Good morning. This is Christopher Hervé, CEO for Pryme. Joining me here today at Pryme One in the Port of Rotterdam, Ferry Lupescu, our CFO, and René de Graaf, our General Counsel, who will be taking questions at the end of this presentation. Sliding through the fine print. Focus on the quarter three 2023 highlights. Safety is paramount for Pryme, and being transparent on our safety track record is equally so. On an HSEQ side, we unfortunately witnessed one safety incident during an off-site activity where our operational team was conducting sport activities as a team building. One operator was injured with an ankle issue. He has since recovered, and after a few days, was back on site working with the team. We're happy to share that Pryme One has mechanically completed construction early September 2023.
Hot commissioning, which had started already in quarter two, continued during the quarter with the successful commissioning of both extruders, but also the heating up of the reactor, who reached the targeted temperature of 600 degrees, and with the internal rotation systems turning at 30 rounds per minute. Corrective actions are necessary for the reactor. They will be detailed further through this presentation. The works are expected to last four to six weeks, and we now anticipate first oil in January 2024. Pryme has continued to build its workforce ahead of startup. We now have 35 full-time equivalent people on site, 20 of which being operators working in five teams of four people, 24/7. The installation being manned full-time since October 2023.
Looking quickly at the financial data, our quarter three operational cash flow printed at EUR -0.7 million and is expected to land in quarter four in the range of EUR -2.5 million to EUR 3 million. With construction works ongoing, our quarter three investment cash flow printed at EUR -2.4 million, and we estimate to completion in a range of EUR 3.5 million-4.5 million that will be spread over the quarter four and the beginning of quarter one. Based on these figures, Pryme now anticipates its funding to extend into the quarter two of 2024. Pryme has built an organization that is now primed for growth with the successful onboarding in the previous months of our CTO and our CFO.
We have also appointed our new COO, who was already in the company and brings along a substantial petrochemical experience, and we now have a rollout team manned with an industrial rollout manager and our build director, who successfully completed the build of our first plant, will also be joining those efforts. We have a streamlined, experienced technical team. It is a small but focused team who is capable of troubleshooting issues on the spot in our installation, and multiple of these issues were successfully solved during the quarter. Feedstock is secured for startup, including ramp-up, and is now projected, based on our recent commercial developments, to fully cover the needs of our installed capacity. Last but not least, based on most recent forecast for first oil, we anticipate our first liquefied plastic waste, and therefore first revenues, to occur in the first quarter of 2024.
Bringing the focus one step back and reminding the impact that Pryme ambitions to bring to the market, advanced recycling has clearly become a societal issue on par with reduction in carbon emissions in order to handle the challenge of plastic waste. Pryme is not here to take volumes away from mechanical recycling, but very much so to take volumes that cannot be managed by mechanical recycling, hard-to-convert plastics, and by doing so, we will produce, or at least enable the production of virgin-like plastics. We will be reducing the dependency on fossil fuels by bringing plastic back into the system, and last but not least, cutting emissions from the plastics that we will be diverting from incineration. Regulatory and consumer demand is clearly driving our future growth and asking for a transition from linear to circular packaging.
Last but not least, it's extremely clear to say that petrochemical players have joined the party with substantial investments happening, both at the technology level but also at downstream capacity buildup. Pryme's impact objective is to enable circular plastics through advanced recycling at industrial scale, therefore reducing waste emissions and the subsequent demand for fossil fuels. In order to do so, Pryme has successfully funded, with the backing of its shareholders, EUR 69 million in funding since its IPO, two subsequent private placements, a debt financing, and subsidies. With these fundings, Pryme has deployed its actions towards three key focused objectives. The first one being to design, build, and start up a first installation. The second being to secure the adequate feedstock to run the installation, and last but not least, of course, to be able to commercialize our production.
Pryme is currently in the process of starting up Pryme One, which will effectively become, once operating, Europe's largest advanced plastic recycling installation. If we look at the IPO happening in quarter one, 2021, and the start of build in end of 2021, the first half of 2022 was focused on civil works and steel erections, per the photo you can see on the left. In the second half of 2022, we focused on installing all process blocks in the first half of 2023 on the piping, electrical, and automation works, and commissioning actively starting in quarter three and pursuing into the fourth quarter of 2023.
Effectively, Pryme has transformed a PowerPoint concept into a near fully operational petrochemical facility in just over two years, going through the terror of COVID, supply chain disruption from the Ukrainian situation, and last but not least, substantial shortage of labor when it came to piping works in the Rotterdam area. With commissioning well underway, we have identified two key points that need to be dealt with by our technical teams. The first one is linked to the connection point between our extruders and our reactor, namely the melt pipe. As a reminder, Pryme operates two different extrusion technologies that have a primary objective of homogenizing the waste intake, and secondly, of increasing its temperature above 300 degrees to reduce the temperature differential between the feed entering the reactor and the operating temperature of the reactor.
Both of these extruders have been successfully tested with post-industrial waste and successfully produced melted plastic. The pipe connection between the extruders and the reactor has been identified as requiring an upgrade in terms of pressure capabilities. The flanges have been replaced, and we will be recertifying the pipes through hydrotesting weld audits in order to be able to test the Melt Pipe once the reactor is available. In the meantime, and as was already planned in our startup activities, we have the ability to feed cold waste directly into the reactor, effectively bypassing the extrusion step and the Melt Pipe step. This will enable us to individually commission the reactor, produce first oil, and subsequently, while troubleshooting potential problems on the Melt Pipe, we can continue to feed the installation and ramp up capacity. So we do not see this as a critical path towards first oil.
Moving on to the reactor, following its final connection on the battery limit, end of September, we initiated what we call the in-and-out testing, which essentially consists of testing all the electric connections and instrumentations of the reactor in early October, and then initiated heat ing sequences in October sixteenth. Over a few days, we heated the reactor up to 600 degrees and successfully, at that temperature, operated the internal rotating shafts at 30 rounds per minute. The rotating shafts are critical in order to be able to homogenize the melt and enable the gas bubbles to evacuate from the top of the reactor. Technical issues were faced, not from a process perspective, but from a electric connection perspective, for the following reason: Our reactor was redesigned based on an existing technology that usually operates under covered roofs, while our reactor operates outdoors.
The installation calculations conducted by our technology partner concluded that the wiring connection points between the electric cables and our heating rings could be enclosed in the installation panels. Unfortunately, these calculations were wrong, and we occurred overheating inside of the heating panels, which will now require us to externalize these connection points. On a unit basis, this would be a quick work, but our heating reactor has more than 500 heating rings, and therefore, the operation will need to be repeated 500 times. We estimate this time of modification to last four to six weeks, after which we can reinitiate our commissioning works. Once again, we insist that the target of the commissioning was to reach a temperature of 600 degrees, which was successfully achieved, and therefore, from a process perspective, this testing was a success.
Looking at our technology and our key differentiators, the number one advantage that we see of operating an electrically heated reactor is the ability to have a homogeneous heat dispersion on the reactor, therefore avoiding either hot spots or cold spots in the reactor, but more importantly, to ensure a much higher superior core temperature inside of the reactor. When operating our reactor at 600 degrees on the externals, we will effectively have an internal temperature in the range of 400-450 degrees, which is substantially higher than any existing technology from competitors currently in operation. This increased temperature will allow us to, first of all, yield increased quality when it comes to our output product, liquefied plastic waste, also known as pyrolysis oil.
But more importantly, it will also allow us to fully complete the reaction and therefore ensuring that our ash residue is free of plastic residues, and that can be witnessed through a dry and free-flowing ash, as we have successfully produced in our Ghent facility, operating on an R&D setup with a reactor with the same electric technology. Last but not least, having opted for an already existing technology, our reactor is capable of delivering up to seven times the capacity of any competitive reactor, and therefore, in our subsequent plans, takes away the requirements of scaling up our technology. With our plant nearing final startup, our commercial teams have been very active on the feedstock side. Pryme's technology flexibly handles very polyolefin and contamination contents. Our plant, currently starting up, has created traction in the marketplace with multiple, both......
Feedstock traders, plastic waste traders, but also processors approaching us and proposing material. Pryme strategy from the start has always been to have a very focused approach. Our approach is delivering on our build, which is converting waste to liquid through our electric heated reactor. We have by no means ambitions of integrating upstream into the sorting and densifying steps of plastic waste. We have therefore partnered up with existing waste management systems, namely producers of refuse-derived fuels, and by integrating into these existing steps, we are also ensuring that no additional capital investment is required from our upstream partners in order to enable our first plants. RDF pelletizing operations are engineered to handle plastic bales from post-consumer and post-industrial sorting facilities efficiently.
Their process, which takes in bales that have already been processed once, involves a further processing through shredding of these bales, a gravity-based separation, which enables to take out any residual hard components inside, ferrous and non-ferrous metal extractions, and last but not least, a densification step that essentially yields a densified pellet or agglomerate. These densified products have very low moisture, very much standardized density, and being hazardous-free, can enter with no risk into our installation. Final polyurethane content is obviously a function of waste intake in the densification step, but we have identified sufficient material to be able to be processed through our partners and deliver our installation. Pryme partnering with RDF producers also aligns with our impact purpose of diverting plastic waste from incineration, while, of course, reducing emissions.
Availability of pre-processed, densified plastic waste is expected to meet, if not exceed, Pryme's demand for its subsequent plants. Pryme foresees strong tailwinds fueling our growth prospects, with our focus being clearly on converting efficiently plastic into liquefied plastic waste, prioritizing volume and scale. In the meantime, with upgraders having made substantial investments in capacity, demonstrating flexibility on their liquefied plastic waste intake specifications in order to be able to meet their commitments and supply circular products to consumers, Pryme has successfully secured offtake contracts for its first two plants, and is currently in the process of finalizing a fourth supply contract, where pre-agreed commercial terms are currently in final draft. Last but not least, Pryme sees effectively limited competing advanced recycling capacity actually coming online.
Even though there has been multiple projects, only a few of them have made it to the stage of putting online an industrial unit. Pryme is a primary waste converter. We are focusing on translating waste into a liquid that then gets further upgraded by the petrochemical industry. By having this focus, we position ourselves at a juncture of the value chain where neither the existing waste conversion players or the petrochemicals have a strong appetite to operate, and our build, own, and operation model makes only sense. Looking beyond our first plant, which will, of course, offer valuable insights for our future designs, Pryme is actively developing multiple options for its next locations. Construction will follow site location permitting and the derived learnings from our first plant.
In order to pursue our technology developments and future rollout activities, Pryme aims to raise up to EUR 12 million in short-term fundings. This will enable ongoing and permitting activities for plant two and three and extend our funding into the start of 2025. Bringing it all together, our ongoing commissioning is delivering tangible progress towards first oil in January 2024. We have gathered a dedicated and committed team of industry veterans to pioneer a new value chain. A scalable and flexible industrial process, combining existing proven technologies, will enable this ambition. We have an attractive growth potential for increasing circular demand for plastics, strong regulatory support bolstering this adoption, and last but not least, Europe's largest advanced recycling plant once operating, backed by significant investors. Pryme therefore expects to deliver above-average returns through large-scale plants by leveraging purpose-developed, established technologies.
We are now very happy to take questions that will be funneled through by René, and myself and our CFO will be happy to reply to them.
Thank you. Until now, the audience has not posted any questions. Feel free to do so. Please feel free to post your questions for Christopher Hervé and Ferry Lupescu to address in this opportunity. We'll give you a couple more, couple more minutes. The audience, we leave a couple of more minutes during this conference call to post any questions you may have for management to address. If there are no questions, we'll close this call in two minutes. Dear audience, thank you for your attendance. We'd like to think the presentation has met with your expectations. Other questions that you may have, please route these, these via our known channel at ir@pryme-cleantech.com, where we'll pick them up for address, to the extent possible, other than the information that was shared here today.
Thank you for your attendance.