Thanks, Nick, and welcome everyone to the webinar. Today we're announcing a really important transaction for ASP Isotopes, a transaction I'm really excited about. We've spent sort of four years talking to each other and looking at the industrial and economic synergies these two companies have had by putting them together. It's really exciting to be able to announce this transaction today. We look forward to creating a real powerhouse in the electronic gases and critical materials company. If you could read these forward-looking statements, that would be great because it's a transaction involving two different exchanges. There are two pages of forward-looking statements. Critical materials have a definition by most governments around the world. They're typically categorized by having very tight supply chains, challenging supply-side characteristics, and they're critical to everyday life.
ASP Isotopes and Merrill-John have both have critical materials that are essential to the future of how we operate as a planet and many of the global megatrends such as semiconductors, space travel, nuclear power, medicine. That is why this combination makes so much sense. Now, in terms of the two companies, I think ASP Isotopes has got a very strong track record of taking distressed assets or challenged assets in non-Western countries and creating shareholder value out of them, substantial shareholder value out of them. We have been going now for almost four years. In those four years, we have built three manufacturing plants in South Africa, and all three are now in commercial production. We have done that because we have a real deep understanding of supply chains and procurement. We are able to procure most of the components of our plants ourselves.
We fabricate most of the components ourselves. Our Silicon-28 plant has about 50,000 components in it and probably 40,000 of those we have manufactured ourselves in South Africa. We do that because myself and the COO spend the majority of our time in South Africa focused on project execution, getting stuff done on time, on budget. We have a great relationship with the South African government. Four years ago, I never thought we would be going into a nuclear fuel industry in South Africa. It has taken a while to get various governments around the world to agree it is needed. Yesterday, we announced we have signed a definitive agreement with TerraPower to build a nuclear fuel plant for next-generation nuclear fuel, specifically high-assay low-enriched uranium. We also have a pretty strong balance sheet as well. We announced today we have an additional $30 million of debt funding.
Actually, this transaction will be neutral to the cash in our balance sheet. When you look at Renergen, it's a really unique asset. It's one of a kind in the world. Most helium comes as a byproduct of natural gas. Here, the natural gas comes as a byproduct of helium. Helium is critical to so many different industries, specifically what we've focused on, electronics and space travel, and again, isotopes. They've also got exceptionally low-cost energy, which in Africa is a really unique asset to have. It could really drive huge cash synergies with our isotopes business. Just to kind of focus on the key highlights of the transaction, both companies focus on critically and strategically important materials. Helium is so required for so many different end markets. Most governments view it as a critical material.
Almost every government views isotopes as critical materials. There are so few suppliers of both. To be one company supplying both is going to make us a really unique business. There is a lot of end market synergies, again, because of the industry overlap. It is going to create a vertical and horizontal supply chain. The integration of the two companies is going to really bring down our power costs, really expand our gross margins. It is going to be fantastic. We think it is a huge revenue opportunity. I have been very cautious about supplying guidance to the market of what our companies can do. In terms of earnings in the short term, it is because starting up plants is so fickle in terms of exactly which week they start up and they start and they stop and they start and they stop.
All three are going, which is great. When I look forward to a few years, this combined group, I feel strongly, can do over $300 million in EBITDA by 2030. That would be after the QLE spin-outs. This is just focused really on the semiconductor and the medical isotopes business. These two businesses will create a really unique company. No other company like it in the world. There were three electronic gases companies, but none of them have isotope enrichment, and none of them have helium in the kind of quantities that we will have or the kind of concentrations that we will have. Just to run over the transaction details, Renergen shareholders are going to receive 0.09196 shares of ASP Isotopes common stock value Renergen shares. It is a share exchange.
We've already announced we're going to be listing our shares on the JSE, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. We look forward to doing that in the early part of August. Renergen shareholders will benefit by being able to own a much more diversified company and get shares of ASPI. It reflects a significant premium over the closing price yesterday. We feel that's good value to Renergen shareholders. Renergen's balance sheet is somewhat constrained. Without this transaction, the alternative would have been potentially not so good for that group of shareholders. I'm going to remain the Chairman and CEO, but Steph is going to come and join as the CEO of our newly formed electronics and space division. I've known Steph now for four years. We've got to know each other pretty well out of Africa over the last four years.
It's going to be a great addition to our team. I'm really looking forward to welcoming Steph to both the board and our management team. We're going to move our group headquarters to Austin, Texas, which is where Steph is based. We've been looking to put a bricks and mortars HQ for ASP Isotopes in the U.S. somewhere. There's no better place to put it than Austin, Texas. We look forward to putting our infrastructure there. We've already lent Renergen $10 million in order to advance the projects. Our goal here was to acquire a going concern rather than a non-going concern. We wanted to make sure we can continue the construction in South Africa and accelerate these projects to market.
We have made available a $30 million debt facility, which we will pay to Renergen over the next several months or so to make sure the plants are finished in a timely fashion. With the debt we announced today, we signed a term sheet with institutional investors of $30 million of debt. It should mean that this transaction is cash neutral to our balance sheet over the next few months. This transaction should be highly accretive both to revenues, EBITDA, earnings per share, and cash flow in 2026. There will be a short-term drag on cash demands. By 2026, we will be generating significantly more free cash flow and earnings than we would otherwise. Obviously, this deal is subject to Renergen shareholders' approval. There should be a shareholder meeting in late June. Perhaps it slips into early July.
The last few days of June is what we're hoping for. We've already got irrevocable votes for over 35% of the shares outstanding. We feel very confident that Renergen shareholders are going to support this transaction. Steph's spoken to many of them, and there seems to be quite a lot of enthusiasm to creating this combined group, which is going to be one of its own. It'll be the only company in the world like it. It's going to be fantastic. For Renergen shareholders, I'm going to explain what ASP Isotopes is. For ASP Isotopes shareholders, Steph's going to explain what Renergen is. Hopefully, then both groups of shareholders will understand where we're coming from. ASP Isotopes has basically three verticals.
We incorporated the company four years ago with a goal of bringing isotopes to mainly the U.S. market and the global market and solving many of the supply-side problems in this industry. I actually got to know the isotopes market really when I was an investor on Wall Street. Many companies missed earnings because they couldn't get hold of isotopes. I recognized that the world needed more of them. That is why we created the company four years ago. The three verticals is ASP Isotopes in the middle. That has our three isotope enrichment facilities in South Africa. One is for Ytterbium-176, one is for Silicon-28, and the other is for Carbon-14. We are going to build more facilities under that part of the company. PetLabs is the leading supplier of radioisotopes. It takes a stable isotope and converts it into radioisotope.
It is the leading supplier of radioisotopes in sub-Saharan Africa for PET imaging, which is a form of oncology diagnosis. Quantum Leap Energy is going to be focused on the nuclear fuels of the future, specifically high-assay low-enriched uranium and lithium-6 and lithium-7. Quantum Leap Energy is the business that signed the deal yesterday, or actually late last week. We announced yesterday with TerraPower. That is Bill Gates's company for small modular reactors, next-generation nuclear power. We intend to spin that business out later this year. Shareholders will have a share of each. Our view is that nuclear fuels is very different from nuclear medicine and isotopic gases. Let us keep them as separate businesses. We will talk more about that spin-out and what is going on in that business over the next three to four months as we get closer to the spin-out.
There's lots of exciting stuff going on in that business. We operate in three end markets principally: semiconductors, medical, and nuclear energy. Next-generation semiconductors are going to require isotopically pure elements in order to make them fast enough. It's unlikely one will be able to produce quantum computing without highly enriched silicon-28. Silicon-28 conducts heat and electricity substantially faster than normal silicon. That's why one is required to produce these isotopically pure materials. There's many different isotopes needed in the semiconductor industry in the future. Our goal is to produce them all. Medical, there's lots of isotopes used in the medical industry. Novartis's new drug, Pluvicto for prostate cancer, requires a feedstock called ytterbium-176. The only supplier of ytterbium-176 today is Russia. It's Rosatom. We've built a ytterbium-176 plant in South Africa.
We intend to build more medical isotope plants in South Africa and other countries over the next coming years. Nuclear energy, next-generation nuclear plants will require a new type of nuclear fuel called HALEU, high-assay low-enriched uranium. There is no Western supplier of that fuel. Russia is responsible for about 85% of isotope production. It is probably one of the most or the most severely compromised supply chains of any material in the world I have ever looked at. Almost every government identifies isotopes as being critical materials. A quick operations update for ASP Isotopes investors as well. During the last three years, we have constructed three operational nuclear enrichment facilities in South Africa, all three successfully entered commercial production during the first half of this year, specifically actually during February and March.
The Ytterbium-176 plant is currently operating at an annualized rate of about 300 grams a year in batch mode. You'll see to the right there some successful Ytterbium enrichment. This is the first time we've ever shown Ytterbium enrichment to the public. We expect to move to continuous processing during July. That should increase the capacity to about 1 kg per year. We are expecting to ship commercial samples during June or July. There have been a couple of stops and starts with this plant. We started off using what we referred to as a time-of-flight mass spectrometer. We decided to change it to a quadrupole mass spectrometer. Things like that. When you start up plants, things often just take a little bit longer than expected. The plant is now operating really successfully. The team are really happy with how the production is going.
For Silicon-28, the team successfully commissioned that plant and it entered full reflux during March of 2025. The most important thing for me, what's kept me awake at night over the last 12 months or so is not the isotopic ability of that plant, but actually the chemical ability of that plant. Can we take 99.9999% chemically pure silane and convert it into an isotope also at 99.9999% chemically pure? You just have to look at that and it becomes 99.9998% pure. That's not good enough for a semiconductor company. The great news is we are keeping it at 6Ns chemically pure as we go through the process. We expect to ship the first commercial product during June or July. That plant's going great. In terms of Carbon-14, we've received the first two shipments of feedstock. We're waiting the third shipment.
We're successfully operating that plant 24/7 right now. We expect to ship the first product during July, subject to the timely receipt of the final batch of feedstock. Just other updates on ASP Isotopes. We've started the procurement of construction of a very large laser facility in South Africa to produce large quantities of Nickel-64, Gadolinium-160, and Zinc-68, and Lithium-6 and 7. It's been an exciting last few months for ASP Isotopes. I think things are going well. I'll pass over now to Steph. He's going to talk about Renergen and what Renergen does.
Thank you, Paul. Let me just reiterate the shared enthusiasm from our side on this transaction, which we believe is really going to create a world-class producer of critical materials.
For the ASP shareholders that have not yet come across Renergen, at a glance, we're a South African company which is listed both on the Johannesburg and on the Australian Stock Exchange with exceptionally high helium concentrations. To put that into context, if you look at global averages, there are only seven countries in the world which produce helium at the moment, ranging from the lowest concentration of Qatar at 0.01% helium in their gas up to the highest on aggregate, which is the United States at 0.35%. We're sitting on an average of well over 3%, which makes it a geologically unique asset. We are the first and only onshore holder of a petroleum production right in South Africa. This is a key differentiator for us.
It means that not only do we have at least a 10-year head start on any other onshore upstream explorers of natural gas, but it means that we've also got the strategic advantage in terms of how we shape the rollout and distribution of LNG within South Africa, which, as everyone knows, is massively energy strapped between Eskom's rolling blackouts, as well as an inability to import LNG from its terminals, which are not yet LNG importation ready. We have already gone into production on our first phase project, which was a pilot-scale project of both LNG and liquid helium. This is what we call the Virginia Gas Project in phase one. This was, in fact, funded by the United States government on the basis that helium is declared critical to United States national security.
this basis, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation funded the project with a $40 million loan back in 2019. We've already got congressional approval for a further $500 million from the United States government for the second phase project. That's to build a much more meaningful, what we call phase two project, which we believe in time will supply about 8% of the entire planet's helium. The project has been declared a Strategic Integrated Project in South Africa. In South Africa, that would be the equivalent of being declared critical to United States national security. On that basis, we enjoy faster turnaround times with regards to our regulatory approvals, as has been mandated by the Strategic Integrated Project Act.
We're positioning ourselves as becoming a net exporter of helium, which would make us only one of eight countries in the world capable of exporting helium. All right, so the helium market overview. At the moment, upstream and downstream is worth about $7.5 billion per annum, making it quite a niche market in the gases space. It's enjoying significant growth levels. Some people are saying that the CAGR growth could be up to 8.3% between 2025 and 2032. It's got an incredibly fragile supply chain. This is apparent from the fact that since 2005, there have been four major helium crises.
While it's funny to think that a squeaky voice gas is really subject to that many supply chain interruptions, it's had many knock-on effects from things like during the COVID period, there were challenges with getting helium into hospitals for necessary treatment, through to the semiconductor industry facing shortages because they couldn't get helium. You've had certain rockets that have been delayed because they couldn't get helium on time. In particular, I believe it was the Artemis launch that had to be delayed, as well as one or two of the SpaceX launches. It is a critical gas which has faced severe fragile supply chain issues. The price for helium has also shot up significantly. We expect that this trend is going to continue, particularly with the increased use cases of helium, as well as the significant increase in demand for helium in certain industries.
I'll touch on those as we go through the presentation. This is a picture that's worth a thousand words. This really just goes to show what the power of concentration does. Here you can see as a company compared to the concentrations across the rest of the world. That's not to say that there aren't other helium assets out there with high concentrations. Really, this is a unique project, both in terms of the purity of the methane that comes out of the ground as an associated byproduct of the helium production, as well as the overall helium concentration that we have in our gas. This is right across the field. We've got wells that operate between the 1.5%-2% range. We've got wells that operate around the 3.5%-4% range.
We have some wells in the sandstone trap, which have been producing helium at up to 12%, which is an almost unheard-of concentration. Across the field, when you measure flow rates and you look at the chloropleth of helium across the field, we are well over the 3% mark. Strategically, South Africa makes a huge amount of sense from the point of view of how you move helium across the globe. It gets put into an ISOC container, a 40-foot ISOC container, and that goes on an absolutely normal standard cargo vessel along with people's furniture. The point is the helium gets put into this ISOC container in liquid form at minus 269 degrees Celsius. It is a little chilly. That then has 45 days before it has to get to the customer.
Otherwise, what ends up happening is that you have to vent some of the helium and it purges into the atmosphere and you lose it. You lose a few tens of thousands of dollars every single time that you have a purge of helium. That means that you've got to get from refinery gate to customer before your 45 days. This is where South Africa makes a huge amount of sense. We've got the benefit of being on all of the old established spice trading routes. The Cape of Good Hope was established as a trading post. The important thing over here is that we can get it to the United States. We can get it to China. We can get it to South America. We can get it to Europe. We can get it to the Middle East. We can get to Australia.
We can do all of this in around the 30-35 day mark, which no other country in the world is capable of boasting by virtue of the fact that South Africa has access to both the Indian and the Atlantic Ocean. We're right on the tip. We do not have the same fragile issues that many other helium shippers have in the sense that they need the Suez Canal. We do not need the Suez Canal. We can go east. We can go west. We can get there quickly.
Right. As you'll see, this creates a company with real clout in these four industries: semiconductors, medical, energy, and space exploration. It is going to be great to have such a diversified company and the only company with access to helium in the kind of concentrations that we will do and also isotopes.
No other industrial gas company can enrich isotopes as we can. It really creates a very unique offering. You can really see here the overlap between the businesses. The merger rationale should be fairly obvious. Both companies focus on very similar end markets, very similar customers. It is going to create a vertically and horizontally integrated supply chain. When I put together the two companies' business plans and what we look to do, I can see a very clear path to generating over $300 million net EBITDA in 2030, which, again, is, I think, huge upside for shareholders. It also gives us more geographic diversification in terms of where we operate, customers we sell to. In terms of some of the synergies, as I said earlier, we fabricate most of the components for our plants ourselves.
We have an engineering team and a fabrication workshop that can precision engineer components of plants down to 10 microns in size. That is incredible accuracy, which we need for our plants. It also means that if Renergen needs to get a component shipped in from overseas, it could often take three, four, five months. We can turn it around in a few days. It creates so many synergies from that standpoint. In terms of us being able to leverage Renergen's low-cost power, that will really cut our cost of goods dramatically. That is kind of demonstrated here in that if Iceland generates over 80% cost reduction, but moving an isotope plant to Welkom in South Africa, and our cost of goods drops by over 90%, which is just amazing. In terms of the expected timeline, this is still kind of expected. It is not firm yet.
The goal is to send the scheme circular on the 29th of May. There'll be a shareholder meeting of Renergen shareholders in late June. We intend to list our shares on the JSE in early August. We expect to close the merger shortly after that listing day. Renergen will delist from the JSE on or around the middle of August. All of this is subject to us receiving Competition Commission approval and other regulatory approvals. We've had a good reception so far from most of the government agencies we've approached about this transaction. I think most of the politicians and people in South Africa are pretty excited by this transaction. In terms of the leadership team, Steph's going to come. I've been looking for someone to lead our electronics industry, our electronics business for some time.
Steph's going to slot straight into that role and be the CEO of our electronics and space business. He's based in Texas, which is where a lot of the companies are based. He's done an incredible job of securing all the debt funding for phase two of the project and phase one of the project. It's fantastic to welcome Steph to the team. Nick Mitchell is going to join us also as a co-COO with Robbie. Again, he's an experienced engineer in South Africa. In terms of how the group will look after the merger, you'll see Renergen will fit in as a subsidiary to ASP Isotopes. The Renergen debt will be secured on the Renergen assets. There'll be no recourse to the top company or to the parent company. As I say, Quantum Leap sits by itself.
The goal is to spin that out during the second half of this year. We're targeting kind of September, October timeframe for that subject to regulatory clearances. Nick, with that, we'll stop there and take any questions the audience has got, if that's okay.
Thank you very much. We have a lot of questions. A lot of them overlap. What I'm going to do is try and synthesize questions rather than repeating them. First off, who supplied the $30 million of debt and at what interest rate? Within that is, have the DFC confirmed their $500 million loan for phase two? Also, are there any other lenders for phase two? If so, at what rate?
Yeah. I'll take the first part and I'll let Steph answer the second part of that question.
We have not disclosed the interest rate, but it is low teens, essentially. We have not disclosed who the investors are. There are multiple investors, but I would describe them as tier one institutional investors who have got a lot of experience of providing debt to global projects around the world, essentially. Steph, I will let you answer a bit about the DFC loan and other loans.
Yes, we have congressional approval on the $500 million. That is all in the public domain. Yes, the debt has been confirmed. Furthermore, the additional lender in that transaction is Standard Bank, who has also committed a further $250 million. The funding from the DFC side is typically quite advantageous.
To give you an idea, the first $40 million that we drew down from the U.S. DFC is at an interest rate of about 5.25%, which is very attractive in dollars. It is also 12-year funding, which means that it gives you all of the leeway that you need for the construction of plants. We envisage that phase two funding is going to be of a very similar pricing. You finally affix the pricing on the date that you actually draw down the funds based on where U.S. Treasuries are trading.
I'm Sean Benton at Tees River. Congratulations, Paul. You now have two significant components for the semiconductor market with the existing Silicon-28 plant and acquisition of a tier one helium asset. Do you envisage synergies between the two separate elements with sales to customers, or will you keep the two isotope sales chains separate?
Yeah. That's a great question. Absolutely. We look at significant synergies. I envisage us in three or four years' time having four or five different isotopes being sold into the electronics market. We're also looking at some fluorinated gases plants as well. Our engineers are experts in fluorine chemistry, all of which go into the semiconductor industry. We'll be the only company globally that has helium fluorinated electronic gases as well as isotopically pure gases as well. It'll be a really unique offering into the electronics market. Medical, again, we'll kind of keep that separate. I'm looking to get a salesperson or a leader for our medical isotopes business as well. We look to have four or five different isotopes in medical in years to come. The two business verticals will be kind of kept separate.
I guess it's possible at some point we split those two out as well. We have medical business and a semiconductor gases or electronic gases business.
Lots of questions about the mix of the $300 million EBITDA you cite on the front page of the presentation. There's a little bit of confusion as to whether it's isotopes, PetLabs, or helium, or whether it's within Renergen. Can you elaborate on that, please?
Yeah. It doesn't include any revenues from QLE, but basically, it's all of the above. It's helium, it's isotopes, and it's PetLabs, all three combined.
The independent survey for you, Steph, the independent NPV that was performed by Sprawl back in 2021, that's four years ago. Can you give us some idea of what's happened to helium prices since then, please?
Yes.
The most prominent change in helium pricing was really during the 2023 helium crunch. Coming out of COVID with fragile chains along with a combination of geopolitical situations and several plants going offline, you had a significant bump in helium pricing, in some cases up to about 4,500% from where they were before. To give you an idea, you had some situations where you had semiconductor fabricators needing to buy a load of helium. To put it into context, if you do not have your helium for the day that you are actually in production, one day's loss of production in a semiconductor fab eclipses the total U.S. purchases of helium to keep the plant running. It is inch-wide, mile-deep risk when it comes to your supply chain around helium, which is why they are willing to pay whatever they need to keep plants up.
We saw prices getting clipped in the market at around $3,500 per MCF. There is a rumor that someone paid $10,000 per MCF. You compare this to pre-2017, pricing then was about $200, $220, $250. At the moment, spot has become very regional. Much like LNG, you have different pricing on different continents. That really is a function of access. We are currently seeing that spot is printing tickets at anywhere from, in the midstream market, $500-$700. In the downstream market, it is north of $700-$800. Obviously, in the party balloon market, you are looking at about $1,300-$1,400 to get your foot in the door.
Thank you, Steph.
Staying with you, just for ASP shareholders, could you a little elaborate on some of the operational issues that have emerged at Renergen thus far and how, with you and Paul, you're looking to deal with those, please?
Yeah, absolutely. It is no secret that we had some operational issues with regards to getting the helium plant started. It was unfortunate that COVID broke out only a few months after we had commenced construction on the plant. Obviously, the knock-on delays from COVID and the shipping crisis that followed from COVID meant that the overall construction of the plant was delayed. We managed to bring that back online, and we got the LNG plant up and running quite quickly.
With regards to helium, we had a rather unfortunate run with the EPC contractor that was building the plant who did not admit to the fact that there was a leak in the cold box during the commissioning process. That essentially cost us at least a year in terms of having to then remove the cold box, repair it, and then all of the ensuing challenges that followed. In a nutshell, it was really a number of factors that all led to a massively challenging commissioning period. I am pleased to say that in the end, we finally got there, and we managed to get the first cargo load of helium out and sold that.
Now, with the combination of the broader group, obviously, the most important thing is that now we've got the financial wherewithal that we need in order to be able to complete the drilling for phase one, which will then get us up to the point where we've got sufficient gas flow, which means that phase one then stands on its own two feet and becomes EBITDA positive. That's probably the most exciting part of this.
We have two questions all around the idea that is the transaction not going to result in sort of significant CapEx to build out the helium extraction infrastructure beyond the $30 million of debt that's already being granted? In the same sort of way for you, Paul, how are you going to see ASP Isotopes managing those REN assets differently?
There's obviously a lot of the points that Steph made were specific issues. What expertise do you think you can bring to helium to stop those issues from happening again?
I'll start first on the helium side. The plant is now fully built. There's no other modification required to the plant. The plant is 100% complete. From that perspective, once we've got the requisite gas flow up to nameplate capacity, it operates on autopilot. From that perspective, right now, the focus from our side is 100% on drilling.
In terms of what we've then again, we've got a significant R&D and engineering team in South Africa. We've got 153 employees now at ASP Isotopes. 20% of those have got PhDs. Over half have got advanced degrees.
We've got an engineering hub with 20-30 engineers, chemical, mechanical, and electrical, who design and build our, have designed and built our plants. We also have a fabrication workshop, which really cuts down the procurement time. If you can't get a component in time, we just make it ourselves. For example, when we were starting up the Silicon-28 plant, we had an impeller on a compressor break. These things happen. You can pick up the phone to the compressor manufacturer, six-week, eight-week lead time. You can get a new impeller. Or actually, our engineering workshop can just construct one themselves in 24-36 hours. We bring that kind of procurement expertise and project management expertise to the project. In terms of funding, future growth and stuff, I think we've demonstrated we have a strong ability of getting our customers to pay for plants.
Do not be surprised if we see a large helium customer basically open their wallet to pay for a lot of the expansion and growth here in the future.
Okay. We have 47 open questions. I'm going to do my absolute best to get through as many as possible. I'm going to be amalgamating them, as I say. Lots asking what happens if we do not get or you do not get shareholder approval. Are there any backup clauses?
If we do not get shareholder approval, there is a standby offer as well. We feel strongly that will take us to owning a majority, over 51% of Renergen. I think it is pretty likely we will get shareholder approval, though. We have 35% of the votes already cast, and they are from the largest institutional investors at Renergen.
The alternative is Renergen has to pay back the debt, which will be very dilutive to Renergen shareholders. I think we've paid a suitable premium on the Renergen share price to make Renergen shareholders whole on their current investment and also provide significant upside in the future. They are becoming part of a group that we think is going to do considerable amounts of EBITDA in the future and become a real powerhouse in the industrial gases industry. I think we seem to have got a lot of support from most institutional investors in South Africa. They seem to be very keen to see this go through.
The U.S. government's role here. What role are they playing in the project? Why are they funding it? And also, what is it that they ask of you?
Yep.
The United States government sees helium as critical to the supply chain for many industries. We've touched on this before, but key industries that helium is a valuable commodity. There's the semiconductor industry. There's rocket launchers, for instance. Not many people know, but you can't launch a rocket without helium. In the nuclear industry, in many cases, it's the coolant in modern nuclear reactors. In addition, it goes into the manufacture of fiber optic cables, all sorts of things. The key over here is that helium is within the list of critical materials. You also have the situation where the BLM, the Strategic Helium Reserve in Amarillo in Texas, that was constructed by the U.S. government, has also been depleted. It's now down to its final few years of production. That's gone under stewardship. They've sold a bunch of that helium off.
The point is that in the near term, the United States goes from a net exporter of helium to a net importer of helium, particularly when you consider the Hugoton and LaBarge fields in Wyoming are also on a sharp decline. That means that if the U.S. economy is going to continue to enjoy its high-tech status in terms of manufacture of all of these high-tech products for resale, it's going to need to ensure that it has a long-term sustainable access to helium. To put into context, I've mentioned before in this call that the Virginia Gas Project, by the time that phase two is on, will be about 7-8% of the entire planet's helium supply. You put that into context of our field, our 1P reserves are equivalent to that supply until 2042.
That's only 4% of the total acreage of the Virginia Gas Project. You're looking at 4% of our acreage supplying 8% of the entire planet's helium supply. To Paul's points earlier, this is really a powerhouse when it comes to supply chain and being able to really satisfy global demand for helium. That, we believe, is the big differentiator between the Virginia Gas Project and many other projects.
I would add that isotopes have a very similar kind of view amongst the U.S. government. We talked to many of the U.S. government departments about isotopes' supply into the United States and how the United States is entirely reliant on non-U.S. companies to supply its isotopes.
In the press release last night, we did state that TerraPower and ourselves are going to work to try and bring isotope enrichment back to the United States and build a HALEU facility in the United States, which is where we should be building one. The country that needs it most is the United States. Let's address that problem and try and build one in the United States. We have a lot of support.
On the U.S. thing, questions popped up now about Trump's watch list and South African perception globally. Does this acquisition diversify the business geographically? I know that there is a White House visit going on at the moment by Ramaphosa. Can you add to that, please?
I think if anything, this strengthens. Sorry, Paul.
No, no, no. You go, Steph. You go, Steph.
This significantly strengthens our position.
If you think we are operating out of South Africa, but with funds from the United States government, and the United States government has reiterated its support of our project. Now, you've got Renergen becoming a subsidiary of a U.S. incorporated company. If anything, this transaction just goes towards assisting the two countries mend their ties and build on the relationship that the United States and South Africa enjoyed for many years in the past. We believe in many years to come. Paul, your take?
Yeah. No, I concur exactly with what Steph said. I mean, I think this is going to make our company critical to the United States. We expect continued support. We've had a lot of support from them already. Continue to have even more support.
I know there's been headlines about problems between the two countries or politically recently, but what we see on the ground is very different to what we see in newspapers and what have you.
Okay. I'm going to put a couple of questions together. How long have you been working on this deal? What DD, Paul, have ASP done on this deal? Also, questions that if it's such a great asset, why hasn't it been on the radar of global industrial gas companies already?
Yeah. I'll take the first two. Then I'll let Steph answer the third one. I first met Steph probably four years ago, three, four years ago in South Africa. He came to visit our facility. We've stayed in contact since then, comparing notes, discussing what's going on.
I guess really it was in November last year we sat down and first started to talk about this making a lot of sense. We really accelerated the discussions in January. This is not something we have just done quickly. We have been thinking about this for a very long time. I saw the financial struggles that the company were in. I actually thought about, well, maybe I can personally try and help sort them out and introduce them to some bankers. I thought, actually, it makes more sense to combine the two companies together and become a real leader in specialty gases or specialty gases. I was also knowing when we spin QLE out, I really wanted ASPI left behind to have some real muscle and some meat to it. This gives it a lot more muscle than meat.
Again, it makes it a much stronger, much bigger company. Steph, I'll let you answer the third part of the question adding to what I just said.
Look, I completely concur with that. With regards to why do major industrial gas companies not, why didn't they look at us? The easiest way to consider this is that most of these global gas giants don't have a mandate to invest upstream. Look at all of the majors. Without going into names, all of the majors that have industrial gas divisions, not a single one of them owns an upstream asset. That's because their mandate precludes them from investing in the upstream portion. That's not to say that they don't look at participating in projects vis-à-vis the issuance of free capital. In other words, they'll put CapEx down in the plant.
It's a well-known fact that in Qatar, they did this. They've done this in Algeria. They've done this in several jurisdictions. The tricky part about doing a deal like that is that they're taking essentially all of the cream in the transaction. They pay you a very, very small tolling fee for the gas that you're getting out the ground. We wanted to maintain a fiercely independent role to really become a differentiator and to open up the helium market and bring it more into the mainstream commodity space. That obviously goes against the gas majors' business model. From that perspective, in order to maintain independence, you can't necessarily go out and either get snapped up. You can't get snapped up because they don't invest upstream. Accepting their capital means that they control the underlying asset completely.
That means that you're not the maker of your own destiny.
Thank you. Okay. Just coming on, Paul, this is on the sort of TerraPower announcement last night, which has been a little bit like buses. Can you tell us a little bit about that deal with TerraPower, please?
Yeah. I would add that the transactions were not expected to be announced within 24 hours of each other. It just happened to end up that way. It is just where it was. The TerraPower announcement basically is TerraPower will commit a certain amount of funding for us to build our first HALEU facility in South Africa. That funding should allow us to get significant capital from other providers of capital in South Africa and allow us to build the plant. There is also a 10-year offtake agreement for 15 metric tons per year, which they will guarantee us.
If you think about, I don't know, between $20,000 and $30,000 a year, that's probably sort of $3 billion-$4 billion worth of offtake over a 10-year period. We're going to work together to try and bring this technology to the United States and build a plant in the United States. As I say, we signed a term sheet back in October last year. We've spent the last six months working together to see what that definitive agreement would look like. I think the goal was to do it by July. We've beaten that timeline by six weeks, I guess.
Just to clarify, because obviously questions are what that's worth, $3 billion-$4 billion then is the value of that offtake agreement for 150 metric tons of HALEU?
Yeah.
If you use current market prices, that's the kind of range, yeah.
Does this now, because obviously you've talked about this before, what does this do for the spin-out, the IPO that I know you'd scheduled for the second half of this year for QLE?
I mean, we probably wouldn't do the spin-out without this deal inked. If we hadn't inked a deal with TerraPower, we'd have inked one with another party because there's other parties talking to us and looking at us as well. Obviously, it helps that spin-out. It provides some more certainty over the customer for QLE. We've now got a location to build the first plant. We're going to work fast to build that plant as quickly as possible.
I must say, building a plant on a greenfield site would be a painful and expensive process, as other companies have kind of proven. Penn and Darborough in South Africa is literally a plug-and-play location where we can turn up and kind of build a facility with the correct permits and licenses in place. It is well known by the IEA. They have enriched before. They have a nuclear reactor on the site. It is a fantastic location. That is why I think it really helps secure the future of QLE.
I'm not sure if you can answer this one, but TerraPower had been mentioned historically as contributing equity to any QLE entity. Is that still the case post this announcement?
I probably can't really answer that question. I guess wait and see.
Should we be looking now at this combined entity?
I mean, a question here from an analyst, obviously. I mean, one looks at Linde, Air Products, and your sort of new peer group that trade on sort of an average P of 25 times and 15 times EBITDA. I'm not sure if those multiples are correct in this question, but should we now be looking at ASP Isotopes, Renergen as a peer to Linde and Air Products?
I would say they're our closest peers. I mean, that's fair. I would also add the electronic gases business of those companies have the highest ROI, have the fastest growth, and highest margins. The electronic gases business of those companies is, I would argue, the best part of those companies.
Okay. Question probably for you, Paul. Are you not spreading yourself a little bit too thin?
I mean, at what point is it where ASP Isotopes should try and get its own positive P ratio and net income numbers? It's done a lot of great work, but taking Renergen on, does that not spread you a little bit too thin?
We've got a great team in South Africa. I spend about half my time there. I'm not the person building the plants. We've got a team to build the plants for us. We've got project managers on each plant. We hire the best engineers every year from universities in South Africa. So we've got a great team. And I feel very confident we can add a lot of support to Renergen to help Renergen be successful whilst maintaining success ourselves. We also bifurcate a lot of the responsibilities around the company.
Our laser team is different to our ASP team, is different to our engineering hub, different to our fabrication workshops. We have a lot of skills and a lot of expertise. I feel very confident that we can do this.
When are we getting the 10Q?
I think that should get filed after the close today, along with various 8Ks and other regulatory filings that need to get filed related to this transaction. I have been asked by a lot of people why the 10Q was late. I could not really say, but obviously, investors can now see why the 10Q has been delayed by a couple of days because of this transaction and the announcements we have made in the last 24 hours.
Will Renergen delist on the ASX?
Renergen will delist entirely through this transaction. Renergen will no longer be traded as a moniker.
It will be ASP, which then lists on the JSE. In terms of will ASP have a counter trading on the ASX? No, it will not.
Do you plan to sell helium spot or under long-term contracts? Is one able to hedge to run to production?
50% of the phase two production will be under long-term take-up, and 50% will go into the spot market. That will give us a very decent blended return on the overall helium portfolio. Sorry. Is there currently a visible market for helium? No, it is quite clandestine and it is quite opaque. I believe that is one of the core philosophies that we have behind our phase two project. By bringing on a significant volume into the spot market, we will be facilitating the visibility as to where trades are being printed. That will make the commodity much more mainstream.
Why is it so hard to replace helium, Steph?
It is unique chemically. It's both electrically and chemically inert. It's incredibly light. Most importantly, and this is really the key driver, in electronics, it has the highest thermal conductivity of any gas. To explain that, it means that it moves heat very, very efficiently. Air actually insulates well. Next time you put your beer inside a cold box, the reason that your cold box keeps your beer cold is because there's bubbles with normal air, and air doesn't conduct heat very well. Helium is the exact opposite. It dissipates heat immensely quickly. The other thing is that it's the only element on the periodic table which cannot be turned into ice unless you put it under extreme pressure. That means that it never, ever freezes. It'll only ever go to liquid.
That's why in quantum computing, you can get it to under a thousandth of a degree Kelvin. That's the only way that you can use quantum computers is with helium. It's a very versatile gas, but its chemical and electrical properties are unparalleled. There is no other gas or no other element on the periodic table that has the kind of uniqueness exhibited by one element on the periodic table.
We're getting to the last couple of questions. Is there upside to the $300 million EBITDA number by 2030?
I'm only going to give guidance of numbers I'm very confident we can hit. There may well be. Yeah. We'll see.
Okay. Look, this is a fantastic transaction. If you had to finish off, why should the market be as excited as it is about this deal?
I kind of look at very few transactions around the world where you see a hand and glove fit. This is a hand and glove fit. I think it's going to create a really important company for the world, which will be needed for so many industries that are growing right now. I think without what we're doing, quantum computing, a lot of nuclear power, a lot of medical isotopes simply won't be able to happen. It's going to put us right smack in the middle of a number of critical supply chains that the world needs. Many governments know that. I think it's going to really make us a powerhouse in industrial gases that, quite frankly, no one else has. No one else has the helium in these concentrations or the ability to create isotopically pure gases.
We'll be the only company in the world that can do that. I think it's going to create a really, really unique company and tremendous growth potential ahead of us. Steph, anything you want to add to that?
Yeah. I mean, from our side, the addition of isotopically pure gases really becomes a differentiator. Think about it from your typical semiconductor manufacturing perspective. You know that so many of your supply chains are interrupted due to whatever geopolitical factor. Here, you've got the ability to buy from an American firm on American soil. You can go straight in. You've got one company that's going to give you right across the entire spectrum, all of your gases that you need from a critical supply chain perspective.
It also means that you've got the ability to buy direct from source as opposed to having to go through a middleman, which adds to the complexity of your supply chains. This really is a we're looking to build a very advanced one-stop shop for critical gases. Adding helium to the ASP portfolio and adding ASP's portfolio to helium, you've got, as Paul said, a hand and glove fit. It really makes a lot of sense. One and one is three in this case. Having had the honor to work on this transaction with you, I can certainly say that now that question that came up about looking at peer group multiples now to this new industrial gases space, such as Linde and Air Products, takes you to another level. We have a piece of research we've made freely available on the transaction.
If anyone's interested, please contact me or myself or Ben or any of the team at OceanWall. We're also going to make Steph and Paul accessible through group meetings and also to existing shareholders of both companies for the next couple of days. We obviously have a lot on the agenda with the QLE spin-out. We have the Russell re-weight. It's a fantastically exciting time. Gentlemen, I just want to sort of finish this on the hour by saying congratulations to the pair of you for a fantastic transaction. Well done.
Thank you, Nick, for your enthusiasm. Thank you, the audience, for their questions and interest.
Yeah, thank you to everyone. Looking forward to the next milestones and delivery.
Thank you.