Critical minerals are absolutely vital for the energy transition. Without nickel, copper, lithium, cobalt and other rare earth elements, we simply cannot produce the solar modules, wind turbines, batteries and other technologies necessary to decarbonize the global economy. It’s no surprise then that demand for these critical minerals is expected to almost triple by 2030. But mining, processing and incorporating these critical minerals into manufacturing processes can itself result in far too many emissions. In addition, the concentration of related supply chains in just a few – sometimes authoritarian – countries exposes the United States in particular to unacceptable geopolitical risks. In this episode, Guy Van Syckle and Chad Reed chat with Coleman Adams, CFO of Nth Cycle – an industry leader in critical metal refining. Coleman discusses the climate and supply chain benefits of Nth Cycle’s first-of-a-kind (FOAK) Oyster facility in Fairfield, Ohio, which produces from recycled materials a critical input needed to manufacture batteries.
Critical minerals are absolutely vital for the energy transition. Without nickel, copper, lithium, cobalt and other rare earth elements, we simply cannot produce the solar modules, wind turbines, batteries and other technologies necessary to decarbonize the global economy. It’s no surprise then that demand for these critical minerals is expected to almost triple by 2030.
But mining, processing and incorporating these critical minerals into manufacturing processes can itself result in far too many emissions. In addition, the concentration of related supply chains in just a few – sometimes authoritarian – countries exposes the United States in particular to unacceptable geopolitical risks.
In this episode, Guy Van Syckle and Chad Reed chat with Coleman Adams, CFO of Nth Cycle – an industry leader in critical metal refining. Coleman discusses the climate and supply chain benefits of Nth Cycle’s first-of-a-kind (FOAK) Oyster facility in Fairfield, Ohio, which produces from recycled materials a critical input needed to manufacture batteries.
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Qualifying Advanced Energy Project Credit (48C) Program
Episode recorded October 30, 2024
Chad Reed: I'm Chad Reed.
Hillary Langer: I'm Hillary Langer.
Gil Jenkins: I'm Gil Jenkins.
Guy Van Syckle: I'm Guy Van Syckle.
Chad: This is Climate Positive.
Coleman Adams: Our beachhead market is the refining recycled content or end-of-use, end-of-life waste products. It's bringing units of metal that don't have to go through the traditional flow sheet. That's the primary focus. it's bringing supply chain security through onshoring, reshoring, bringing some capacity back domestically.
Chad: Critical minerals are absolutely vital for the energy transition. Without nickel, copper, lithium, cobalt and other rare earth elements, we simply cannot produce the solar modules, wind turbines, batteries and other technologies necessary to decarbonize the global economy. It’s no surprise then that demand for these critical minerals is expected to almost triple by 2030.
But mining, processing and incorporating these critical minerals into manufacturing processes can itself result in far too many emissions. In addition, the concentration of related supply chains in just a few – sometimes authoritarian – countries exposes the United States in particular to unacceptable geopolitical risks.
In this episode, Guy Van Syckle and I chat with Coleman Adams, CFO of Nth Cycle – an industry leader in critical metal refining. Coleman discuss es the climate and supply chain benefits of Nth Cycle’s first-of-a-kind Oyster facility in Fairfield, Ohio, which produces from recycled materials a critical input needed to manufacture batteries.
Chad: Coleman, thank you so much for joining us today.
Coleman: Yes, great to be here. Thank you for having me.
Guy: Coleman, wonderful to have you on the line here. To kick it off, I know you've had a good balance of building projects as a developer and then on the venture capital side, imagining the future ahead. How'd you find your way to Nth Cycle and what sold you on the mission?
Coleman: Yes, it was an interesting process. I spent most of my career in the resource development investment project world. I got to know the company while I was on the investment committee at Oak Ridge National Labs and their Innovation Crossroads program. This was 2017. I knew of the founding team and they actually started to raise money I think February of 2020, which is perfect timing. They reached out once COVID shut everything down and said, "Hey, we're trying to do our first raise."
At the time, I was working with Clean Energy Ventures. They were the lead investor in the seed round, which miraculously closed October of 2020. I think it was one of the first deals that was completely virtual, which is a novel thing in the venture world. Was serving on the board representing CEV so I got to know the company even better. Then there was just a ton of tailwinds in the space, in the critical metal space with the Inflation Reduction Act, the IIJA, unfortunately, the war in Ukraine, et cetera. Post-series A, I joined the team full-time as a CFO, but had spent the last couple of years getting to know them and really believing in the technology and the mission. It's been an interesting two and a half years since then.
Guy: When you think about that mission and what you saw early days looking at Oak Ridge and then on the investor side, what was it about impact of Nth Cycle you processed that really brought you in?
Coleman: I think part of this is the umbrella of clean tech getting a little bigger, going outside of energy. I've always had a thesis way in the back of my head of, if you're going to go from hydrocarbons to electrifying everything, you're going to need a lot of metal. If you look at the supply chains over the last 15, 20 years, really the Western world has gutted their metal supply chain. It all got exported to other countries. It was never apparent how unstable those supply chains were until COVID hit and exposed everybody and everything.
It's been something I've been very interested in for a long time, but the market conditions, this didn't really make sense to have a tech play when you're directly competing with China and the broader world doesn't necessarily seem to mind that. It wasn't until supply chains got disrupted. We have a number of geopolitical issues, and then you have this real commitment to electrifying everything. Those three pillars of the stool come together and say, "Okay, there's an opportunity here to do something new and different and novel because the U.S. has unique opportunity where we are probably one or two generations behind on a lot of this tech. It's a bit of a greenfield. It's like the U.S. finally gets a chance to skip a generation of technology and just go right to the best in class and rebuild an industry that's more or less been forgotten about for 20 or 30 years.
Chad: Yes. Coleman, you talk about how we're trying to electrify everything now, in part, to address climate change, and that requires a whole different suite of inputs into everything we manufacture and create in our economy. Nth Cycle is an industry leader in critical metal refining. First off, can you just zoom out and talk to us about what are critical minerals? What are we really referring to here, and why are they so important to the electrification of our economy, and ultimately, the environment?
Coleman: Critical metals is an amorphous definition. It depends on the country that you're in, but it's really a list of minerals or metals that here in the U.S. has been identified that's absolutely critical for either existing industries or growth areas that at least the current administration wants to support. I think it's 30 or 35 different elements on the periodic table that are metals that are needed for chips, they're needed for solar panels, they're needed for batteries. It's a whole gamut.
It's a pretty lengthy list. Some are exotic critical metals, some are more well-known, but each one has a different flavor and a different use case for areas of interest, at least here in the U.S. Then Europe has their own set of critical minerals and metals, but in a similar vein, right? They want to support industry and making sure that the industries that are priority have access to the raw inputs that they need to continue their innovation.
Chad: Can we give a specific example, maybe nickel? I think most folks have heard of nickel. Can you talk about where we get nickel from traditionally and then how it is processed and used for end use manufactured products today?
Coleman: Yes, and I think it's really important too to look at each one of these individually because their supply chains are all relatively unique, both the geography and the technology that's employed. If you take nickel, for example, traditionally, there's been a strong nickel industry in the U.S. up until probably the '90s. Canada still has a pretty strong nickel-producing industry.
Australia is another big nickel producer, but over the years, a lot of that production has been concentrated primarily in Indonesia and Russia. In Indonesia, most of the operators are actually either Chinese-owned or Chinese-backed. You've really concentrated both the mining of that raw material and the refining of that material to two countries that either have explicitly denied access to the supply chain or are of concern in terms of us relying on it, which is--
China and Russia are a huge percentage of both the raw ore and the refined capacity and so nickel is incredibly sensitive to the pricing power of China. At the same time, if you want secure supply chains and if you want compliant material, and if you want transparency on that material, you have this bottleneck going through China and Russia that make it very difficult for downstream users to get the type of products that they want or compliant products that they want.
It's a bit of a fractious mark at this point where you had concentration, then you had the war in Ukraine, and the Russian supply gets rerouted, very similar to oil, probably more of that goes to China. At the moment, you're seeing a lot of operators shut down, which furthers that concentration. BHP shut down in Australia, New Caledonia had a number of shutdowns. The latest number I heard was 80 plus percent was coming from Indonesia. It's probably even higher than that at this point.
That's just nickel. You have cobalt. You have copper. You have all these different metals that have a unique flavor to their supply chain, but a similar dynamic. You're starting to see concentration. That concentration leads to supply chain risk. Each country or entity is trying to exert some of their pressure as to how they want this material produced. In reality, if they don't do it domestically, they can't really influence how China secures and produces that material.
Chad: Right, and so what specific product or products would we recognize where nickel is the primary input, especially in the clean energy economy?
Coleman: The main one that gets most of the headlines is in batteries. NMC batteries use a large portion of a nickel intermediate, but still the vast majority of nickel goes into things like stainless steel and alloys, which though maybe not directly related to the clean energy transition, is part of the reinvestment in infrastructure. You can't have infrastructure without nickel going into stainless steel. At some points, you're competing with the nickel going to batteries and nickel going to stainless steel, but both of them have a major role to play, just infrastructure in general, which sometimes is code word for clean tech.
Chad: The traditional process of mining a mineral like nickel and then processing it, and then incorporating to the manufacturing of stainless steel batteries, et cetera, is relatively, there's a lot of emissions in that process, at least as it exists today. Can you talk to us about that? Where are those emissions really coming from?
Coleman: More often than not, the first step in processing nickel ore is to smelt it. You have a physical piece of it, but then it ends up in a smelter, which is not all that different than a blast furnace dealing with iron ore or steel. That is a bulk of the GHG emitted from nickel. There's also another process called high-pressure leaching, which is a lot of acid, a lot of pressure, a lot of heat. That probably has a slightly lower GHG footprint but has a much, much worse general environmental degradation to the surrounding environment.
The final step is typically what's called solvent extraction, which the solvents are byproducts of oil and gas, and then are hazardous wastes when they're done with them. The whole end-to-end process is fraught with both carbon-intensive aspects, but then overall just environmentally unsustainable practices that more often than not the Western world does not want to permit, so would not comply with current best practices in environmental protection, which is why you see it in countries that don't have those standards like in Indonesia or China or Russia.
Guy: When you think about Nth Cycle and how y'all address that and avoiding some of the really terrible environmental externalities tied up in mining today and processing today, maybe just give the listeners a walkthrough on how your solution avoids a lot of that impact.
Coleman: Yes, I think it's twofold. One is, our beachhead market is the refining recycled content or end-of-use, end-of-life waste products. It's bringing units of metal that don't have to go through the traditional flow sheet. That's the primary focus. Then the longer-term focus is bringing new tech to the table in a refinery flowsheet is really important to all of this because most of these operating assets are quite old. They're very large investments. They're very hard to stabilize. They're a hundred-year, a hundred-life assets, and we have an opportunity in the U.S,. especially if we want to start looking at being self-sufficient and producing these and deploying the best-in-class technology when it comes time to sort of reinvigorate the mining industry in the U.S. and in the Western world.
It's a little bit of we don't have that tech debt in a way that other countries do. We have a greenfield to say, "Hey, we're going to start mining nickel. We have a different way to do it. It's a better way to do it. It's easier to get permitting because it doesn't have the same legacy environmental impact." The tech needs to get to a point where it's mature enough to do that. You have to sync up the fact that most mines take 10 years to get permitted and it hasn't been a focus area for a long time, except for the last couple of years.
Now that's getting a lot of focus, the refining step comes along with the mine permitting. From our viewpoint is cut your teeth on the recycling side. Then, when these mines are starting to come to the permitting stage, there's a new best-in-class refining technologies available to them to help continue to keep that refining capacity here in the United States or in the Western world in general.
Chad: Yes. Your new and best-in-class solution is called the Oyster. You opened a facility about a year and a half ago in Ohio, which is the first U.S. domestic supply of premium nickel-cobalt MHP. Tell us about what Oyster is and how it works.
Coleman: Yes, so our Oyster is an electrochemical process that is really mainly focused at pulling out selectively certain product metals. The way I like to think about it is, we're the third leg in the stool of you can smelt metal, you can do what's called hydrometallurgical solvent extraction, or you can use electricity to do this. Our facility in Ohio is our first commercial plant focused on nickel production. The Oyster that's in there and the cells that we, proprietary cells that we employ there are really our nickel cells. They're really good at pulling out nickel from a wide variety of waste end-of-life recycled content material to produce a nickel product.
That facility is roughly about a 3,000-ton per year nameplate capacity. The really cool thing about that one is it took us 12 months to build and permit, which is light years faster than alternatives. One of the things that we wanted to prove is not just the effectiveness of the tech, but how rapidly we can deploy it and also how we can operate it on the smaller side.
One of the main issues in building large-scale refining is that you have to have the feedstock tied up and lots of it to justify a 50,000-ton plant, where our whole business model is to go a little smaller, find feedstocks that are a little more bespoke, but bring a tech to the table that can properly address that available feedstock versus the more traditional method, which is go find a lot of feedstock, build something big or take the risk you build something big and it's underutilized for a very long time and it puts stress on the viability of that asset.
Chad: Where's the feedstock coming from for this particular facility?
Coleman: Yes, so we have a sort of a wide variety of both partners that send us material as well as we are sort of opportunistically buying material within the broader region. We have everything from manufacturing scrap and batteries, end-of-life batteries, both from EVs, consumer electronics, and we also plan to process more generic industrial waste. They all have funny names like rainy nickel and fatty nickel cake and all these industrial waste products. The facility is designed to be a pretty wide funnel. As long as it has nickel in it, we're going to pull that nickel out and produce a product.
Chad: What product are you actually producing?
Coleman: We produce a hydroxide product, so mainly a nickel hydroxide product, or if there's a presence of cobalt, it's going to be a mixed nickel-cobalt hydroxide. That is what we'd probably call an intermediate commodity. It's not a finished product. There is a relatively deep market that buys that sort of thing, but it's not pCAM, it's not CAM. It is meant to be universal. It can go into stainless steel. It can go into specialty chemical. It can go into the beginning parts of the battery supply chain. We did that on purpose because though we very much believe in the growth of batteries, we needed to be able to ensure that we had a product that had the deepest possible market. This gives us the world stage to say, "Here's a product. We're not selling it to one buyer. We sell it to 20 or 30 that are available globally to start with."
Then as a lot of the gigafactories come online or as other supporting industries come online, we can begin to hone that down and start closing the loop, because that's the ultimate goal is to say, "Hey, battery comes in, battery material goes back out," or, "A spent catalyst from oil and gas comes in, that can go back out and go back to the producer." It's being realistic of where the market is right now, which is somewhat nascent, but preparing, for as the capacity of all these other industries come online, we can begin to have a larger product suite to support them.
Chad: So your top primary or two customers today for this product are who exactly?
Coleman: We have a number of partners, all of which are in the early stage battery manufacturing or are in the generic nickel production business. The one thing that we did with this facility is it's unencumbered by a long-term offtake, which I know you guys would hate to hear that if I was trying to raise money from you. The one thing it gives us is that it gives us a lot of price discovery, because this is a relatively new option in the market. We had an opportunity to sign 10, 20-year offtake agreements, but it didn't really factor in all the attributes that we thought provided value. Most of our production, unless it's going back to a partner, is open market, which has been fantastic for us in learning more about where we can tweak our product to be the most value add to that downstream offtake.
Guy: Coleman, as you think about how you can be a best value add there and your position with contracts, I certainly hear past developer Coleman in some of that analysis. It would be great to hear about how you apply some of the learnings from the microgrid side of things and scaling up distributed infrastructure into your Nth Cycle work.
Coleman: Yes, I think that was always part of the plan was we, in essence, are a project developer with a really cool piece of technology that no one else has. It's a completely different world from energy, right? There is no PPA-backed, utility-backed solar farm that we can do here. It's a unique type of project that you're developing, but a lot of the things are similar. Can we get an EPC to wrap this thing? Can we ensure our performance guarantees? What can we back-to-back?
Our business model is very much in line with the best practices for being a project developer. It's just certain things are more important to our type of asset versus traditional, and some things are less important to our particular asset than the traditional things. One thing about being in a commodity market is you are selling yourself short if you're 100% contracted because a big part of the metals world is you want to be in the right place at the right time when prices go parabolic, right?
If you were to lock in pricing for 10 years and nickel goes from $17,000 today up to $30,000, your investor partners are going to be pulling their hair out and being like, "How much money are we leaving on the table?" It's that balance of the investor class wants surety, but they also don't want to be left out. It's a balance of what risks we're going to take, how is that risk different than traditional assets, and then what does the investor get for that. What our partners get for that type of risk outlay?
Chad: We'll add a commodities master trader and market assessor to your resume here. It's good stuff.
Coleman: A junior master, I guess. [laughs]
Gil: Climate Positive is produced by HASI, a leading climate investment firm that actively partners with clients to deploy real assets that facilitate the energy transition. To learn more, please visit HASI.com
Chad: Where are the future oysters going to be built? Where are you looking to expand to?
Coleman: Yes. Our business model is to own and operate co-located with our partners under a tolling agreement. That's a bunch of buzzwords from the project developer world, which essentially means we're going to own our stuff, we're going to run it for our partners, we're going to do it as close to their feedstock as possible. we're going to take a performance risk. Where we look to site projects is pretty much wherever our partners tell us to go, whatever is most strategic for them, because especially in the nickel space, where you produce and how you produce has a gradient of value.
Now that there's restrictions on where and how material can be shipped and the attributes and you have the EU passport, the battery passport, you have compliance requirements for the Inflation Reduction Act, where you produce this stuff becomes really, really strategic. We work with our partners and say, "Well, where is that most strategic place to get the most value uplift between what goes into our system and what comes out." That is a very interesting process to let the site assessment float early on in the discussion and say, "Hey, maybe they have three facilities," or like, "Yes, there are four sites we're looking at," and we try and give our partners a lot of flexibility and optionality about where we go.
Any sort of case is a little bit different. The EU is a really strong market, even other European countries that aren't in the EU have a really strong value proposition. Then here in the US, I would say, the market's a little bit behind where the EU is- but there's a lot of interesting opportunities in and around, as you guys can imagine, places where the battery industry is standing up or some other legacy industries are beginning to look at closing the loop. We have a facility in Ohio. We have a lot of interesting opportunity in that new battery belt. Then you have some of the more traditional places like Texas, is a very interesting project location for us. As I said, throughout Europe, we have at least a site that is on the table in pretty much every European country. It's just a matter of where that most valuable uplift that we can find for our partner.
Guy: Coleman, can you quickly remind our listeners on how that value from the Inflation Reduction Act, either through credits or any of the grants you're seeing there, and likewise with the European battery passport flows through to demand for Nth Cycle output and the value that you bring to your customers.
Coleman: Yes. With the Inflation Reduction Act, it's twofold really. There's the investment tax credit on the assets that we deploy. That's your traditional solar tax credit. The biggest difference is that it's monetizable. We can get a credit and we can sell it, almost as if it's a security. We don't need to do a tax flip or something exotic.
Guy: That's the manufacturing credit, right?
Coleman: Yes, that's the 48C. There is in theory a 48X, which our co-located partners could probably take advantage of, but it's a little bit TBD, which is if they're making investment in their facility via our tolling fee, as long as it pertains to the right critical metal purity, which is 99.9% for most stuff, they could take advantage of that. The main driver of a lot of this is in order to have the tax credits for the EVs, you have to have a certain amount of compliant material in those battery components. In order to be compliant, you either have to produce it in a country that's got a free trade agreement or it has to be recycled and primarily in the US.
What we allow the downstream parties to do in terms of transparency is we produce the material where the feedstock comes from. It's naturally transparent. It doesn't get commingled. It doesn't get sent to China where it goes through a smelter with a thousand other things and comes back. We can stamp a lot of material with this is produced in Ohio or this is produced at our partner site. It makes the transparency for the auto OEMs very clear as to where that material comes from. As those requirements ramp up from about 40% to 80% of the content being compliant, they're scrambling to find that volume of material to maintain models of cars that their customers can get that tax credit on.
Chad: The policy incentive so far has been, and obviously, your business model is in part predicated on it being successful in reshoring some of these processes back into the United States. Is that accurate?
Coleman: I think it's a big part. Yes, it's bringing supply chain security through onshoring, reshoring, bringing some capacity back domestically. I think that is unique to our business model, which is most large refining, go find a body of ore that meets their requirements and build it there. They have no geographic requirements except for where do they have an ore body that they think they can mine. This is unique where we're unencumbered by those stipulations. We can site our refining asset in strategic places that can help bring transparency, which in essence brings compliance to the materials being produced.
Chad: We're now talking about how do we recycle aspects of the clean energy economy because we have solar projects that have been online for 15, 20 years in some cases already. We have panels. We have turbines. We'll soon have more batteries that will need to be recycled. How will this, some people call it e-waste, potentially be a source of feedstock for you all in your project development efforts going forward?
Coleman: Yes, I think where we want to play is we want to give our partners essentially the widest possible funnel of material that they can take. There are, obviously, limits to that. Each one of the things you listed has a different mix of things that need to get recycled. For a large part, where we want to fit is bringing a lot of optionality to our partners. If they're seeing more electronic waste or if they're seeing other industrial waste, or even if it's getting into some of the new tech that's coming out that doesn't have an end-of-life supply chain yet, I think there's opportunities to go after some of these new things that are scaling up that have a nascent end-of-life part of it.
It's really, in some ways, trying to future-proof the refining piece so that our partners can maximize the recyclability or the reusability of all these things. I think it's important that we think of the full lifecycle analysis of all this wonderful, clean tech stuff we're doing but if we don't think of it as a full lifecycle analysis, we can be falling short in areas, right?
Chad: Absolutely. Great to hear your entry into Nth Cycle. Can we talk about Nth Cycle's founding story? This idea was conceptualized a decade or so ago, well before most folks were even beginning to think about the opportunities here. Could you tell us a little bit about how Nth Cycle came to be founded and how, I think you just recently, last year, at least closed your Series B, and how you've been successful in fundraising to date?
Coleman: Yes, and I will not do this justice. Our CEO, Megan, does a much better job of telling the founding story since she actually experienced it. ButMegan and Chad. Chad's our chief scientist. Chad was at Harvard. Megan was at Yale. They had an opportunity to work with some of the OEMs thinking long-term about if we have 50 billion iPhones, what does that look like in terms of reuse and even getting access to those metals? Chad had been working for a long time at Harvard on the base parts of this technology. When Megan, our CEO, and Chad met, this idea clicked of, "Hey, this thing that you've been using for other things can work for metals."
This was probably 2016. Megan took the idea to the benchtop as part of her PhD thesis, and then came out of Harvard and Yale with licensed IP, where they went down to Oak Ridge and really had focused time on understanding the foundational merits of the technology and really the scalability of it. They spent two years in Knoxville at Oak Ridge, and then came out of that with a proof of concept at the benchtop scale, actually mainly around rare earth metals.
A lot of what they're doing was recycling of magnets, which is one metal sonar roadmap. It wasn't until the first funding that they started pivoting towards nickel and cobalt and copper, which are three main beachhead markets, primarily driven by this boom in EVs, as well as I'd say rare earth is a more difficult supply chain to enter into. That company did the seed round in 2020, did a series A in 2022, and we closed the B round about a year ago in 2023. All that was leading up to our commercial facility in Ohio, which is now up and running. From here on out, it's really just scaling to the pipeline. We have our, I guess, coming from Climate Week, everyone's talking about FOAK. This is our FOAK that's done. We now have the reference plant. We want to go do it all over the place and really turn and burn on the project side.
Guy: Quick question just on the plant itself and the system itself, and as you think about, the path forward, can you remind me how you all tune the system to process different metals and how is the strategy around that or even just the process around how you tweak the components in the system to process different metals?
Coleman: Yes, and I will caveat all this by, I'm the CFO and I have zero experience technically, but the way I like to conceptualize it is we have a cell that more or less looks like a cartridge and within that cell we have a number of different ways in which we can flow through different series of reactions that are primarily driven by electrical input and then the chemical conditions within it. The way we tune things is saying how many electrons are we pumping into it and what are the sequence of reactions, different metals come out at different sequencing and that's within the cell. Then because of how this is set up modularly, we can either do this in series or in parallel.
We look at the input. We look at what the cell can do in terms of conditions that we can create within it. If we want to add volume, we add more cells. If we want to add purity, we do things in series. The aspect that we're constantly and always interested in learning more about is, so where are the boundaries of what the cell can do without any retooling? If we do need retooling, we try and make it as limited as possible, right?
You're just taking a cell out and putting a different one in versus a complete redo, which allows us to, as things change in the future with our partners, say "Hey, you're seeing feedstock that's looking more like this or the products you want to do are looking a little bit tweaked. We'll bring you the next generation of cells that can do that better. It gives us a little bit of that future-proof and adaptability into the future as needs change. I think the whole clean energy economy is a awesome but somewhat terrifying idea of some of the products we don't even know people need yet, but we want to be in a position to give it to them once they concoct whatever wonderful mousetrap that they come up with.
Chad: Coleman, thank you. I appreciate this great overview. We're almost done, but first we have what we call the hot seat. We ask for your immediate reactions to the following statements and questions. Guy, do you want to lead us off?
Guy: I would love to lead us off. Coleman, as a fellow DC guy, what's your favorite food spot when you're back in the hometown?
Coleman: I got to be honest with you guys, it's been a bit, so I don't even know if any of this stuff exists anymore. I was going to say Steak and Egg, but I'm pretty sure that's gone. [laughs]
Guy: That's a great pick. Good memories there, for sure. Next one up, I know you're a big hockey player. When was the last time you laced up the skates?
Coleman: It's been a while. We have three little kids, so most of the time I'm on skates is trying to hold them up. We take them out on the pond. It's a support role, support role only, but it's been fun. It's nice living in New England, having access to all this. Someday I will get back to it, but not until my oldest gets into kindergarten probably.
Guy: Wonderful. Coach Coleman, I see [crosstalk]
[laughter]
Chad: Something I thought was true that I no longer believe.
Coleman: This was a tough one because I'm pretty naturally skeptical. I sort of assume most stuff is TBD until I can prove it true. I think relating this back to the climate piece, I've lived in New England six years now and it hasn't snowed much here, which is probably one of the more disappointing things because the pond doesn't freeze, the ski slopes don't get snow. I thought there'd be a lot more snow in New England and it seems to be getting worse every year.
Chad: I'm most proud of.
Coleman: I would say my family. I'm a proud dad, but I have three little boys all under the age of five. We've been very bullish on having kids the last couple of years. They take up most of my energy and time and brainpower and very proud papa.
Chad: As you should be. To recharge, I--
Coleman: We live in a wonderful place in Massachusetts out somewhat in the exurbs and we have access to the woods. I spent a lot of time being able to walk around, take the dog for a walk, think about what we're doing. It's really quite wonderful living and have such access to nature. I wouldn't say hiking, that's a bit of a stretch, but definitely meandering through the woods.
Chad: The book or article that has influenced me most is?
Coleman: Can I pander? Can I say this podcast?
Chad: [laughs]
Guy: Oh, thank you, Coleman.
Chad: Just stop, Coleman, stop.
Coleman: Whatever Guy posts to Instagram, that's pretty influential too.
[laughter]
Chad: He is prolific, isn't he?
[laughter]
Chad: Then, finally, to me, climate positive means?
Coleman: My viewpoint is we just need to be more efficient in everything. We humans are really good at optimizing if it's our priority. I think climate positive just means let's start prioritizing around ways that we can be efficient and stewards of all this. I think it's taking all the best human qualities and just focusing it on this topic.
Chad: That's a great answer. Thank you so much, Coleman. Great to chat with you and learn more about Nth Cycle and look forward to chatting again [sound cut]
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I'm Chad Reed.
And this is Climate Positive.