Aurora Sustainable Lands - Formation capital raise

Terms

Not ranked

Raised by a fund or vehicle, not a company or project

Announced

2 Nov 2022

Instrument

Equity

Amount

Approximately US$1.8bn, equity and debt, split not disclosed

Source

aurorasustainablelands.com

Parties

Fund or vehicle

Aurora Sustainable Lands

Country

United States

Capital providers

Capital providers and the amount counted for each

Party	Role	Amount	Basis
Oak Hill Advisors	Investor	Undisclosed	No value disclosed
AB CarVal	Investor	Undisclosed	No value disclosed
EIG	Investor	Undisclosed	No value disclosed
GenZero	Investor	Undisclosed	No value disclosed
Anew Climate	Investor	Undisclosed	No value disclosed

Carbon

Pathway

Improved forest management

Backed by offtakes from

• JPMorgan Chase
• Microsoft

What happened

Acquisition of a 1.7 million acre US timberland portfolio, announced 2 November 2022 and described by the company as completed, with definitive agreements over a further 200,000 acres taking the platform to 1.9 million acres. The buyer at the time was Blue Source Sustainable Forests Company, renamed Aurora Sustainable Lands in 2023. Oak Hill Advisors led the investor consortium. Recorded at fund and vehicle level and carried without a value: approximately US$1.8bn is stated, but it is the price of a land portfolio bought with an undisclosed mix of equity and debt, not a disclosed financing into a carbon project, and booking it in the market total would make one row larger than any other in the book.

Kumo note

The transaction that created the largest carbon-first timberland platform in the United States, and the reason improved forest management has a corporate-scale balance sheet behind it at all. Land was bought outright and then managed for carbon rather than for timber yield, which is a different proposition from financing a project on land someone else owns. It sits outside the ranked tables because it is a vehicle formation at the asset level rather than a financing into a company or a project, and because the split between equity and debt has never been published.

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