Hello to Wes Bolson, CEO of CitroTech.
Really nice to see you down here today.
Thank you, JD.
Great to be here.
What was the experience like for you and your team to ring the closing bell?
What does the moment mean to the Citro tech community, you think?
Yes, I think it was a wonderful opportunity to ring the closing bell because I think people are starting to become aware that we need to prevent fires.
Citroech is a company that is going to start preventing fires versus just suppressing them, and we're one of the few companies on the New York Stock Exchange that is.
Actually preventing versus just reacting to things.
I feel like this is always, it's always an important time to have this conversation here in New York.
We are reminded of that this year with all the wildfire smoke coming from places like Canada.
Most people might be familiar with the red fire retardant that drops from airplanes.
How is your technology fundamentally different?
Yes, fundamentally what you're doing is preventing the ignitions under power lines, along railroad lines, along roadsides, and it's the first EPA recognized fire retardant that.
Safe.
All the red stuff has some things that build up, and we need to move to more friendly, environmentally friendly fire retardants, and that's what Citroc is doing.
How do we shift the model, the thinking from suppressing wildfires to preventing fires in the first place, to your point?
Yes, I think what we have to do is we have to start saying for every $1 it's like an ounce of prevention is worth £1 of cure.
If we spend $1 towards preventing ignitions with Citroc, we wouldn't have to have as many airplanes up and air tankers dropping that.
But where it's going to come is hearts and minds in communities.
It's going to start with people saying, I need to protect my home.
It's very personal to saying how does my home and my community get protected.
And how do we have people prevent those ignitions from ever starting?
And it's not just there.
You're taking it a step further into the lumber itself, a new partnership with Hexion to build fire protection directly there.
What could that mean in terms of how we build homes, specifically in wildfire country?
Yes, the Hexion Citrotec joint venture, the Hexech venture is meant to say globally we will manufacture fire retardant.
Treated lumber and building materials in a way that makes homes withstand the wildland urban interface where those fires are burning down homes.
So Hexion is an amazing partner, a 100 year old company, and it was great for Citroc to be able to form that joint venture to get Citroc into the market with the biggest wood producers and lumber producers in the world.
Even bigger picture, what could this mean for would-be home buyers who struggle to even get insurance if they live in so-called fire country?
We're seeing homes that are being built in that high-risk fire threat area that are either being uninsured or they have insurance of last resort.
We're seeing insurance companies say, hey, if you use Citroc or if you install some things around your home, we can actually help you with your deductions, and you're not using water, you're using something.
And that lasts until it's physically washed off from that vegetation.
You know, it's amazing here in New York.
I grew up very close by wildfires, these summer kind of regular patterns.
This was never a part of my childhood, and now it's a part of something we contend with seemingly every summer, at least here in New York and so many other places.
What does it take to get ahead of the next big generation of wildfires in the US and in Canada?
Yes, I think we, as we look towards preventing those fires, I think the federal government and state governments are going to start bringing in contracts for ground.
Based where we don't have to send up aerial tankers, we get ahead of it by precision applying Citroc where those ignitions are likely to start.
I'm going to bridge over to AI for a second.
We have more data and more knowledge on where we should be preventing fires, and I think Citroc will start to adopt some of the breakthrough AI modeling to know where we should be preventing those fires.
It's a really important story coming at a very important time.
I'm grateful for your time today, Wes Bolson, CEO of Citrotech.
Congratulations.
Come back and see us anytime.
Thank you, JD.
