for significant growth.

Executive Commentary

"We are now producing high-quality asphalt from both the potential feedstocks for this technology," stated Aidan Mills, CEO. He emphasized the strategic importance of the company’s 24/7 operational potential, projecting $10 million in EBITDA per plant.

Risks and Challenges

• Production timeline delays: The company acknowledged a slight delay, approximately one quarter, in meeting production targets.
• Scaling operations: Achieving full capacity and operational efficiency remains a challenge.
• Market competition: As Northstar expands, it will face competition from established players in the asphalt industry.
• Feedstock security: Ensuring a consistent supply of feedstock for continuous operations is critical.

Northstar Clean Technologies is making strides in its mission to revolutionize asphalt production through innovation and strategic partnerships. As the company continues to scale its operations, it remains focused on achieving its ambitious growth targets and securing its position in the global market. InvestingPro analysis highlights both opportunities and challenges, with two key ProTips noting the company’s significant recent returns but also identifying concerns about gross profit margins. For a complete analysis including 3 additional ProTips and extensive financial metrics, explore the full InvestingPro Research Report.

Full transcript - Northstar Clean Technologies Inc (ROOF) Q2 2025:

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Good to go.

Greg Phaneuf, VP of Corporate Development and CFO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Good to go.

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Excellent. Good afternoon and welcome everybody to the Northstar Clean Technologies second quarter 2025 financial results and corporate update. As you guys know, my name is Aidan Mills. I’m the President and CEO of Northstar. Today joining me is Greg Phaneuf, our VP of Corporate Development and CFO. Before I begin, I’d like to remind everybody that the comments made on this call may contain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and assumptions and involve certain risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those described in these forward-looking statements, and please refer to our CEDR filings for discussion of these risks. The second slide here has a more detailed description of this. As always, there’s a question and answer session after the presentation.

Trenton Grant from CIN is going to help us with that, and will moderate the Q&A session and ask the questions today. As before, just enter the questions in the Q&A box on the bottom of your screen, and Trenton will review those to ask and pick out themes to ask us as we go forward. The presentation will be on YouTube tomorrow, and we’ll take this Q2 presentation and upload it onto the website, replacing the Q1, and that will be done for tomorrow as well. That’s the admin. Let’s chat quickly about today’s agenda. Of course, we’ll cover the financials. Greg will cover that. I’ll do an update from Calgary, obviously based on the PR that we released this morning. I’ll talk about the next steps for Calgary as well, and I’ll give you an update on the expansion plans.

I think one of the things that’s important about this presentation are the themes, and we’ll talk about this all the way through, and I’ll summarize them at the end. The major theme is that we are creating great momentum for Northstar. We have our first commercial facility constructed, commissioned, and starting ramp up. We’ve produced high-quality products, and we’ve also made a technical development and innovation, obviously with the pellets that we produce as well. Our focus is now on getting to the ERA production target, but also not losing the focus on the next facilities and developing a strong financial framework to support that growth and expansion.

Lastly, and this is of course a bit of a personal comment, I’ve been at Northstar, was Northstar for four years on the 1st of September this year, and my objective is to continue to deliver the milestones as we have done since I have been at the company. That’s a bit of the theme of what we’re going to talk about today, and I will hand it over to Greg to talk about financials.

Greg Phaneuf, VP of Corporate Development and CFO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Thanks, Aidan. Good afternoon, everyone. The second quarter of 2025 represented another 90 days of preparing for full operations. No product revenues, as you know, were generated during the quarter, aside from the collection of waste shingles from Eiko, one of our suppliers, which have been securely stored at a nearby offsite location to be processed once commercial operations begin. As far as the numbers are concerned, comprehensive loss for the period equaled $3.1 million compared to $1.4 million for the comparable prior period, as the company increased full-time equivalent personnel and incurred other non-capital costs associated in preparation for operations.

In addition, a non-cash expense of $367,000 was recognized for the quarter, which was $721,000 for the six months, relating to the fair value remeasurement of the CBW royalty to venture, which is essentially Northstar picking, otherwise known as payment in kind, the interest due and adding that to the principal of the debenture and continuing efforts to preserve working capital. As the debenture commenced in September 2024, these fair value adjustments did not occur in the comparable prior periods. As far as CapEx is concerned, CapEx decreased to $1.9 million for the quarter compared to $4.1 million in the prior period, as the construction of the Calgary Empower facility was completed after Q2, near completion at the end of Q2, as Aidan had mentioned.

In fact, the company announced completion of construction during the quarter and received $3.9 million from Emissions Reduction Alberta under milestone two of the contribution agreement for this major achievement. Aidan, as mentioned, will speak to operations in a minute. From a working capital perspective, the company exited the quarter with a $1.7 million deficit. $1.5 million of this, however, is represented by two tranches of previously issued convertible debentures due within the next 12 months, where the conversion strike price is below the current share price, i.e., in the money. More on that in a minute. In addition, subsequent to the quarter, the company raised $3.6 million in an oversubscribed non-brokered unit private placement. This replenished the treasury and provides the bridge to fund the business to the point of operational cash flow.

Furthermore, we anticipate further milestone payments under the ERA grant prior to the end of the year to bolster working capital reserves. For the accountant people in the audience, commencing in the second quarter, the company began to account for inventory. This was a new accounting convention for the company and will continue from this point forward as we move to an operational status. The inventory is largely comprised of collecting, sorting, and processing shingles brought to site. Further details can be found in our Q2 2023 financial statements. As touched on previously, it is worthy to mention we have witnessed a consistent stream of both convertible debentures and share purchase warrants exercised over the last number of quarters. Specifically in Q2, $150,000 of convertible debentures were converted during the quarter, while $730,000 of warrants were exercised during the quarter, bringing in another $150,000 into the company’s treasury.

Subsequent to the quarter, we have continued to see these conversions and have no reason to expect different, given the current share price and our expectation of continued share price appreciation as we build out the business. With continued conversions and exercises, we would expect the capital structure to become less complex. With that, I’ll turn it over to Aidan for an operational update.

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Thanks, Greg. That’s great. Let’s talk then about kind of our key achievements and short-term objectives. This is a summary of what I’m going to talk about in a lot more detail in the next few slides. Again, one of the themes here kind of plays to what I kicked off with. This continues to demonstrate our kind of strong track record of delivery. The patent is a really good example of where we have protected the business with a number of patents, both in the U.S. and Canada. That’s obviously really important for the technology and the technology support for the business. In funding, and I’ve shared this slide before, and we don’t have it in this pack, but since I’ve joined four years ago, we’ve raised $58 million, and all of that $58 million, including the number Greg referenced, $30 million of it is non-dilutive.

You can see from the last quarters, our funding partners, Emissions Reduction Alberta, Business Development Bank of Canada, etc., coming up with support and long-term partners such as CBW and TAMKO Building Products, obviously there, and now the potential to add EDC as a funding partner for the U.S. If you think about those names and you think about the support for this company, these are sophisticated funders who understand good businesses, and it’s great to have them on board. The last one, of course, and the most important is that if you look at the output from the facility, and I’ll talk about this in a bit more detail, as a shareholder, you can look at these achievements and recognize that this technology actually works.

Remember, we took the asphalt that came out of Delta, and with that asphalt, the pilot plant, and with that asphalt, we proved, the R&D proved that you could manufacture shingles. That was the first step in demonstrating the technology works, and now we have demonstrated it in our first commercial facility. Kind of a huge milestone as we think about where we are in the business. Okay, let’s talk about Calgary. The deliverables for 2025 were pretty simple. We had four. Number one, build the plant, obviously. Number two, commission the facility, unit by unit and all the way through. Number three, focus on what the product was coming out the back end of the facility.

The reason that I can say very comfortably the technology works is the product that’s coming out of the back end of this facility, and we’ll talk about it in a bit more detail later, but the product coming out of this facility, it is better than Delta, surpasses our expectations, but that demonstrates that we have a technological solution that is delivering high-quality product. The fourth thing was ramp up production, and I’ll talk about that in the planned objectives. Okay, so where are we? In the PR this morning, we outlined that this facility now has the capability to deliver high-quality asphalt for both manufactured waste and tariff shingles. Independent lab analysis, as we said this morning as well, supports that thesis. Now, the Delta oil, as I said, you know, the R&D showed that it was circular.

This asphalt is significantly better than that oil, and that plus the lab results, we believe that it will perform better for our customers. The major technological development today, of course, that we announced was pellets. The Northstar facility now has the capability to produce two types of product. Firstly, hot oil, of course, for local distribution within a certain radius, and now solid asphalt pellets. This now has a huge transport potential. This is one of my added remarks. We have some very interested industry partners on this call, so I’m not going to be providing any details on, you know, our preferred transportation option, etc., for the pellets. Clearly, we expect that solid, high-quality asphalt pellets have a wide range of market access options. I will, though, talk a little bit about the quality of the pellets.

It’s important that the industry across the kind of recycling industry for shingles, there are pellet solutions. People harshly separate tiles and make those into pellets. Those are technologies that are developing. Those are technologies that are under review, etc. They have not pelletized the final product. Our technology does not change the quality of the oil. It literally takes the hot oil that comes out the back end of the facility, the high-quality specs that we’ve seen from our lab results, and pelletizes it. This is a bit of a self-indulgent kind of 10,000-foot reflection for me, but this is exactly what I came to Northstar to do. My vision when I joined Northstar four years ago was the applicability of this technology right across the continent.

The ability for us to deliver product, you know, city by city, and as we’ve said, 16.5 million tons, you know, 400 facilities at 40,000 tons a day, you know, 200 facilities at 80,000 tons a day, that was my vision. Now we have the potential from every Northstar facility to actually deliver a global commodity. When I hark back to my former life as a hydrocarbon buyer, originator, and trader in my old roles as Head of Strategic Origination for BP and the Managing Director of Commodity Sales in Goldman, access to this type of global commodity would be outstanding. It’s fantastic to be sitting here with our hands on a potential global commodity. As you walk away from this call today, that’s what I think we’ve just delivered. What are we doing next? I’ve laid out the objectives for going forward here.

Objective number one is obviously to deliver Emissions Reduction Alberta milestone. Remembering Emissions Reduction Alberta has kind of four milestones. Number one, engineering, of course, done. Number two, construction, as Greg referenced, that was for the first half of the year. Number three, commissioning. Number four, operations. The commissioning milestone isn’t just a commissioning milestone, i.e., everything works. The first part of it is, yes, all systems have to be installed, calibrated, and operating. That’s a commissioning milestone. The second part of that milestone is operational. That operational target is 80 tons per day coming through the plant, or, you know, obviously going to the front end of the plant. Our target is to deliver that by year end. Objective number two, of course, is then to take the facility from that 80 tons a day up to full capacity.

The way I’ve defined this is the single shift full capacity is, and as you know, capacity designed for the facility is 15 tons an hour, times 10 hours a day, so 150 tons a day. The third objective is to secure feedstock to enable us to move to 24/7 operation. That’s where we can essentially add the night shift and double the production. The objective here is not about spending more capital. This is completely feedstock dependent. Our job is to secure the feedstock. It’s not to add any additional capital. The only thing that we actually need to do is add an extra shift. I added an ongoing objective here because this is the transition across to the next slide. We’ve always talked about continuous improvement, and we need to integrate the lessons we’ve learned from engineering, construction, commissioning, and operations into the design for the next facilities.

As you can imagine, this is the first facility. That’s a theme that we’ve talked about all the way through here. This first facility, the learnings are huge, of course, across all of these buckets of engineering, construction, commissioning, and operations. It’s really important that we integrate those into the next design in the same way that I’ve talked about continuous improvement before, which is when we do plant five, plant six needs to be better. When we do plant 15, plant 16 needs to be better. The biggest impact we can make in continuous improvement is to take the lessons learned from the first facility for the next two. We think that’s going to be pretty sizable. Let’s talk about the expansion options. Hamilton, both expansion options are going well. In Hamilton, we’re finalizing the specific site layout with the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority.

As you know, we have the area of land which has been outlined for Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority development. Now what we’re doing is, given the utility works that are going on, we’re actually finalizing the exact four-acre plot because to do that, you need the exact boundaries to be able to kick off the permitting process. We’ve done the first step of the permitting process. We have had consultations with the Ontario Ministry to get the first step completed, and that’s defined exactly what permits we need. We now have the list of here’s the permits, and that can start as soon as we have the boundary defined with the Hamilton-Oshawa Port Authority. As we did with Calgary very successfully, we’ve now identified some federal and provincial funding options.

Obviously, non-dilutive, as you remember, Emissions Reduction Alberta, you know, that we talk about all the time, the over $7 million was gained through the same process. Those have kicked off. We’re not going to provide any more details as to who we’ve applied for or for what number, but we have identified a number of funds. We’ve also commenced local engagement with Hamilton, both at the city level and at the local level. In U.S. one, we now have identified the state, the city, and the preferred location for our facility. The permitting process is now fully understood. With that state, we have been working with the permitting authority. We know exactly what to do once we finalize the site. We’ve also started negotiations on feedstock. We would expect, of course, to get the TAMKO manufactured shingles from their Frederick facility.

We’ve now kicked off the feedstock negotiations with respect to tariffs. Those have commenced and are ongoing. The same with the offtake. TAMKO, obviously, the majority offtaker, but we’ve also discussed offtake with other parties too. Interestingly, both from the federal level and the provincial level, there are also non-dilutive funding options available for this location, which is great. Let’s talk about expansion financing. The feedback we’ve often got is, you know, we have a complicated balance sheet and, you know, it’s not simple. What are you doing to simplify it, et cetera? I know that’s always good when it’s nice and simple, but all of these options, as Greg looks at them, these are complicated. They’re more sophisticated and they’re not simple. From the leader of this business, in my perspective, it offers massive flexibility and great optionality.

The other thing is, as you can see from what we’ve done from a non-dilutive perspective, I think it also offers massive equity shareholder value because there’s a number of pots of funding that we can source that will not have an effect on the equity. As we think about it, there’s kind of two buckets that we look at. Under the asset level, I’ve just talked about government funding, project debt. EDCs are a really good example of the project debt. There is market interest for project equity at the project level. We have the funding partners in CBW with potential royalty options on an asset level. On the corporate level, strategic equity and strategic debt. Those will be dependent, of course, on delivery from Calgary. We have to have a track record of being able to deliver an operating facility, and that’s critical.

The last one is a market raise. Just to be clear, this is a market raise for growth capital. This is all about what does the capital for the new facilities look like? What does the timeline for that facility look like? What does the capital spend profile look like? What is the goal seek for all of the categories above before we determine what that market raise is? The only thing that you will see us do as part of this development, we have ruthless focus in Calgary, but this is what we have to continue, of course, the next facility development. The only thing you’ll see from a financing perspective is we will file an AIF so that we can create a shelf. That will be done through Q4.

That is so that we have the full range of optionality as you look at this expansion financing to support growth funding. The other thing that I would say with respect to both of these facilities is I’ve talked externally with strategic funders, both in the equity and the debt level, that we’ve changed our metrics for attractiveness with respect to sites as we move forward here. Originally, when I was talking about market attractiveness and how we looked at it, we looked at it in a matrix of tipping fee versus asphalt price. We looked at all the locations, all the cities where that could be attractive. The third thing that we added, which is almost kind of like this is what you need to get onto the page, is can we operate the facility 24/7? Can we operate this facility at an 80,000 ton a year rate?

The reason that affects both these two facilities is both can support 80,000 tons, and the permitting process that we are submitting will be for 80,000 tons. As we think about the other things that we have to do, the only other thing that was missing off the summary slide was we’re continuing to develop our portfolio. We’re not stopping at Hamilton and U.S. one. We’re continuing to develop a portfolio under the three criteria now of can we run it 24/7, what’s the asphalt price, and what is the tipping fee? The driver for that 24/7 for me is all about the value we add when we add a plant. If you take what we disclosed in our slide deck, a 24/7 operation should in theory kick off, hand grenade math as I always describe it, $10 million worth of EBITDA per plant.

If you take a reasonable waste-to-value multiple of 10, that means that we should be adding $100 million per facility. When I joined four years ago, I talked about this having the potential to be a billion-dollar company, and now we’ve got a really clear path to what that looks like. Developing the portfolio as well as the expansion options and landing both Hamilton and U.S. One are pretty critical. In summary, I’m going to tell you again what I’ve told you already, of course, but look, firstly, we have built and commissioned our first commercial facility. This team is incredibly proud of having done that. I’m very proud of their delivery and proud of the fact that we can be on this call four years later and say that we’ve actually done that.

I think the second thing we’ve done is we are now producing high-quality asphalt from both the potential feedstocks for this technology. We’ve added a technology with pelletization that I think offers our facilities the potential to produce a global market commodity. We now have a ruthless focus on facility ramp up. We continue to develop the expansion sites, and we’re obviously constructing this flexible financial portfolio to support the company, shareholders, and that expansion. Lastly, I said it earlier, in the four years that I’ve been here, which has been a real honor, we’ve delivered on every milestone that we talked about. This is absolutely going to continue as we move from this massive inflection point for Northstar Clean Technologies to drive the business forward. Trenton, that’s my spiel. It’s over to you for the questions.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Excellent. Thank you, Aidan. I’m going to combine and paraphrase some of the questions here. Thank you for all your questions, everyone. As you laid out the production timeline in the presentation, it sounds like there’s been some shifting on our timeline to full production. Can you comment on that, please?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Yeah, for sure. I wouldn’t call it shifting. I would call it delays, for sure. Now, it’s slightly different from the delay that I would have had in my mind four years ago when I could tell you when I thought the first facility was in production. Really honing in onto the Calgary project and when we started to construct in the middle of last year when we were doing the site work, et cetera, I would say at a high level, we’re probably a quarter behind. I also want to provide some context with that. Look, some examples, the first job that I ever did when I was working as an engineer for BP was at a linear low-density polyethylene plant in Grangemouth. It was a first of its kind and took probably six months to a year longer to get to operation than was the original plan.

When I arrived in the U.S., again, as Head of Origination for BP for the oil business, Thunderhorse, which then the offshore platform, which then got renamed as Mad Dog, was 20 months behind its commissioning date. I come to Alberta, and we all know what happened with Northwest Upgrading and the Transmountain pipeline. Obviously, joining Meg and with the Christina Lake train one delay. To be perfectly honest, as I think about this, one quarter of delay for a new technology, to me, it’s a delay. It’s annoying, but actually, I think that’s pretty good because the most important thing is we have delivered on the milestones to get here. They have been delayed, but we have delivered on the milestones.

If we had this call and we had a huge problem with either the construction or the commissioning, or we had a problem with the product coming out the back of the plant, we would have a serious issue. I think a quarter of a delay is a delay, but in the whole journey of this business, it’s relatively immaterial. I would also say that one of the things I thought about when I was thinking about delay examples was Husky. When we first had Husky roll out the kind of the 10,000 barrel a day side D plants that were deployed all across the heavy oil, our first one was delayed and over budget. Because it wasn’t the first one of only one, we improved the deployment of the capital and the speed of delivery after that. That’s the really good thing that shareholders can think about today.

The continuous improvement I talked about earlier on will run as a thread through this organization. We should be continuing plant after plant after plant after plant. Investors don’t have to worry about the performance of the first facility because literally this is one of, what, 200, whatever the number is. That’s where the lessons learned come in. Sit back, think, hey, this technology works. Now they’re ramping up to operation, and we’ll learn stuff from that too. That gets integrated into the next facilities, which are going to be number two and three of a hundred facilities or whatever that number is.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Excellent. Thank you, Aidan. Next question. With Calgary fully complete, how should investors think about the company going forward?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: I think I talked about it today. You know, we have to be, Calgary’s complete but not operational, so we still have a ruthless focus on that. I think we have the two development facilities, of course, next. We have the financial framework to enable that to develop. As I said, one of the objectives that was missing off the slides was the development of the portfolio. As we develop the portfolio, I think we need probably, we need to be strong, very strong in kind of three areas. The first area we need to be strong in is the capability to build and operate plants. You know, I talked about the internal aspiration of that being three, you know, three plants per year. I believe we have the capability to build the internal resource to do that. I think the second thing is the business development.

We have people developing the portfolio and developing the portfolio of plants. That needs to have permitting capability, that needs to have site selection capability, that needs to have all the stuff that you need to do to get to the point where like where we have in Hamilton or we have our four-acre plot drawn out exactly. We’ve talked to the locals and we’ve talked to Ontario Ministry of the Environment and all of that stuff. That expertise needs to be built in this business. I think we’ve got it, you know, holistically today, but not for kind of three to five plants a year. I think the last one is the financial framework. Obviously, we’re lucky to have Greg here. You know, although we do talk about the complexity of our balance sheet and me adding, you know, more innovative financing options pretty much every day.

The capability to optimize that portfolio, I think, is very safe in our hands having added Greg to the organization. I think as he expands his team, those would be the three areas that I think we need to concentrate on as we, you know, come out of this year and into next year and are talking about the development of the portfolio.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Excellent. Next question, sort of more process-oriented at the Calgary site. Are there currently any issues with the system? How have things been running at a high level?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Of course there are. We’re commissioning the first of its kind plant, so there’s lessons learned in engineering, there’s lessons learned in construction, there’s lessons learned in commissioning, and there’ll be lessons learned in operation. If there were major issues, we would not be providing, we would not be producing major high-quality asphalt at the back of the facility. That’s what people should focus on.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Excellent. Following on from that, what are some of the lessons you’ve learned from putting Calgary into production and for future sites? Where do you anticipate finding some improvements with respect to lead times and efficiency?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: We expect to significantly increase capital efficiency and significantly increase lead times with respect to commissioning. A really good example is, when you commission a new unit, a brand new unit with input and output from that unit, you don’t have the set points of that unit. You don’t know how to set pressure, level, temperature, flow, etc. That’s what commissioning is all about. That’s how you learn your unit. Let’s imagine one of our units in Calgary, which is now running, starting to run full time as we ramp up. Let’s think about nine months down the road where we have exactly the same unit in Hamilton. We know the set points. We literally know how to put the set points in to run that unit.

The efficiency of time, the length of time it will take us to construct and to get to operation, we believe there’s significant efficiencies there. I could get into every single element of this: engineering, construction, building, commissioning. We have lessons learned pretty much from every unit on where the improvements are going to be. We probably have a hundred-line spreadsheet on areas of improvement. It’s not anything substantial apart from, sorry, some of them might be substantial, but it might be like, hey, when you walk up the ladder for this system, put the pump on the left, not on the right. Actually, the access to, nobody’s built one of these before, so the access to that vessel, it’s way better if you put it on the left rather than the right. Simple to do, doesn’t cost any money, but it’s good for maintenance access.

The level of detail and sophistication that this team has done in identifying that is huge. That’s what continuous improvement is all about. I had a bit of a rambling answer as usual, but.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: In a nutshell, you would say next sites will be faster, cheaper, better. Is that fair?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Yep.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Good summary. Yeah, speaking of future sites, what are the current plans for the Delta, BC site?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Obviously, we had the lease extension there. We have a 15-year lease. We expect that will be almost the first stop in the next wave of three, and really, you know, that’s all about kind of feedstock and offtake negotiations.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: I’m going to comment on the pellets. Pellets has an angle there too, doesn’t it?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Yeah, I mean, Greg asked, do I want to discuss pellets? I mean, if you think about global access for a product and you think about the location of the Delta facility, which is probably five kilometers from the Tsawwassen facility, which has Canada’s major export to Asia, exporting hot oil from there would clearly be a challenge, given the distance traveled. Exporting pellets from there may be a massive fit. That’s one of the things in terms of business development that we’re thinking about.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Great. Speaking of product, from a technical perspective and in the customer perspective, what kind of feedback have you gotten on the product coming out of the back end?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: On this call, we have a number of customers and we also have a number of competitors. I will provide no feedback from a technical perspective with respect to the product.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Sounds good. What are some other technical considerations more broadly for the business going forward?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: I think we’ve covered it, right? Continuous improvement, learn from what’s happened at Calgary and the categories we chatted about, implement that. The next two won’t be perfect either and we’ll have to do continuous improvement for plant three and plant four and plant seven and plant 10. We have continuous improvement as part of the DNA of this business because if you’re going to build, if you’re going to build a hundred Northstar facilities, then continuous improvement is important. As I said earlier, that technical capability to build and operate is one of the key strengths we have today, but that we have to build on ourselves from an organizational perspective to make sure we can deploy that as we go forward.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Last but not least, we have a financial question for Greg. Greg, can you walk us through the margin profile on the tipping fees?

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Tipping fees. I guess I look at it from two perspectives. Based on my highlighted high-level comments on the accounting convention, it’s both an accounting convention, but it’s also economical. From an economical perspective, tipping fees go right to the bottom line. That’s how we look at it. There really isn’t any cost associated with tipping. The fact that we have inventory recorded, to me, is going to the matching principle of accounting in terms of we have costs that we are incurring to move product. Eventually, once we have operations, that becomes more of a cost of goods sold caption, which is encapsulated into our numbers we’ve quoted in our website in terms of margins. I don’t really see a net back per se on tipping fees. When I look at the overall margins of the business, we don’t, certainly we have assumptions on our pricing.

We’re not forecasting, we’re not in the business of forecasting fundamentals. There are pricing contracts that are for competitive reasons. We don’t disclose those that are tied to commodity prices. From a net back perspective, the margins are healthy. It results in very accretive IRRs. It relates and refers back to short paybacks, all the things that make this business based on Aidan’s comments. Once we have multiple plants, it just generates cash and becomes self-funding.

Trenton Grant, Q&A Moderator, CIN: Excellent. That about does it for Q&A. If you have any remaining questions, feel free to send them to us at roof@cancunications.com. With that, I’ll flip it back over to Aidan for closing remarks.

Aidan Mills, President and CEO, Northstar Clean Technologies: Thank you for the questions. I think that kind of encapsulates where we are. As I said earlier, I think our themes are, I think we’re in an excellent place. The PR today demonstrated not only does the technology work in the way that I said I thought it did when we were in Delta, and I said that I thought this technology was deployable. I believe we’ve just proven the product at the back end of our first commercial facility has outstanding quality. I think that’s very exciting. I think it’s the absolute platform for us now to, I don’t mean stop answering questions, but actually get back and focus on this ramp up. I’ve used the term ruthless focus, and that’s what we absolutely have. We need to deliver that for the marketplace, but also obviously for the fundamentals of this business.

We expect to have that done by the end of the year. We’re hoping that that’ll be the last PR that anybody needs to read on Roof because at that point in time, we’re fully operational. Basically, it’s all about how fast can we deploy this technology across North America and how many more tons of this global commodity can we actually deliver. Thank you very much for the time.

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