The founder of an investment firm buying large estates across Britain to restore woods and peatland has said it is “unashamedly and proudly” capitalist, and plans to make tens of millions of pounds in profit.
Rich Stockdale, the chief executive of Oxygen Conservation, said his model of “regenerative capitalism” was a “force for good” because it would offer investors significant profits by planting trees, restoring peatlands, operating solar farms and holiday homes and installing new windfarms across its estates.
The Exeter-based firm, which has bought 13 estates in under four years, plans to rapidly become the UK’s largest private landowner by expanding its current landholding of 50,000 acres (20,234 hectares) over the next five years to 250,000 acres.
“We are applying a capitalist model, unashamedly and proudly,” Stockdale said, on a tour of Oxygen’s estate at Dorback near Grantown-on-Spey in the Cairngorms.
“We think releasing, activating and motivating more capital into this space is the only way we can scale conservation for the better of climate, wildlife, people and everyone concerned.”
He said Oxygen Conservation was creating a new market for “premium” carbon credits because some wealthy private and institutional investors would pay much higher prices to store carbon in new woodlands or peatland if they included high environmental and social benefit.
Its goal is to sell two million tonnes of carbon credits at well above the normal market rate, to prove that “regenerative capitalism” can work, he added.
Stockdale likened his firm’s approach to the Brad Pitt movie Moneyball, in which a baseball coach used performance data to build a winning team. Oxygen Conservation uses Lidar laser scanning, thermal imaging to track deer and photogrammetry to build up 3D images of their estates.
“We’ve taken very much a moneyball approach to the environment that’s previously been applied to sport. And that’s where you see all these threads that run through data, sport, high performance, US tech culture. We’ve brought that to the environmental world.”
Campaigners and experts in natural capital who have been closely watching Oxygen Conservation’s rapid growth are sceptical about its methodology. They say it is based on significant levels of borrowing and speculative bets on the future value of its investments.
Residents near Comrie in the Scottish Highlands, where Oxygen Conservation plans to build a large new 50MW windfarm, and around Dartmoor in south-west England where it bought a large hill farm, have accused the firm of ignoring local concerns and opposition.
Josh Doble, the policy director at Community Land Scotland, a community-ownership advisory and campaign group, said Oxygen Conservation was the most bullish of a new generation of “mega lairds” accumulating extensive land-holdings.
Their profit-driven approach “raised questions about the long-term commitment to restoring nature, rather than treating land as another investible commodity,” Doble said.
“If absentee investor landowners own large parts of rural Britain, they must engage with the fact that owning land comes with responsibility. If you have a risky model, you need to be very careful because you’re not just making risky decisions in a boardroom, you’re playing with people’s lives.”
Despite insisting Oxygen Conservation would be transparent about its plans and its business model, Stockdale refused to confirm or deny reports from natural capital experts he had already spent £150m and planned to spend another £100m on land.
He said he could not say how much he paid the brewing firm BrewDog this summer for its estate at Kinrara near Kingussie or for Dorback because their owners had requested confidentiality.
Campaigners said withholding the sale price for a Highland estate is unusual, undermined transparency and risked concealing changes in the land market.
Its biggest investors include Mike Dixon, a billionaire statistician who holds most of its shares, the self-styled ethical bank Triodos and Tony Bloom, a gambling billionaire who owns Brighton and Hove Albion FC. Bloom is currently being sued in a lawsuit alleging his gambling syndicate used “frontmen” to place bets. It is understood Bloom intends to file a defence to the claim.
The latest accounts for its parent company, Oxygen House Group, which is also the majority shareholder in Low Carbon, the firm building its two Scottish windfarms, show the firm has two large bank loans totalling £106m to be repaid by 2033.
Its critics point out that the two Scottish estates where it wants to build new 50MW windfarms, at Invergeldie near Loch Lomond and Trossachs national park, and at Blackburn and Hartsgarth estate near Langholm in the Borders, had bank loans worth £20.5m tied to them.
Andrew Thompson, who helps run a local group opposing the windfarm, said residents feared those loans meant Oxygen Conservation had to push the windfarm through to pay off that debt, despite well-founded objections to the project from the conservation agency NatureScot and the national park authority. “Otherwise they’re completely screwed,” he said.
Stockdale claimed Oxygen’s investments are already worth more than £300m, and said its backers could see returns as high as 15% a year because the price of its carbon credits would climb to up to £180 a tonne and its biodiversity net gain credits were already worth £25,000 each.
The average price for carbon in the UK last year was £37 a tonne. He said the appetite for premium credits had been proven when Burges Salmon, the law firm which acts for Oxygen Conservation, paid £125 a tonne earlier this year. The civil engineering firm Arup also paid £100 a tonne to a nature capital firm called Nattergal which owns rewilding estates in eastern England this year.
He said one way to pay its investors was to sell off its estates after five years or so at a significant profit, with Oxygen Conservation remaining in charge of running the estate.
He said wealthy investors including pension funds and international companies were willing to pay well above market rates for these credits, similar to some drivers preferring a Prius over a Ford. European investors were clamouring for Oxygen Conservation to invest on the continent.
“We’re taking more risk, we’re pushing this out, we are doing things faster and different. I’ve been able to do that because of an incredible set of investors, an incredible team. Please don’t judge us by the norm, we aren’t trying to be,” Stockdale said.
