Richard Poole and Verdant Earth Technologies pitch green plan for former Redbank coal power plant
Investors have stumped up $80m to fund a proposal to turn Babcock & Brown’s former coal power plant in the Hunter Valley into a massive wood-fired generator.
It was the country’s dirtiest coal power plant, placed into administration after the failure of its owner, investment bank Babcock & Brown, in 2014.
Now the businessmen who acquired the Redbank station in the Hunter Valley are again attempting to restart it – this time talking up an opportunity to re-tool the site to operate as a green hydrogen facility.
Documents circulated to investors this year by Verdant Earth Technologies – and obtained by The Australian – show it was attempting to raise $50m by listing on the Nasdaq.
It is far from the first time that the company – previously known as Hunter Energy and run by colourful banking identity Richard Poole – has tried to revive the plant.
Poole, found by the NSW corruption watchdog to have worked with the family of disgraced Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid on the now-mothballed Mount Penny coal mine, had originally heard about Redbank in 2016, from a “mate of a mate of a mate”.
Since then, the site has been spruiked as a power source for a cryptocurrency venture and separately as a biomass fuels station. In 2020, the Australian Financial Review reported the company had engaged Bridge St Capital in an attempt to re-list on the ASX after a five-year absence. That listing never went ahead. Poole told The Australian that the ASX had refused to allow it to list until it had environmental approvals. “The ASX said unless we got approval to burn biomass they wouldn’t accept our listing,” Poole, now Verdant’s CEO, said.
His work on the Redbank station has not been the only thing keeping Poole busy. The former banker has run a vociferous campaign to have findings of corrupt conduct, made against him in 2013 by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, expunged from the record. They relate to his time as a director of Cascade Coal, which became part of ICAC’s Operation Jasper probe into the Mount Penny licence granted by the then mining minister, Ian Macdonald, to the Obeid family. He was found, along with others, to have attempted to hide the involvement of the Obeids in the Mount Penny tenement.
Still, Bruce McClintock SC, the Inspector of ICAC, in 2018 dismissed the issues raised by Poole and John McGuigan. That dispute – and the lengthy delays in restarting Redbank – has not dented investor interest in the latest incarnation, Poole says.
Investors had committed almost $80m toward the new plant, he said. The company proposes to put the money raised towards “the restart of our renewable generator, secure approvals and grid connection, repayment of $US2.8m facility, progress green hydrogen assets, and general corporate purposes”.
In its presentation, Verdant told investors it would cost an estimated $US42m ($62m) to restart the plant over a 10-month period and offered income both from the power it made and the potential tipping fees from taking in waste. “We want to say rather than recycle timber, why don’t we burn it,” Poole said.
Among the additions to the sales pitch is green hydrogen. Verdant tells investors in the presentation that it “plans to lead the charge, producing renewable energy at scale and unlocking the power of green hydrogen”.
Verdant expects total revenue of more than $75m in its first year of operating the plant – having sold 1 million MWh. Total costs will come in at around $52m, it says. From the second year, it forecasts an additional $33m in revenues from taking tippings.
“Verdant is seeking to lead the development of green hydrogen, replicating its model to establish a footprint in multiple markets,” it says in the presentation. But first, the company faces a fight with the NSW government over its proposal to burn wood for power.