Good morning, and welcome to T he Atome PLC Investor Presentation. Throughout this recorded presentation, investors will be in listen only mode. Questions are encouraged and can be submitted at any time via the Q&A tab situated on the right-hand corner of your screen. Simply type in your questions and press send. The company may not be in a position to answer every question it receives during the meeting itself. However, the company can review all questions submitted today and publish responses where it's appropriate to do so. Before we begin, I'd like to submit the following poll. Now I'd like to hand over to Olivier Mussat, CEO. Good morning, sir.
Good morning. Good morning, everyone. Good to be presenting again. It wasn't that long ago, actually, to announce some quite material progress that we have made in the past few weeks. For those who do not know Atome yet, I think I'll give you a brief description of what is it that we do and how we are doing it and who is doing it. Atome as a company— you know— we are basically a green fertilizer developer- producer. Right? Our whole aim is to decarbonize the global food supply chain through the use of green fertilizer.
It really came from the fact that what we saw four years ago, when we started, you know, looking at what was the potential of decarbonization was that the agri sector, and especially the fertilizer sector, was one of these hard-to-abate sectors, which really was not on the list of priority. It was, let's call it a very well-kept secret, that you have one of the most carbon-intensive sectors, you know, highly dependent on commodity prices, which, you know, nobody had really looked at disrupting, thanks to the new technologies of green energy which were coming up. I will go into a presentation on how do we go about making green fertilizer and what are the markets and where is the opportunity.
Once we are past the usual disclaimer, obviously, as I mentioned, you know, this is a company we created four years ago and, you know, a good idea is great, but if you don't have people to execute the idea, you know, that remains a dream. We went about creating and putting together the best possible team to go and successfully develop Atome as a green fertilizer company.
It started with our Chairman and largest shareholder, Peter Levine, who is, you know, quite well known for a number of you as far as, you know, a very successful entrepreneur into the energy sector, having developed and actually sold a company called Imperial Energy for more than $2.4 billion, I believe, back in the late 2000s. Then was also a Chairman of a number of engineering company. That's quite important because at the end of the day, you know, green fertilizer is great, but you're making fertilizer; you're making a chemical, and it's all about the discipline on cost and the discipline on margin.
You have to be able to show that sustainability is great, but you have to be able to produce cost competitively and be very mindful about how you're developing your project. He brings obviously not only his capital as the largest shareholder, but also his expertise and his real focus. Personally, I started my career as a power engineer with GE, moved to oil and gas with Schlumberger, and then the finance world with Standard Chartered, and my last role was with IFC, the International Finance Corporation, as Chief Investment Officer of the Global Energy book, which was about $7 billion across debt and equity assets. Obviously, our first projects in Paraguay, it's all about having the right people on the ground.
We have James Spalding, who's our President of Atome Paraguay, who used to be the head of the Itaipu Dam, which is basically the second largest hydroelectric dam where we derive our power from for our first project. He also used to be Minister of Finance and one of the administrators at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Somebody with a lot of credibility, both, let's say in the you know regulatory and political economy sense, but also as energy expertise, because to make green fertilizer, you need green energy. As I mentioned, we are making fertilizer, so you need to sell that fertilizer.
Terje Bakken joined us last year as head of fertilizer, and Terje used to be a senior VP of Yara and then EuroChem, which are two of the largest European fertilizer company. Finally, we have Mary-Rose de Valladares on the board. Mary-Rose de Valladares used to be the head of the International Energy Agency's hydrogen unit, and, you know, bringing, you know, clearly decades of experience into renewable energy and especially you know electrolyzers and hydrogen, which is obviously —to make green fertilizer, you need green hydrogen, and we'll get into that as well. From our shareholders' point of view, as I mentioned earlier, you know Peter is our largest individual shareholder.
We have Schroders, who has continually increased its investment in Atome at every single step of the way. We have Baker Hughes, the American engineering company, which provides a lot of engineering kit, including compressors, who joined our shareholder registry last year. Trafigura and finally myself at about 3.6%. What's important to note is that us as management, we obviously are extremely aligned with all of the shareholders because we have put at every single step of the way money into the company alongside shareholders at the same price as the new shareholders at every single raise.
We really wanted to make sure that it was always going to be very, very clear to our investors, to our partners that you had a management which was fully and completely aligned with them. I'll go to the next slide. The investment case, as I mentioned is, you know, our job is to develop projects and put them into production, and so that they start generating income. Our first project is what we call the Villeta project, which today is the world's largest green fertilizer facility announced as far as how much it has progressed.
We have announced a few months ago that we had finished front-end engineering and design, that we had also, you know, basically identified and significantly negotiated the EPC, as well as the project funding, so that we will be able to get to the final investment decision by the end of this year, 2024. Today we're gonna put a fair amount of discussion that we have just announced, basically yesterday, that Yara was joining the project to be the offtaker, so basically buying all of the project one's production, on a long-term basis.
Clearly for us it's important because it proves that the green fertilizer that we will be producing has a market and has one of the world's leaders in the fertilizer industry, and especially the low-carbon fertilizer industry, who wants what we are producing. It not only proves Villeta, but also it proves project two, project three, and so on in the pipeline of projects that we are going to be putting online. The whole idea and what where we are at now is that we have basically de-risked our project number one and proved the commercial validity, so that we can basically accelerate project two and project three. You know, why is it important what we are doing?
As I mentioned, there's a decarbonization angle, you know, you know, the fertilizer industry generates more carbon than shipping and aviation combined. You may have seen us investors, a number of companies looking at decarbonizing shipping, decarbonizing fuels, as, you know, we fly around. The reality is: fertilizer today, half of the world's fertilizer are made using hydrocarbons and especially natural gas, and that demand is growing. This graph on the right is quite important in the sense that it shows in green organic fertilizer, and you see that organic fertilizer can feed about half of the world's population. Our ability to grow as a population globally has been on the back of making synthetic fertilizers derived from natural gas and coal available. You see a direct growth, right?
A very steep growth of that. What it means that in a world where we are going to end up with about 10 billion people in less than 20 years, it's only going to go one way, and that the security of supply for fertilizer is going to be an increasing problem as we know that hydrocarbons are going to get more expensive over time, and that the pressure of the food industry to go green is also going to increase, as we have seen recently, and I will discuss that. Clearly for us, you know, developing green fertilizer is important on two points. It's crucial to reduce emissions, but importantly, it's even more crucial that we need to make sure that we can sustainably feed the planet in the future.
How do you make green fertilizer, right? Today, the way that fertilizer is made is you take hydrocarbon— basically what is CH4 carbon: one unit of carbon, four units of hydrogen, which is natural gas— and then you separate the carbon and the hydrogen to make hydrogen. And then after that, you make your regular fertilizer through the Haber-Bosch process. The only difference when you make green fertilizer is that instead of using CH4 from hydrocarbons, is you derive your H, your hydrogen, from H2O water. And to separate the molecule of H2O, you need a lot of electricity and, basically, the only way to make it green is if you use green electricity.
You take a lot of hydroelectric power to separate the H2O, and then you have green hydrogen, which then becomes green ammonia through the Haber-Bosch process, which has existed for over 100 years. After that, you transform your ammonia into ammonium nitrate, and then your ammonium nitrate into calcium ammonium nitrate, in our particular case, to make green fertilizer. Basically what you're doing is you're selling a bag of fertilizer. There is fundamentally no real difference between green fertilizer and gray fertilizer from what the farmer is concerned. The carbon footprint is the biggest difference. It's all great to be sustainable, but you also have to make sure that you are producing something which is economical.
The only way to make cheap green fertilizer is you have basically cheap green power and base load power. It was, it is all about what Atome is doing, is making sure that we have access to very low-cost power to produce fertilizer at or at the same cost or at a lower cost than gray fertilizer, and selling it at a market where you need that fertilizer. You can basically decentralize fertilizer, which is in essentially —instead of having the old way of having a lot of very big plants in Saudi, in Rotterdam, in Russia, especially all the U.S., and then shipping that all around the world— now you have the opportunity to have domestic production of fertilizer using renewable power so you can produce so that you can be close to your market and then generate more return out of it.
This is how Villeta was chosen, and this is how, you know, we ended up in Paraguay because Paraguay has the second largest hydroelectric dam in the world. It is the world's largest exporter of hydroelectric power because it sells it into Brazil, in Argentina. It's also in the center of the largest fertilizer import market in the world, because Brazil and Argentina and Paraguay and Uruguay import more than 30 million tons of fertilizer per year. It's a great place to do your first project, to de-risk your proposal and use that as a basis to go into project two, project three, and so on. Project one is really the proof that it works, right?
It's not just a good idea; it's an idea that actually works, where you don't have to take technological risk, you don't have to take power supply risk, and you don't have to take market risk because you are in the middle of a massive fertilizer market. Villeta: first project, 145 MW in Paraguay using low-cost baseload power from hydroelectric power, which will allow us to produce over 0.26 million tons per year of green calcium ammonium nitrate. That's equivalent of displacing about 0.5 million tons of carbon per year. It gives you an idea of the scale of the opportunity from a decarbonization point of view, from a carbon green income point of view.
The project location was chosen because it is close to the ports where all of the fertilizers are currently imported into the country. It's close to the supply of power. Again, you minimize risks along the way. The strategy of developing projects in project infrastructure is you go about de-risking projects every single step of the way. What we have done over the past two years: we have signed a long-term power purchase agreement. We have acquired the 75-acre site. We have appointed advisors, and contractors, and finance advisors as well, and also environmental advisors.
That's very important because it allowed us to basically get environmental social impact assessment done using IFC and World Bank standards, which have been accepted by the government in Paraguay, which has given us the license to operate, so we can start construction now. Also has given us free trade tax zone, so that for our exports, we will have 0.5% taxes on export of our products. It's all about optimizing everything along the way so that we are ready to go as soon as possible. We have announced a couple of months ago that we had finished front-end engineering and design. This is a significant piece of work because this is the first time a large scale industrial project has achieved that status in engineering.
It's basically all about proving that using low technology, you can put everything together and get into production once you get into detailed engineering. The final, call it "piece of the puzzle" ahead of financing, was solving the offtake. We are very fortunate that Yara, you know, basically stepped up and say, "Yes, I will take on a long-term basis all of the green fertilizer that the project will be producing." Why is it significant? Well, you may have seen a number of projects recently in the ammonia and hydrogen world which have received offtake agreements. As I mentioned, it's all great to produce something maybe green, maybe not. If nobody's willing to buy it, you're not gonna get very far.
It's all about bankability, it's all about financeability. What we have signed with Yara— which is obviously, as I mentioned earlier, one of the largest fertilizer companies in the world. You know, they have more than $15 billion of turnover. They trade more than 22 million tons of fertilizer. Clearly, you know, at 0.26 million tons a year, we represent epsilon for their production. But they are very, very committed to developing the low carbon fertilizer market, and because they see a real opportunity. Just last week, they announced that they had signed an agreement with PepsiCo (who, you may not know, is one of the largest potato grower in the world) that they will be supplying zero carbon fertilizer on a long-term basis for PepsiCo, right?
It's really showing you that there is a market, that the food market really wants to move forward and wants to decarbonize. In that offtake agreement, you know, that's basically sales agreement that we have with Yara, is they are committed to take all of our production, 100% of it, on a long-term basis, with terms which are, what we say basically an upside sharing, with really a line of sight on the green premium. What we mean by that is that the higher the price they achieve, the higher premium we can get, obviously, the more they get compensated. There's a clear alignment of what we are trying to achieve.
Also they are providing risk protection on the downside, which means that if the price of fertilizers starts coming down, they would actually step up to the plate and provide support within that fertilizer price to make sure that the project is always bankable, during the good time and the bad time as well. Really it's all about de-risking the commercial project as much as we can so that when we go talk to our lenders and to the investors at the asset level, they feel comfortable that we have a fully de-risked project. To the next slide. Clearly, as we mentioned, this is, you know, it's project one is great, but we are not a one project company.
You know, we have a thesis and a business case, which is deploying green fertilizer projects across the world and try to copy- paste our model and our engineering so that, you know, project one is X, project two will be 5% cheaper than project one, and so on. That we end up being increasingly commercially competitive and always stay ahead of the game. We've started working on project two in Costa Rica. For those of you who do not know, Costa Rica— like Paraguay— it's a democratic country. You know, it's very stable country as well. It is highly dollarized as a country.
Also, Costa Rica is the second- largest exporter of pineapples in the world and one of the largest exporters of bananas in the world. We have a very green brand as well. There's a clear alignment. They're importing, and per capita, they're one of the largest importer of fertilizer in the world. There's a clear alignment of goal that, you know, they want to have green fertilizer facilities in the country and also to export to the region and beyond, because you have access both to the Pacific and to the Atlantic via the Caribbean. It's a great location. Whilst power purchase agreement, which is the basis for everything, is already done in Villeta.
Where we are now is we are negotiating with ICE, the national electric company of Costa Rica, a power purchase agreement. We are quite advanced now. We started our work about a year ago. The expectation is that by the end of this year, we will have agreed a power purchase agreement, and then we can move into pre-FEED engineering and design and all of the commercial agreements. As I mentioned, it's 120 MW. It's roughly the same size as Villeta. It's all about being able to copy-paste what is essentially 18 months of engineering into another location and have, you know, the efficiencies that come with it. In Paraguay, we've been working on a second project, a larger project that we call Iguazu, of 300 MW.
Obviously, this will be twice the size of project one with Villeta. We have basically allocated reserves from ANDE, the national power company. Now we are negotiating the terms of a power purchase agreement as we have finished what is called the electromechanical study with ANDE, which basically proves, you know, the availability of supply, where this power will be delivered, and how does the grid behave. Because at the end of the day, we are large consumers of electricity at an industrial level, and you have to ensure that you are not putting undue stress onto the grid and that you will have stable power for the next 20 years and beyond. These are two projects which you know have matured quite a bit.
Same thing, we expect to reach power purchase agreement by the end of the year. We've been working on a few other projects, but are relatively too early to talk about. It's relatively immature, but it's just to show that we've had a pipeline of projects building up slowly. Clearly, our focus is project one, and most of the work that we have been doing was securing the heads of terms for the offtake from Yara and which is the first time globally that any offtaker has come up and has committed to buy green fertilizer on a long-term basis. You know, the feed for Villeta was a world first. This heads of terms offtake is also a world first.
You know, from a timeline point of view, kind of resuming, you know, the work done so far on this particular slide and what is left to do. Now that we have the heads of terms agreed, we are working with the French investment bank, Natixis, and the Inter-American Development Bank to put the financing together at the project level. We will be issuing what is basically what we call an info memo to the banks and the equity investors at the project level with all of the commercial terms all of the CapEx terms and the commercial proposition to come in and invest at the project, right?
The intention is that each project will have its own SPV and live its own financial life and have its own equity investors in it. We expect to basically have all of our equity investment and funding package tied up, you know, over the next quarters. Reaching FID by the end of the year once the financing is tied up. For the Iguazu project and the Costa Rica project, as I mentioned earlier, we are in PPA discussions. Once that PPA is done, the pre-front-end engineering and design will start. Of course, you know, we're always being asked about, you know, what does it look from a financials point of view?
Obviously, you know, we are not publishing our own forecast, so we will present here what SP Angel, which is one of our brokers, has been put together and is available in the public domain. These numbers are, you know, pretty much illustrative and use $420 a ton of CAN as a basis. Why $420? It's actually the price at which you would be able to sell CAN, calcium ammonium nitrate in the region, in Villeta, in Argentina and in Brazil today, right? That's on a gray basis without any green premium, without any carbon credit today. This is purely us displacing the gray stuff which is existing.
These numbers show that, you know, we don't need a green premium to actually be commercially viable. That is absolutely key because, you know, we don't believe in sustainability without profitability, and we keep repeating it and repeating it. So with that estimate that SPA has put together, it shows that, from the first full year of production of a project, and which at the moment is estimated at 2028, so we will start up at the end of 2027, and then 2028 should be the first full 12 months of production. When you make 260,000 tons a year of fertilizer, and you assume $420 net back price to the plant, you're looking at an EBITDA of around $70 million a year.
Total revenue of $110 million. If you assume another project coming online, you would look at total EBITDA group of about $190 million by 2030. Obviously, each project is going to be about 18 months behind each other. You know, it kind of gives you a sense of the numbers that are being discussed. It's one of the reason that when we presented the project to the lenders, they were very excited because they saw a bankable project which caters food security issue. You know, let's remember that 1/3 of all fertilizers comes from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus. There's a real problem that is to be discussed.
Also climate issues, which is why, you know, IDB, IFC, DFC, and a number of these multilateral institutions are very interested to finance such projects, including green focused infrastructure funds. What we are looking from a financing strategy for Villeta is to bring together long-term debt financiers at the asset level and also infrastructure level players who invest at the asset level, not at the top co, not at Atome PLC, but in the asset. That gives you hopefully a rough idea of, you know, again, you know, assuming SP Angel's numbers, what the project would look like. To do a little bit of a quick summary, right?
We— you know— we were the first one to come up with the idea of focusing on green fertilizer as a real strong opportunity, which is going to be the future of food and the future of fertilizer. Again, decentralized fertilizer facility close to the market. Since we were created, two companies which are still private have, you know, emerged, you know, using basically a lot of what we had put out publicly. They are working in different geographies, but it just shows that we've been right, and that we continue to basically spearhead. I don't want to say a revolution because it would be extremely, you know, pretentious of us, but clearly the disruption which is happening and which is accelerating.
That 140 MW is today the world's largest dedicated green fertilizer facility and the most advanced one, right? That having now the offtake agreement with Yara, which I can never understate how important offtake is in this world, significantly de-risk our project. You know, it's all great to have a good idea, to put the engineering, to put the money in, but if you're not producing something that somebody that wants to buy and at a price that is— that makes us economical— it's not going to work. That Yara offtake is extremely important and is extremely good news for us as shareholders, as investors, and as management team.
That now, you know, for the next month, basically, five months, I guess, is we are going to be working extremely hard on the project funding and the project equity level to deliver final investment decision by the end of 2024. Clearly, you know, for us it's: we don't want to start there. You know, we want to continue growing. We want to continue to accelerate the growth because as I mentioned earlier, there is competition and, you know, we're not doing all of this hard work and investors are not believing us just to do one project. We want to continue and develop Atome as much as we can and develop the opportunity and the growth that investors and shareholders expect of us. I think I am pretty much at the end. We can move to questions, I guess.
Olivier, thank you very much for your presentation. Ladies and gentlemen, please do continue to submit your questions just by using the Q&A tab situated on the top right-hand corner of your screen. Just while the company take a few moments to review those questions submitted today, I'd like to remind you that a recording of this presentation, along with a copy of the slides and the published Q&A, can be accessed via your investor dashboard. As you can see, we've received a number of questions throughout today's presentation. Can I please ask you to read out the questions and give responses where appropriate to do so, and I'll pick up from you at the end.
All right. I see a few questions already, so thank you for that. There's a question from Kelvin, which says, "Which electrolyzer technology providers we'll be using and, you know, have you yet produced hydrogen on-site?" Because we have baseload power, 24/7 power available, we don't have to take what we call technology risk, right? We don't have to use the latest technology of PEM or SOEC, which are now slowly, I mean, emerging at scale, but we still have a fair amount of risk attached to it. We will be using alkaline technology, which has been the same technology for the past 100 years, which is proven, is the workhorse of the hydrogen sector.
We are now basically at the, let's call it the final two of the providers who have put, you know, after a long bidding process, so we are pretty comfortable with either of them. That contract will be awarded at the end of the year. We haven't yet produced hydrogen on-site, of course, because we are putting the entire project together. We're not gonna be producing hydrogen if you don't have the entire plant put together. One thing we didn't discuss in here is that once we have FID, the construction time between the FID and production is between 31 months-34 months.
Clearly, you know, it means that we will start producing hydrogen into ammonia into fertilizer by the end of 2027. Next question from Michael. Congrats on the progress. Thank you so much. When do you envisage breaking ground, and what's the expected time duration of completion production? I guess I just preempted that question, right? FID end of this year. I mean, technically, we have already broken some ground because we had cleared some of the land to do some testing for the piling and the civil engineering. Clearly, the big work will start as soon as we declare FID because we already have the license to construct and to operate from the government.
That's quite important because there are a number of infrastructure projects which have had many issues because they couldn't get permitting on time. In the U.K. alone, you may have seen a lot of issues with projects such as HyNet, where let's just say that operationally they didn't have all of the ducks in a row. For us, it's all about de-risking, all about making sure that the moment FID is declared, we start putting the shovel in so that we can deliver production between 31 months-34 months with the expectation that if we start commissioning at the end of 2027, we will have in 2028, 12 months of continuous production.
There's a question around from Steve on, you know: "what is the Iceland project?" Why isn't it part of Atome plan going forward now? We announced. I can't remember if it was maybe four months ago, that yes, Iceland was originally part of the portfolio of projects we were looking at. What happened since the start was that we saw the Ukraine crisis arrive. The price of power increased significantly in Iceland, a little bit unexpectedly so. Which made it very difficult to be economical to be able to produce green ammonia.
On top of that, there was pretty much an energy crisis due to the fact that following a number of earthquakes in Iceland, the availability of geothermal energy really went down. From our point of view, it meant that everything was running, moving to the right. The timelines keep getting longer. The availability of power supply became an increasing question. We decided that we would park Iceland for the time being. Should things change in the future, we will obviously revisit it. At present, we don't have an economic case to being present in the country. From Brian and I see that, you know, I can see why Atome has focused on green fertilizer.
However, does the company still plan to decarbonize other areas of operations, including regional river and road transportation, and even if mainly as a way of tackling Atome Scope 3 issues? It's a good question. Scope 3 means that if you transport fertilizer, it's better to transport that fertilizer to the market using a zero carbon truck, for example. The reality is we have to be extremely focused, and which is why, you know, we had a sister company, quote-unquote, from our Chairman, Peter Levine, Greenhouse Capital, which has been looking at decarbonizing other areas of operations, including obviously river, road, and beyond. For us, you know, it's important.
This is, you know, this sector is too important not to be fully focused on it, and we will continue to do so. I would say, however, that the moment we're able to prove that you can successfully use renewable power in Paraguay to decarbonize something as difficult to decarbonize as agriculture, then it paves the way for other projects around basically transport. From Costa Rica, could you do it compared to Villeta? That's a question from Charlie. Can you share any key learnings from Villeta that you will take to other projects? Yes, I think there were a number of learnings along the way. You know, can we share them? Honestly, this is a little bit of our secret sauce as well.
You know, we are learning some painful lessons at a time where we have to do a lot of redesign, a lot of value engineering to make sure that Villeta would make sense. Which is also the reason that, you know, if you look at, let's say, what we were expecting to see two years ago compared to where we are now, we have moved a little bit our timelines to the right, because, you know, I think a number of expectations on the engineering side took more time to get right. Clearly, as I mentioned, it's all about making sure that you can be bankable, that you can produce fertilizer cheaper than anybody else. It's been really all about that focus.
Costa Rica, can we go maybe about 12 months faster than the time it took to develop Villeta? I think that's a reasonable estimate. Clearly, we will continue to follow that same approach. The starting point for Costa Rica will be from the moment we sign the power purchase agreement. That's really the very important point, right? You only want to invest significant amount of money the moment you know exactly what power you have, what is the price of that power, what is the quality of that power, so that then you decide where is going to be the location of your project, what type of fertilizer you're going to produce, and so on. Sorry. A question from Miguel. You mentioned the potential need for grid reinforcement in Paraguay.
Who will fund the investment? How confident are you on a realistic timeline? It's a two-sided question, right? The way we design our projects, whether it's in Costa Rica, Paraguay, and elsewhere is we make sure that we are working with an existing grid for the long term, and obviously taking into account that there will be progress done. In our electromechanical study with ANDE, we have a very good idea that where we would put the 300 MW will not put excessive load on the existing grid. Right. ANDE and I think the team in Paraguay has obviously direct discussion with ANDE because we will be one of their largest customer.
You know, the plan of grid reinforcement in Paraguay is available on ANDE's website, and actually you can find it in the Inter-American Development Bank, the IDB, and the World Bank websites, because they have proposed to provide support to Paraguay to increase the size of the grid. I think Paraguay is quite smart that they're taking a 30-year view of the grid and the power demand. What you will see is they are really doubling up the potential, because today, more than 2/3 of that power is being sold to Brazil, to Argentina at a very low price.
It is much better for Paraguay to invest, to have more power available in Paraguay, so that they can really upgrade the value of that electron and create more job in the region, and also jobs which have and use that power to also increase economic benefit. Because if with that power you can have access to green fertilizer, make you, let's say, protected against more expensive imports, and it makes you more sustainable as a whole. It's all in the benefit of Paraguay. We can only applaud that side of thinking from the government that they really want to go and continue to optimize the use of electrons in Paraguay. There's a question on Steve.
You know, have we looked at the World Bank grants via the TCAF scheme, which recently awarded an Uzbek project with $5 million for 0.5 million-ton reduction in carbon emission? I mean, you know, clearly, you know, I spent nearly 10 years within the World Bank Group at IFC, so we have very active discussions with them. The same way that one of the reason we are working with Yara is they also have very, very good green view of the world and of the green market for fertilizer and the carbon advantages. You know, we are certainly looking at all of the potential options, and where we will optimize the best value. Have we looked at it? Yes, we have.
You know, the question from Andrew N, even with access to low-cost renewable energy, how confident are you that the technology to be used at Villeta for extracting hydrogen from H2O will be economically viable? The confidence comes from the fact that we will be using alkaline electrolyzer. They have been in operation for a long time. The manufacturers of electrolyzers that we are talking to have a proven track record of very large systems, right? We are 100% confident that it is completely viable, right?
There is zero technological risk in what we are doing, and that's very important to continue to push, which is we know the price of a product coming in, we know the price of a product coming out, we know what quality, and we know what efficiency— and that's very key. In our base case, in all of our economics, we are not assuming that maybe the technology will be better in five years or 10 years' time. You know, we've been offered by vendors to, you know, to say, "Oh, you know, but my technology has this advantage or that advantage." You know, we politely declined and say, we will not take technology risk for our first project, and we will only buy from vendors who can prove to us that they have system working in large scale.
Question from Miguel, has Yara indicated interest in also becoming offtaker for Costa Rica or phase two? How many potential offtakers were bidding? Obviously, I'm not going to go too much into these details. You know, Yara is not the only international fertilizer company. There's a number of them. But it is, you know, the largest globally for calcium ammonium nitrate, for specialty fertilizer products. It is also one of the most advanced when it comes to the green, and the renewable, and the blue, but clearly, you know, the green side. We are very confident that they are able to extract the best value and make sure that the value of what we will be producing will be recognized. We view it as a strategic relationship across the continent.
Clearly when we decide for Villeta, sorry, for Iguazu project, for Costa Rica project and beyond, who we want to choose for the offtaker, they will already be in the room in discussions. Do they have exclusivity for the other projects? No, but we are also very, very clear, right? It's, you know, if Yara performs as well as what we think they will be performing, you know, we would be stupid to start a relationship with somebody new, right? For us, this is a strategic relationship. Then, there's a question from Eva, you know, what is the tenor of the Yara offtake? You know, what can we say about it? What we say publicly is what we will stick to.
You know, as I mentioned, for us, it's part of our secret sauce. We don't want to educate our competition too much. We're also respectful of Yara that they don't want to educate their competitors too much. Hopefully that's okay as an answer. I don't believe we have more questions.
Olivier, thank you for answering all those questions you can from investors. Of course, the company can review all questions submitted today, and we'll publish those responses on the Investor Meet Company platform. Just before redirecting investors to provide you with their feedback, which I know is particularly important to the company, could I please just ask you for a few closing comments?
I think what I want to close with is just like it's, you know, with what we are seeing today is exciting to us, right? We are now seeing from last week, PepsiCo announcing this partnership with Yara. We've seen, you know, Fertiberia moving forward. You know, we are seeing, let's say, Safetra, and companies like Marks & Spencer being very open in discussing that they are now looking to decarbonize their entire value chain. What we are seeing is that, you know, all of the hard work that we've done and all of the belief that we've had that the fertilizer market and the food market was changing is becoming a very fast reality.
I think the other side is, you know, our, let's say, very risk-averse approach to development, is also paying off, right? I think what we have seen is a number of companies who have largely overpromised, and on expectations we were not commercially viable because they just assumed that too many things will go right. We never assumed anything. We always looked at what was the price before and what is the price going to be, but what is the lowest case that we can live with to make sure that we will continue to be able to operate even at a very low cycle so that it enables us that when the price of fertilizers become high, we will be able to obviously make, the most hay during that time.
At the end of the day, you know, we believe in the green, but I will go back. You know, sustainability without profitability doesn't work. The other side is clearly we are seeing also a shift in the industry, right? We are moving away from gigawatt, you know, million ton scale type of facility into smaller, decentralized, fertilizer facility. This is what the market wants, this is what the market needs, and we are putting that together to make sure that what we are doing in project one, we can do in project three and so on.
I think I want to leave you that, right, which is, you know, look at how many companies have been able to get strong offtake and which companies have been able to get an offtake for 100% of their projects. That's across the entire hydrogen, ammonia, industry and especially the fertilizer industry. You will see that Atome is extremely, you know, in a very unique position from a public market perspective, and which offers that opportunity to investors. While all of the others who've been doing, you know, decently, they're all private, right? I think we are thankful to our shareholders, to their patience because developing these projects takes a long time, a lot of belief, but you know, we are thankful that investors have continued to trust us.
Of course we are always open. You know, if somebody want to ask this question, we will also always be as open and honest and truthful as, you know, we can be, because this is also what we believe in. You know, we believe in transparency. We work in countries which are also extremely transparent, which are extremely politically stable, and we want to continue to be able to say that. Obviously, you know, within the confines of you know what we want to reveal to the competition because we have a secret sauce and you know we basically will defend that secret sauce very, very fiercely because this is what we will derive value from. Again, thank you very much for everybody's support.
Thank you very much to Yara for joining Atome and especially the Villeta story. You know, I think it's a great partnership, which is only at the start.
Olivier, thank you for updating investors today. Can I please ask investors not to close this session as you'll now be automatically redirected to provide your feedback in order that the management team can better understand your views and expectations. It will only take a few moments to complete, and I'm sure will be greatly valued by the company. On behalf of the management team of Atome PLC, we'd like to thank you for attending today's presentation, and good afternoon to you all.