StormFisher advances Quebec e-Methanol project

StormFisher Hydrogen Ltd. is in due diligence with advisors regarding project finance for its Varennes, Quebec e-Methanol project, IJGlobal can reveal.

The London, Ontario-based company is positioning the former Recyclage Carbone Varennes (RCV) site as North America’s first commercial e-Methanol facility. The project is compliant with European regulatory standards for renewable fuels of non-biological origin (RFNBO).

CEO Judson Whiteside said the company is preparing to enter capital markets in the coming months, with engineering underway and a target FID of early 2027 and COD in early 2029. The company will seek to raise $200 million in project equity.

The Varennes facility was acquired in fall 2023 after RCV entered a creditor protection process and the original investors stepped back from the project. It comes with infrastructure, including 80 acres, 230kV energized interconnection, substations, and long-term renewable power from HydroQuébec.

Whiteside called the grid “fantastic” for meeting stringent European and Asia-Pacific renewable electricity requirements, noting that baseload hydro improves capacity factors compared with US projects reliant on hourly matched wind and solar.

StormFisher has secured sustainable water access from the St. Lawrence Seaway and is contracting nearby biogenic CO₂ from landfill and ethanol facilities.

Whiteside confirmed StormFisher is preparing to raise project equity and debt. The company now has roughly 30 employees, including engineering, CO₂ sourcing, power market specialists, and a dedicated offtake team.

“We’re starting that process right now,” he said. “There’s still a lot of desire and appetite for equity into the projects themselves.”

Investor sentiment, he added, has shifted from platform-level investments toward project-specific opportunities.

“The industry has changed. Pipeline expectations have changed. The market is more challenging and slower to develop than we all hoped,” said Whiteside.

Whiteside estimated capital costs for the Varennes project in the CAD $600-to-$700 million range, with a more refined figure expected as engineering progresses.

StormFisher plans to hire a financial advisor and is conducting due diligence on potential firms, he said. The company’s legal counsel is Osler, a Canadian firm.

Stable Canada, volatile US

StormFisher has raised more than CAD $100 million to date, backed by ARC Financial (CAD $30 million) and Hy24 (USD $50 million), the global hydrogen investment platform supported by French investment firm Ardian.

“We are [Hy24’s] first and only North American investment to date,” Whiteside said. Hy24 holds the controlling stake, with ARC and the founding group, StormFisher Limited, also significant shareholders.

Whiteside contrasted Canada’s stable investment tax credit with the compressed timelines now constraining US clean fuels projects.

“The PTC still exists,” he said of the $3 per gallon credit. “But a project has to meet the definition of start of construction before the beginning of 2028.”

He noted that the original IRA guidance extended into the 2030s, giving developers far more runway.

“These projects are very tricky to do quickly. The condensed timeframes have made it extremely difficult.”

He said the US interior also presented practical barriers.

“If you wanted low-cost power you could contract, you were driven to West Kansas and Northwest Texas,” he said. “But then you run into issues around competing for water sources with farmers or now data centers, where the scale was getting too much for some communities to handle.”

StormFisher remains bullish on US potential but has stalled its efforts in Kansas and Texas given the current regulatory environment, Whiteside said.

Whiteside said the competitive landscape has thinned significantly.

“A lot of our competitors have disappeared because of the policy changes,” he said. Canada never had the same volume of e‑fuel developers as the US, and many firms (such as renewable IPPs that launched and then disbanded P2X verticals) have since shifted focus to data centers or exited entirely.

Some Canadian developers remain active in low carbon ammonia, but Whiteside views ammonia as a longer dated opportunity.

“We’ve always thought ammonia is maybe 10 years further out than methanol.”

Offtake and market positioning

Whiteside said StormFisher has spent years building relationships with global buyers of low carbon molecules.

“We’ve been in front of all the major players since 2022,” he said. The primary market for Varennes eMethanol is European maritime customers facing tightening FuelEU Maritime and RFNBO requirements. “They are under strict policy change with penalties that have already started and continue to ramp into the 2030s.”

Bio-based fuels such as biodiesel and bio methanol are serving as interim solutions, but Whiteside said they cannot meet long-term volume needs.

There is still a large appetite for e-Methanol products, he said, highlighting the logistical advantage of exporting from eastern Canada.

“It’s a fairly short trip across the Atlantic into European ports,” he said, contrasting that with the cost of shipping Chinese e-Methanol. “Buyers like that advantage.”

StormFisher’s leadership team brings operational experience despite not currently managing operating assets.

“All of our executive team, myself included, come from operations,” he said. “When you’re developing a project of this size and magnitude, it’s really important that you have the operations lens.”

 StormFisher’s former operating biogas assets were sold to Generate Capital.

Whiteside said the company is no longer affiliated with Generate, noting that StormFisher sold its biogas assets, including operating facilities and teams, to Generate in recent years. That transaction effectively separated StormFisher’s legacy waste-to-energy business from the new hydrogen and e-fuels platform launched in 2022.

“Our original co‑founders exited that business, and all of those assets were sold to Generate,” he said. “It was a great partner for us and a great transition, but we moved into e‑fuels because we saw more scalable opportunities.”

The companies’ collaboration had been one of the most visible in Canada’s renewable natural gas sector. Generate owned StormFisher’s London, Ontario facility, one of North America’s largest organics-to-RNG plants, which processed more than 120,000 tons of food and commercial waste annually. The project was recognized as the 2021 Project of the Year by the Canadian Biogas Association for its carbon negative fuel production system.