Dutch producer of biological carbon Perpetual Next has secured a €100m investment from majority shareholder Momentum Capital, with over €300m raised externally from twenty family offices
In brief
- Dutch company wants to encourage industrial companies to green their production process
- That idea is resonating with investors. More than €300m has been raised externally. Majority shareholder Momentum Capital is also investing €100 million
- Later this year, a decision will be made to build a green gas factory in Delfzijl
The Dutch producer of biological carbon Perpetual Next has raised approximately €420m from investors. More than €100m comes from majority shareholder Momentum Capital and the other €320m has been raised, according to CEO Niels Wage, from twenty family offices. In return for their investments, they also become shareholders.
The Amsterdam-based company buys up used wood, food waste and other biological residual products on a large scale and converts these waste flows into biological carbon and green gas in its own factories. In the long term, it also wants to produce green hydrogen.
Perpetual wants to entice large industrial companies to go green, so that they replace their production process based on fossil raw materials with renewable raw materials such as biological carbon and green gas – a multi-billion dollar market in the long run.
Perpetual Next has already achieve its first successes. For example, steel manufacturer ArcelorMittal has already started a pilot in Ghent to use renewable carbon from the Amsterdam company to replace part of the fossil coal use.
Talks are also underway with a major US steel company, a major European cement factory and companies in Sweden. They are also considering using Perpetual Next technology. “Companies in the sector would like to go green. The demand for renewable raw materials is high,”says Wage.
Green gas factory
At the beginning of this year, the Dutch climate technology company set up a joint venture with Gasunie to enable the construction of a green gas factory in Delfzijl, as an alternative to fossil natural gas. This involves an investment of €60m. The final investment decision will be taken later this year, but CEO Wage says he is “completely confident” that the project will go ahead.
The hundreds of millions of euros raised will be largely used for new acquisitions and for scaling up the current production capacity. The biocarbon producer currently has factories in the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom and Estonia, while plans are already underway for a location in the United States.
Last year, the climate technology company, which recovers carbon from natural waste, acquired the Belgian company TorrCoal, a business that converts scrap wood and recyclable plastic-containing waste into high-quality carbon and then supplies these raw materials in powder form to the biochemical and steel industries, among others. A recent takeover is that of the Brabant recycling company OMR from Moerdijk.
Perpetual Next currently has a turnover of several tens of millions of euros, but it is expected that it will grow to around €250m in 2025.
The company must then be listed on the Amsterdam stock exchange. The IPO is one of the most important jobs for the new CEO Niels Wage who took office in February. The company has already engaged the American investment bank Jefferies for this. An IPO is planned for late 2024/early 2025.
Wage joined Perpetual Next in November 2021. He has extensive experience in the raw material industry, project development, commerce and supply chain management. He has held leadership positions at major international companies such as BHP, Cargill and Vopak.
This article originally appeared in FD, the Dutch business daily, on 15 June 2022
