Unconventional Gold.
Waste-to-value, bioenergy and the carbon economy in Aotearoa — field notes from the living biorefinery.
// Move your cursor — the digester is feeding · click to send a pressure wave
Two Hundred People, One Room, and a Region Deciding What It Wants to Be
Two hundred people, one room, and a region working out what comes next.
Read the piece →Nobody in That Room Was Short of Money. So Why Isn't Anything Getting Built?
The money was in the room. The projects still aren’t getting built.
Read the piece →Taranaki's Biogas Moment Has a Catch, and Almost Nobody in the Room Heard It
Biomethane is the obvious next move — and the digestate problem comes with it.
Read the piece →Two Declined Consents, and What They Should Have Taught New Zealand's Energy Sector
Two declined consents, and the partnership lesson the sector still hasn’t learned.
Read the piece →We Swapped One Fuel for a Whole Toolbox, and That's Why This Feels So Hard
One fuel became a whole toolbox. That is why this feels so hard.
Read the piece →From 960 to 50
Through to the Top 50 of the QBE AcceliCITY Challenge, from 960 applications.
Read the piece →Why the Best Clean Tech in the World Still Can't Get Out of the Lab
When does good evidence actually change policy? Notes from Tech Tuesday.
Read the piece →What global investors actually look for: inside the international investor panel
Five investors managing billions between them sat down after lunch to answer the question every founder in the room wanted answered: what does it take to get funded — and what does a Series A climate company really look like in 2026?
Read the piece →Scaling from the edge: how Kiwi climate companies actually get into Europe
A textile-waste founder, a scale-up advisor, an ambassador and a returning expat sat down to answer one question — what does it really take to go global? The answers were specific, and occasionally surprising.
Read the piece →The $30 billion circle: inside the bioeconomy breakout
"The bioeconomy isn't one product — it's a circle." A room full of foresters, scientists and founders spent an hour arguing about why New Zealand keeps leaving that circle on the table.
Read the piece →From ambition to adoption: what five parties actually said about climate tech
The summit closed with a cross-party political forum — and for once it wasn't platitudes. Five parties argued, in specifics, about R&D, the "missing middle," procurement, an enduring energy strategy and the bioeconomy. Here is the fullest account of who said what.
Read the piece →"Bring the world to New Zealand": Alice Havill's challenge to Aotearoa's climate-tech founders
The summit opened with a keynote from a Kiwi engineer who left to scale climate companies overseas — and came home with an uncomfortable diagnosis and a very practical plan.
Read the piece →Under One Roof: The Aurora Climate Tech Summit 2026
Why New Zealand's bioeconomy is a deployment problem — not a technology problem.
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