All right. Sorry about the slight delay there. Just, give me a feel for who's online, please.
We've got a mixture of analysts and investors online, Jan. Just to let everybody know that we will be recording this call so that it can be go up on the website afterwards so that people can refer back to it as they wish. At the end of the presentation, we will do a Q&A. Either raise your hand or put a question in the chat, and we can come to you in turn. I'll hand it back to you, Jan. Perhaps anybody that's not presenting... I think everybody's on mute, but I think some people still are unmuted, so I might just mute them. Yeah, that's perfect. Great. There you go. Jan, over to you.
Thank you very much. Thanks, Louise, and thanks everybody for joining. Excellent that you, that you take the time. We thought on the back of, what we announced last week, it would make sense to and to just go through and step by step what we actually did announce and the logic behind it, and also why we are so excited about the fact that we have now restructured the joint venture, Cyclyx, which was previously obviously, a 75%/25% joint venture with ExxonMobil and now a 50%/25%/25% with ourselves, ExxonMobil and LyondellBasell.
We see an absolute phenomenal potential on the back of this transaction and what it opens up, and I hope we can give proper understanding of that and what it potentially can mean for Cyclyx and ultimately obviously Agilyx. Also taking the opportunity to give a quick update on where we are with our conversion business. We'll run through it relatively quickly. It'll be myself, it'll be Joseph Vaillancourt, who is our CEO of Cyclyx, previous CEO of Agilyx. It'll be Karsten Larsen, who is the running our, well, Chief Commercial Officer in Agilyx and very much focused on the conversion business, and of course, Russ Main with our CFO. Those are the main players in this.
If we move to the next one. Thank you very much. What you see on this slide is a quick summary like an executive summary where we really see a pivoting or in both the Cyclyx, the Waste Management business, as well in, you know, conversion business, which we run within Agilyx. I'd take a step back a little bit here and really look at why are we focusing so much on Cyclyx, and why are we so excited about it. It's really. If you've been looking at circularity for plastics, it's something that has been talked about for a long time.
There's been a lot of interesting technologies developed in order to actually materially move that to become a meaningful volume contributor in, into the plastics manufacturing field. Agilyx obviously has one of those pieces in the puzzle. There is not one silver bullet to solve this issue with one, just sort of one technology, one solution. Not at all. One of the key bottlenecks actually has been, for years, the front end. The getting your hands on the waste, number one, and secondly, being able to give the waste as a feedstock to the different converters, be it an Agilyx operator, be it ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell or whoever. To give it to them in a composition in a predictable way so that they can make the product that they are targeting to make. That's Cyclyx.
That is what Cyclyx does. I'm absolutely convinced that this is, if not the key to the door, but it's one of the main keys to the door to really unlock the full potential of circularity around plastics. That's. Obviously, with the fact that two such a major player are putting very significant amount of money behind and not only in the first CCC, but also putting quite a lot of pressure on further development. This is something that we are really take as a proxy for the true potential in this solution. That's just a little bit around the high level why we are so excited about it.
I think it's quite important if you, if you compare, the previous, I say the previous now given that the new one is signed, arrangement that we had with Exxon really only provided Agilyx with a license revenue. Given that we now restructured it and Cyclyx to become a build-own-operate, we can see both a revenue stream from a license, but also that we participate in the economics that the Cyclyx Circularity Center will generate. In the very first one, as you will see later on, it's at a modest level, given that we do not contribute any capital in the first one. Subsequently, you'll see a rapidly increased economics also for Agilyx.
That this really unlocks the potential to make this a multiple unit expansion, so to speak, and also a much more profitable opportunity for Agilyx. That's just summarizing this very quickly, and I think we move on, where I think you take over here, Joe, to quickly take us through the highlights of Cyclyx specifically.
Great. Yeah. Thanks, Jan, and good morning and afternoon, everybody. Happy to be here. It is really an exciting time for Cyclyx. We'll walk through a little bit of sort of work, what the status is, how we're positioned, and the opportunities for growth that we have. Sort of recall, at least from our perspective, I think, you know, we fancy ourselves to have a few unique capabilities. We've been proving that out over the last 2.5 years since we started up Cyclyx. Fundamentally, we sort of leverage our ability to chemically profile plastics.
By doing so, we sort of understand chemically how to model to different product outcomes, whether that's into the existing mechanical recycling market, but more specifically to the advanced recycling market, where it's just really difficult to find folks who are able to secure and pre-process feed for customer specifications. Our belief is that our key enabling technology is the profiling and the modeling. We actually can create custom blends. We take different products, and we blend them together to try to meet a chemistry outcome for our customers who all have different needs and different technologies. As well, you've probably heard us mention 10to90. 10to90 are landfill diversion programs.
Now that we have a capability of dealing with plastics in a way that's responsive to downstream advanced recyclers, you know, most of the plastic waste is still traveling to a landfill, we need to divert those. There isn't a lot of industry support inside the incumbents to sort of do those things because they, in fact, don't know how to take some of these materials and find recycling pathways. We've been, for the last year and a half, developing landfill deferral programs that have been quite successful based on the metrics we've provided for them. Now we sit here with our capabilities proven out, and we're ready to scale.
To Jan's point before, the, the prior approach allowed us to scale in some regards, but this new profile allows us to scale pretty significantly. That all comes around developing what we're calling Circularity Centers. These Circularity Centers really help us achieve industrial scale. The first one is of a, of a size that is quite significant, which we'll talk to here in a minute. It is sort of the combination of this investment approach that we have, changing the business model. Agilyx's private placement all really allow us to grow significantly.
If you just sort of look at what that could mean from an addressable market perspective, you know, if you just look at the 100+ you know, metric ton potential that we have, we're talking about one facility at 178,000 inbound tons per year. If you just look at, you know, what that could mean, that's upwards of just under 600 plants. The growth here is pretty significant, and we'll talk a little bit about the economics here in a few minutes. If you go to the next slide, I'll comment a little bit about the what we just did with this transaction. It's really sort of a Three-tier transaction in a sequential manner.
If you look at this slide, the bookends, the first and the third, have everything to do with Lyondell and Exxon. In essence, we sold 33% of Cyclyx interest to them both, where post-transaction, Agilyx maintains a 50% stake and 25/25 to each of those companies. We did it through an equity sale, but then also, a non-dilutive special contribution to fund the plants through an FID. The FID is actually not yet announced. All of the work has been completed, and we expect that to be announced pretty soon.
In total, if you look at the gross economics of it, we sold 33% for $135 million, which is oriented to funding the first plant in its entirety, both in terms of its capital, as well as the working capital needed to get there. You can sort of understand what that implies for valuations and how that trickles down to the equity ownership. The third is what just happened almost simultaneously with Agilyx, where they did a private placement that's helping them sort of restructure both in terms of the base business and to support further and expand on the support for the Cyclyx business. A little bit more will be talked about that in a few slides coming forward.
If we go to the next slide, I'll transition a little bit to the facility itself and then talk about the economic implications of what we just did. This facility, the CCC number One, in the Houston area, this is a first-of-a-kind facility. Although a lot of the mechanical pre-processing steps are common in the industry, there's quite a few unique aspects of this relative to how we embed the data analytics and the AI programs that allow us to move very large volumes and then custom compound to a consistent quality. Part of that is the fact that it's all plastics, right? I mean, again, only 8% of plastics is recycled today at any given maturity, and that's because they're cherry-picking the waste stream to those high-quality materials.
We're trying to divert as much, if not all, plastics from landfill and then use our approach to find recycling options. That has to be sort of embedded into these facilities. The biggest difference you'll see over and above the technology that sort of is the brain behind allowing it to work is the custom compounding. Excuse me. You'll see at the end of this, anybody who's familiar with the plastic recycling facility, if you go towards the end, you're going to see many silos, which would then hold lots of different waste characterized plastics that then we mix for our customers' benefit. We do have some flexibility in the flexibility in how we can mix those. This is a significant approach, but what's really nice about this is how we sort of financed it.
You know, I've been doing this a long time. I've helped commercialize with Waste Management 15 different environmental conversion technologies trying to find financing, both in terms of at Waste Management but also through startups. Trying to finance for us with kind of facilities is a very difficult task, and certainly the sponsor equity takes a disproportionate risk. In this case, there are some risks. There are some market-based, you know, waste plastic risk. There is certainly no mature exchange pricing that's stable. I mean, the advanced recycling market is in its infancy. This has been structured in a way where Lyondell and Exxon are trading off some preference in pricing, which we can talk to, in return absorbing all of the risk for Agilyx.
Agilyx could have gone to the market and raised 100% dilutive capital and then take a lot of market risk. In this case, I think we have the best of both worlds. We've got some partners who have demand that is very, very significant, well beyond the first one, which we'll talk to in the next slide. Also willing to take the risk because their sustainability goals around the circular economy are so robust that this makes sense for them. This, this structure that was put in place is quite unique from my background and, pretty exciting. Next slide. We'll talk a little bit about the economics. It does get a little confusing.
We need to be a little careful here about not either giving guidance or any kind of antitrust around pricing, input costs, things like that. What we tried to do here was profile over time sequentially what this could look like for Agilyx and Cyclyx. CCC 1 is unique because it is first of kind facility and because of the risk trade-off, we have this approach where we have basically a cost-plus approach for Lyondell and Exxon. What you see here in the first column on the left here, One are Two slip streams of profitability, which are represented to be cash, right? Down below, you have Agilyx's royalty per plant for each size, bill true $2.5 million. You can see that culminate over the years.
Up above, there is a management fee that Cyclyx will be charging, which obviously Agilyx would obtain 50% of. That's pretty much limited here in the One because of the risk profile. On the Two through Five, there is an ambition to do Five very quickly. In those situations, Exxon and Lyondell have then added on, in addition to those base economics, the ability to have a return on capital for any plants that Agilyx would envision to invest in itself and take a 50% ownership stake in. In those instances, we for the sake of ease of modeling, we put the return on invested capital at 15%, but it needs to be investable under the terms of the agreement.
You can see here that within a pretty comfortable line of sight, what those free cash flows and earnings would look like for Agilyx. We wanted to do, though, is give you a sense of why we're so excited about this, because the change in the model also allows us to develop a licensing approach either for any individual member who doesn't wanna do. You know, you could envision one of the members wanting to build one of these facilities, maybe in a geographic area that the others don't, or maybe more to develop a scale that they're not interested in. We allowed some flexibility with the licensing approach, but it also includes selling those directly to the rest of the industry and third-party competitors to each of the members.
Being careful does not sort of judge what the market is. If you were to go to most of the waste and recycling companies today and ask to develop a program, where they added plastics that they don't traditionally take, you know, for them to retrofit their facilities and for them to, you know, get the sufficient profitability, and absorb the risk of that, you're gonna see numbers, you know, Two and Three times higher than what we believe Cyclyx has experienced in our own cost-plus model. If we were to think about building licensed facilities and charged market-based rates, if we put a discount off of what we think the future discounts, or the future market rates are, you've got a lift of about $30 million in gross profits for that same facility.
So you can see that if we were to build, you know, Five of the same types of facilities, the numbers on the left would be substantial if Agilyx, in particular, were the investor in those plants. Of course, we would envision, you know, bringing on project debt right now where these numbers, you know, have the members financing these. There's, you know, with financial engineering, there's ways to optimize that even further. Next slide. Why, why Exxon? Why Lyondell? Well, Exxon, we were very excited about a few years ago when we, when we closed their deal because they had stated missions and forecasts about what they wanted to achieve relative to their circular economy goals.
In fact, they've been, you know, they've set up their first facility, and we've been supplying them for the last two and a half years. Lyondell is the same. I think part of the challenge that the whole advanced the technology companies within the advanced recycling industry are facing is what Jan referred to as the limitation of the feed. You're seeing a bit of a slowdown there. In this case, both Lyondell and Exxon are very active in the space. They've announced very aggressive goals, you know, 500 KTA in the short-term for each company. In fact, by the end of the decade, both exceed well over 1 million. For us, this helps us seed the market.
It helps us create new landfill diversion programs, which are absolutely critical for us to achieve scale in the first instance. It supplies us capital for a handful of plants. It allows us to liberate the business model that allows us to support others in the field, but really their demand by themselves. I mean, I would go so far as to say they're leading the industry in how active they are. We're super excited about this deal and how it was structured and the fact that Lyondell has joined Exxon and Agilyx. We really do expect this to scale pretty significantly. With that, I think we're gonna transition over to Carson to give a bit of an update on the Agilyx core business.
Yeah. We'll be very happy to. Now that we've sorted out all the feedstock, it's time to talk about the conversion business. As most of you know, you know, one of the key difference to Agilyx and one of the unique selling proposition in the conversion space is that we have been around for almost 20 years, and we have, you know, electrified our reactor. We have a lower carbon footprint, a good LCA in that space. We have a technology that is very robust and flexible to take different types of plastic, unlike our competitors in a space that hone in either on styrene or on mixed waste plastic. That's a main different position. Also, we have a competitive advantage in what we call waste to product.
Some of you have recently seen analysis out, you know, criticizing the space of pyrolysis a bit from doing a kind of an overall oil that doesn't fit anywhere. What you've seen with Agilyx, you know, during the past years, that we've kinda like focused in and continue to be very, very laser focused on what we call waste to product space. This is where we convert either a specific type of plastic or mixed waste plastic into a final product. We take polystyrene waste, and we make a styrene monomer that goes back to polystyrene. We do that with our partner technique in True Styrenics, and this is a very promising area for us. The other key projects that we're working on is with BioBTX. That's the whole aromatic space, benzene, toluene, xylene.
We take mixed waste plastic and take it back to aromatics. No hydrotreatment, no nothing in this process. It goes back to a sellable product. Mitsubishi is the same thing. We take plexiglass, and we develop a precursor for plexiglass called MMA, and we make plexiglass again. That circular economy space, that's where we advantage. That's where we're gonna hone in all our efforts in this asset-light business model with our conversion business. Nothing changes in terms of being asset-light, but really the focus being on that waste to product space. You probably sit and think, "Yeah, but what's your key priorities?" Obviously, we need to move products to the construction phase. This is where Agilyx makes money on license, equipment sales. We are targeting three projects a year in this space, waste to product.
Obviously, our near-term organ resources and organization is really focused in on that space. On the right-hand side, you see a couple of examples. You know that Toyo Styrene is in construction in Japan. It's gonna start up early in 2024. We're very excited about that. That's a new project for us and really a technology proof point. Another one. INEOS, we have the Tru Styrenics development. We have the final stage on the engineering to be completed in the first quarter of 2024. That's another, you know, key step for us. Kumho, which we've talked about for a while, difficult to negotiate with, we are still, you know, going strong at this. We are in license discussion. As a matter of fact, we're heading to Korea this week to talk to Kumho.
Mitsubishi, the partnership there, what's going on there right now is that samples are being sent out to customers based on Agilyx-produced MMA, and those evaluations are ongoing, and there will be a decision how to progress this project by the end of the year. Last but not least, what I talk about with BioBTX. Fast engineering on the way. We've really been able to advance this project quite quickly. We're already in licensing discussion with BioBTX and in the final engineering stage. Again, you know, last but not least, we are a drop in the ocean, the conversion business. You see down at your lower hand, right-hand slide, of a slide, basically the opportunity for Agilyx, you know, we could build 400 plants, and we would still, you know, be a drop in the ocean.
The opportunity is really huge, but we believe the way to move forward is waste to product and not waste to some kind of intermediate that is then need further treatment downstream. I'll stop with that because you're probably more interested in the Cyclyx deal that we announced, but we thought it was important just to tell you about the recent development in the, in the conversion business. Jan, I think I hand back to you.
Yeah, no, thank you very much, Carsten, and to Joe, excellent, well presented. Thank you very much. I'm sure we'll come back to both of you in the Q&A. Before we go to the Q&A, just wanna touch upon what we also announced last week, which is the fact that Tim Stedman, our CEO, has decided to step down for personal reasons. He's been with us for Three years, and we really wanna take the opportunity to thank Tim for the efforts and the achievements during those Three years. We are in a very different space today and place compared to where we were Three years ago.
Again, Joe, no shadow over where you brought the company, but Tim has certainly picked up the reins and moved it further forward. I will be stepping up to be a working chairman. I cannot be an executive chairman according to governance in Norway. Tim will stay until the end of the year, so we have a very seamless and good cooperation now over the next two months. We have a search launched in the market, so obviously we will be pushing hard to make good progress on that.
Just also wanna highlight the three gentlemen that you see to the right that are all on the call, extremely experienced and coming in with tremendous CVs, all three of them. They are obviously staying in their respective positions as well as the rest of management. We really feel very, very confident that we can handle this transition into a new CEO leadership here without any hiccups in the organization and the pursuit of our business objectives. Just wanted to touch upon that.
Just summarizing, I think what you've heard and hopefully what you take away, that we have a very strong and competitive advantage in the feedstock sourcing and with the conversion pathway, as Carsten just went through. There is few, if any, in the market that really has this end-to-end. I like the way you sometimes describe it, Carsten, from yogurt cup to yogurt cup. I mean, we really go from the waste product that is collected from household to the monomer that then can produce a new yogurt cup. I think that's something. That capability and that knowledge is something that we really stand out in being quite unique.
As, Joe, you've told me several times when I sort of in my learning curve of what we do, we're using standard equipment for our the Circularity Centers. There's no unique hardware as such, but the uniqueness is the competence, the know-how that we have collected over 20 years, and then the artificial intelligence models that we have built around that are now further developing now. I think that's a strength that we're basing ourselves on standard technology that is available out there today. As that advances, we will continue to take advantage of that in our Circularity Center. It's not on us to develop that. This is something we can benefit and ride on that wave, so to speak, from open market development.
Strong management, as I just touched upon, and a really strong global understanding of where the plastic waste market needs to move. I think the fact. I can just underline what Joe said. I haven't seen in my 40 years plus in the industry a more de-risked opportunity in moving from more or less incubation. We have proof of our solution with toll manufacturing companies in the Houston area today. It's not as if we go from complete incubation, but not far from it, to full industrial scale in One step, backed by Two such blue chip companies. They put the investment forward, and they guarantee the offtake.
I mean, it's an absolutely phenomenal outcome of this negotiation, and I think very much a testament to the strength of the solution that they see. I think also coming back to what Joe highlighted earlier, we have the opportunity together with these two powerful partners, but we also have the possibility to develop with other partners. There are many knocking on the door, I think there's a good mid Two-digit number, Joe, in your pipeline of projects and companies knocking on our door to develop similar type of solutions. We can do that full-blown, be it build-own-operate if we would like, and we think that's the right way.
We can also do it in a lighter version with project finance or a larger portion of financing from the partners, and thereby not requiring the same amount of capital be put forward. Then, obviously, there will be a negotiation around the returns, depending on which of these models that you actually apply. There are a multitude of ways and opportunities how we can structure our future businesses. I think that's important to bear in mind when you look upon it from a pure investment and return perspective for Agilyx as a shareholder. Last but not least, perhaps a detail, but I'm not sure if you touched upon it, Joe. I think what is so important with CCC is they are applicable regardless of what the conversion technology is.
This can be for mechanical recycling, this can be for all different kinds of chemical recycling. This is sort of at the front end, sitting in front of all these different conversion technologies, which, by the way, we do not look upon as competitive technologies to us in Agilyx and the conversion technology Carson just described. Mechanical recycling has a very important role to play in the overall solution to circularity of plastics. By the way, is probably the best solution when you can use it. You can only take that technology so far, and there are many restraints and constraints on that technology, and that is where chemical and advanced recycling come into play.
Again, coming back to, there is no one silver bullet to solve this issue when it comes to the conversion. But stretching the imagination here a little bit, there is one, at least one silver bullet for the waste management side, and that's Agilyx.
I think I'll end it on that. Anything, Russ, that you would like to highlight in terms of the structure of the transaction, et cetera? Perhaps just mention two words about the fundraise that we did very successfully at the end of the week before we open up for Q&A. Sorry to ambush you with that.
Oh, no. No worries, Jan. Thank you so much. I think you guys summarized it really well. I think what's really exciting for the company is the fact that we've unlocked the potential to build further CCCs in the manner we choose as a corporation. That is very powerful. Whereas before we were pretty much, you know, locked in with ExxonMobil, this really opens up the opportunity, as Joe and Jan mentioned, to unlock a lot of value for the company going forward. We're really exciting. The private placement was very successful at the end of last week. We were successful raising the equivalent of $20 million.
Fantastic news and the use of funds for those funds are really gonna help to build out the structure to support the CCCs going forward, as well as to help us to continue to improve on the Agilyx R&D and to continue to enhance our portfolio of offerings on the conversion side. Very excited. This was a great success for the company, and we're really looking forward to building this out in the near term.
Thanks, Russ. I mean, according to our own predictions, et cetera, that should have us funded through 2024. That's sort of the outlook that we see from that. With that, I think I hand back to you, Louise, if you so kindly sort of lead us through the Q&A session.
Yeah, very happy to. If anybody's got any questions, please feel free to raise your hand, and then we will unmute you. There we go, Adam. I will unmute you. Anna, can you help me? I believe everyone, in fact, is unmuted now. No, Adam's unmuted. Go ahead, Adam. Perfect. Thank you.
Hi there. I hope you can hear me okay.
Yes, we can.
Good afternoon.
Yeah, good afternoon.
Couple of questions if I may. First one, slightly general one. Obviously, the JV has now gone from Two partners to Three.
Mm-hmm.
Have you made any material changes to the governance arrangements? I think of two things in particular. How are the voting arrangements agreed? Is it 50%, 25%, 25%, or is it one third each? Also, if another partner came in, you talk about potential new partners, that may not be true at the JV, but if a new partner came in, Is Agilyx the first to dilute, or would it be subject to the negotiation? If there's anything else material you can give me around, you know, the new JV agreement, assuming there is one, that'd be really interesting. Just a second question, just on the further development of the CCCs, where do you see them likely happening geographically?
Are we gonna see material changes into either waste mix or feedstock mix? Also particularly, you've given a sort of outline timetable for CCC 1. I'm expecting that will be accelerated on future projects, but it'd be good to get a feel for that. Thanks.
You wanna take the lead here, Joe? Or is there anything?
Sure
you want me to address?
Sure, I'm happy to do it. I think I have Four questions there. Relative to the governance, obviously the governance changed. We still have a proper board, that board essentially represents the shareholder relationships. There has been some change into supermajority, obviously some of the major things around future financings and capital calls sort of escalate above the board to the members. In some cases, they're pro rata, in some cases they're unanimous. However, some of the commercial elements around the governance are going to be put in sort of a typical delegation of authority, things like licensing. There will be a templated set of heads of terms that will be defined that the board and the members can't necessarily block as long as those things are met.
I think the governance is a bit different than it was before, but a lot of time was spent making sure that each member had flexibility in how they could participate or not in future activity, both in terms of their willingness to or being mandated to do something. I think there's a good balance in the governance for the members and for the company to pursue its commercial activity. As it relates to future.
Sorry to interrupt you there, Joe, but just to build the phone up before you move on to the next one.
Yeah.
I think it's quite important to point out, Adam, that you could envision a scenario where Exxon and Lyondell are only doing this as long as it benefits themselves and wants to basically curtail or stop the joint venture from doing anything beyond that. What Joe just mentioned now is very much a testament to that that is not the case. Both of them want to see this as a way to really drive the circularity for the industry, not only for themselves. They feel both very confident that they have competitive advantage in the downstream steps, and are not looking for Cyclyx to be the sole competitive advantage that they have in the value chain.
They are very much open for the, for us driving that either as in indirectly within Cyclyx or as Joe just touched upon, that we've already identified exactly how a licensing model should look so that Agilyx, for example, can, on the basis of a license from the Dora Company, go out and develop a CCC together with somebody else. That's I hope that that sets the frame and the, and the spirit in which the joint venture has now been restructured. Sorry, Joe, to interrupt you there.
Yeah, no. Important clarification. It's excellent. Thanks. Relative to dilution, there is a willingness to sort of entertain additional members. It's not intended. There's no active process for it. The way the current deal is structured, there would be sort of a pro rata dilution for any additional equity sales. I think our intent, though, is to really try to focus more on project financings more than trying to replicate this. You know, it's great that we have two big incumbents. The degree of, you know, difficulty just increases quite a bit when you add more and more. That to say, there are some non-petrochem companies who have expressed interest over time that could be interesting for some of the other core competencies that we need to develop.
We'll entertain those at the time, but there is no active solicitation at the moment.
Okay.
Relative to the geographic diversity of the CCCs, there's sort of two things going on. We obviously will focus in on wherever our members want to be. Of course, those members have concentrated large scale assets in certain geographies that are not sort of equitable across the US or any other international market. We'll continue. Exxon, for example, could build several of these to support, you know, Gulf Coast activity, and we certainly would do that. We also. Cyclyx has an ambition to geographically be distributed less because of the CCC activity and more because the more geographic expanse we have, the more successful we'll be in setting up national take-back programs. One of the challenges that you have, and it's been historical challenge, is this chicken or the egg.
Why is a local, you know, waste and recycling system going to change and aggregate new plastics if it doesn't have infrastructure to go to? The reverse is true. Why is somebody gonna build something in Chicago if there's no ratable feed? Well, now that we have this anchor activity in Houston, we have many, many growing numbers of take-back programs, both on the commercial side and significant interest on the municipal side based on the work that has been done with the City of Houston. By allowing us to now build facilities in other metropolitan areas, it allows us to start to scale those 10to90 take-back and landfill deferral programs pretty significantly. We'll be doing both.
We will be doing several CCCs in close proximity, but we'll also be trying to sponsor some that allow us to expand over geographies pretty quickly. Relative to the cadence, we expect FID to be announced fairly shortly for CCC-1. The engineering is complete. What's nice about these facilities is they don't necessarily need to go after greenfield development. Albeit large scale, you know, 500,000 sq ft under the roof, but these are light industrial warehousing. Our ability to develop now that we have the base syst-- and we have three designs for three different sizes, can happen pretty quickly, and it's our expectation within the next quarter or two, the next one will be announced as well.
As Jan says, we've got letters of interest from upwards of almost 10 other companies in hand as well. Our expectation of follow-on activity will be very short term.
Right. That's really helpful. Thanks very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you. Good questions. Thanks, Adam. Do we have any more hands?
I can't see any more hands at the moment.
Anything in the chat? No.
Nothing in the chat, no.
No.
No more questions. I don't believe. Oh.
I-
Adam. Is it you asking another one, Adam?
Yeah, I thought.
I wasn't sure if you'd put it down or not. That's fine.
Yes, sure. No, I thought I'd just come back, obviously on the future program, the top of project financing. I'm guessing you probably have had discussions already, but on the next 2, 3, 4 projects, what sort of level of gearing do you think we might be likely to expect? I'm guessing we're not moving right away to kind of the full end-of-the-kind funding. It'll be somewhere in between first of kind and end of the kind. It'd be really good to hear your views.
It's interesting. We've had quite a few discussions, and I'd probably defer to Louise on these. We Cyclyx itself has not prospected project-oriented capital at this point. Prior to this, Agilyx and Exxon were looking to sort of maintain negotiating positions. We've had lots of interest in the project level of financing. The benefit here is that the first kind is fully cauterized by the risk. What's really nice, though, is that over time, you know, the offtakers, particularly Lyondell and Exxon, could participate in the offtake agreements that allows us to shore up just traditional project financing in a typical, you know, 40-60 split or what have you.
Mm-hmm.
We're not anticipating that to be a challenge. I think, frankly, it won't take the amount of time to go from first of kind plant to financability. We're already generating feedstocks. Although it's not at the type of scale that we're talking about here, it is certainly the largest scale that we can see in the industry, we've got the capability to do, you know, if we had to right now, 60,000-70,000 tons a year. We're already at interesting scale, and most of the equipment is off the shelf. Really, we think we can go straight to sort of typical, you know, infrastructure engineering, financial engineering.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. I mean.
Right.
I think what we've said, Adam, is that for the second CCC, the agreement is that it's equity into Cyclyx, but how Agilyx finances its share into Cyclyx could be through a variety of different mechanisms.
Mm-hmm.
It doesn't have to be shareholder equity into Agilyx to go into Cyclyx in that form. Then Joe's right, for CCC 3 and onwards, you know, Cyclyx is freer to look at kind of leveraging at the unit level, shall we say? So.
Mm-hmm. Right. Thanks again. Thanks.
I think you touched upon that, Joe, that, I mean, we have the 15% IRR that is locked in with the agreement as it stands right now on the CCC 2 and onwards. yeah, there is also the opportunity to scale that up quite significantly if we go outside and do things on our own or with other partners with, I mean, the ballpark $30 million an equivalent size facility as we're talking about with CCC 1, and $30 million cash for Cyclyx and well, and Agilyx then. I think the upside in that sense is quite significant.
The way I think as an investor, I am an investor, I'm invested twice now into Agilyx, participated in this most recent round as well. You know, I look upon this as this is a springboard, this is a sort of making a very long runway available. I think that's very much the way you should, one should look upon these investments.
I think I would add to that. We have had a lot of outreach with investor partners that infrastructure investors that are interested. You know, we haven't had a lot of detailed dialogue because of this transaction, but now that it's opened up the transaction, I think we'll see a lot of interest in CCC three.
Mm.
above. We're really excited about that. Infrastructure investors are very interested in this kind of investment, especially at a 15% IRR and above. They, I think they're very interested. More to come on that.
Right. Thanks.
Thanks, Adam. Still no other questions, so I will hand it back to you, Jan, to close this meeting.
Yeah. No, thank you very much. Thanks, everybody, for taking your time. I hope this was helpful to sort out some of the questions, or, and some of the moving parts, perhaps, that you have come across from the announcements last week. With both the deal itself, the, and the capital raise and obviously also the change in management. Like I said, there's absolutely zero drama around that piece in itself. Good cooperation and seamless move transitioning to the future here. Thank you very much. Feel free to reach out. If there are any follow-up questions, and I know that there could very well be, feel free to reach out, primarily to Louise, and you will...
She will direct you within the company to myself, Russ, Carsten, or Joe, to make sure that we get back to you quickly and can straighten out any questions or concerns that you have. Highly appreciate the time that you took, and thanks to the team members as well. Well done, as usual. Much appreciated. Thanks, everybody.
Thanks.
Thanks, everybody.
Thanks, everyone.
Good to see you. Bye. Thank you. Bye.