everyone to the 90th Emerging Growth Conference and day one of our two-day virtual investor conference. I'm Anna Berry. Just a few notes. Today, we're running until about 4:50 P.M. Eastern. When we switch to the next company, you'll see a black screen for a moment. Don't go anywhere. That's just us moving to the next presentation. If you do experience downtime for more than a minute or so, refresh your browser. Our platform does work best on Google Chrome, so if you're watching from an Apple device, you have to hit the play button to start the session. During each company's presentation, you can submit questions through the webcast module, and we will attempt to address as many of these at the end of the presentation. All of our conferences are uploaded to the Emerging Growth Conference YouTube channel, so please subscribe, youtube.com/emerginggrowthconference.
Let's begin with ASP Isotopes Inc., trades on the Nasdaq under the symbol ASPI. It is a pre-commercial stage advanced materials company dedicated to the development of technology and processes to produce isotopes for use in multiple industries. Happy to welcome back CEO Paul Mann. Nice to see you, Paul. It's been a while since you've been on. We're very much looking forward to hearing all the updates.
Yeah, it's been about six months, I guess. It's great to be here, and thanks for your interest. I'll run through the presentation as I usually do, and then we'll have some Q&A at the end. That's great. I'll run through a slide deck and some prepared remarks. Obviously, we're a Nasdaq-listed company, and, you know, we have for please read these forward-looking statements and disclosures. Also, please read our, all our SEC filings for a complete set of risk factors and, you know, all the information about our companies. We publish file form 10-K's, 10-Q's, and other filings with the SEC. What do we do, and what are we?
Basically, think about ourselves as having a number of verticals in the company, and we focus on isotopes, a very special form of chemical for 3 main industries, really, medical, semiconductors, and nuclear energy. You'll see we have a couple of subsidiaries in the company. Actually, it's slightly out of date. We've actually got 3 subsidiaries in the company now. Quantum Leap Energy is focusing on nuclear fuels for the future, specifically high assay, low mixed uranium and Lithium-6, Lithium-7. Our goal is to spin Quantum Leap Energy out as a separate entity later on this year. We publicly stated that we filed an S-1 with the SEC to spin that company out.
PET Labs is a profitable biotech and radio medicine company, produces radioisotopes for treatment of oncology, and we have three radio pharmacies there, two in the United States and one in South Africa. We're actually South Africa's leading supplier of radioisotopes for PET scanning, which is for oncology, for cancer diagnosis. In the middle, you see ASP Isotopes, and that focuses on producing stable isotopes for things like semiconductors and also the obvious, nuclear medicine. All three end markets are very interesting, are growing at a tremendous pace, and we're excited to be involved in all of them. We recently acquired a company called Renergen of South Africa.
Renergen has a very large helium supply, and we're in the process of completing Phase 1C of that project. That will bring Renergen up to a positively EBITDA business. You know, since we took over the project, we've really accelerated the drilling and the operations there. Renergen suffered from only really having three engineers and a subscale drilling team. We've brought industrial expertise. We obviously have sort of 30, 40 engineers who work for our company, who are experts in project installation. We've added those to the team, we've really re-accelerated that project, and that's looking fantastic.
If you look at, you know, at the key highlights of the transaction, this plan will benefit from about three-quarters of a billion dollars of funding, half a billion dollars from the U.S. government and a quarter of a billion dollars from the bank loan. When we've finished this project, what we said is the combined company should achieve greater than $300 million in EBITDA in 2030, and that's excluding the QLE spin. This will really transform ASP Isotopes into a leader of providing electronic gases as well as medical isotopes as well. A lot of people have questions: What is an isotope? An isotope is a very special form of chemical.
When you think about hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen, they're very different elements. They, you know, you'd separate them 'cause they go into gases or solids at different temperatures. They're chemically very different, so they're easy to separate them. When you look at individual isotopes, carbon has three isotopes, for example, carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14. Each has a different molecular mass, so a different number of neutrons inside the nucleus. They're very challenging to separate 'cause chemically they're identical. Now we separate them using various processes and which I'll describe in a moment. When we separate out carbon-12 and carbon-13 and carbon-14, you know, when we think about carbon, a bag of charcoal sells for maybe $1 a kilo. A kilo of carbon-14 sells for $24 million a kilo.
We basically take these very normal chemicals, and we turn them into extremely specialized materials used for specific industries. The supply chain for isotopes is extremely challenging. That's one of the reasons why I got interested in this industry about five years ago. You know, here's the reason why. Basically, Russia controls about 85% of the stable isotope supply and, you know, with Europe supplying about 15%, there's no real domestic production of isotopes in the United States, and we intend to change that over the next several years. We have two processes to separate isotopes. The first is the Aerodynamic Separation Process, the second is Quantum Enrichment.
The ASP process, we basically, when you think about traditional centrifuge used in Russia or other countries to enrich uranium, that's a large vertical tube that spins on its vertical axis and creates almost like a vortex inside, the heavy isotopes move to the outside wall, lighter isotopes stay on the inside, and we separate heavy from light. We actually keep the tube stationary, we spin the gas inside the tube. Again, we create a separation of heavy from light. Some of the advantages of our process is that our plants are much cheaper to build, much quicker to build than traditional centrifuge. Also, we can enrich light isotopes as well as heavy isotopes. Traditional centrifuge needs a very heavy molecular mass, we actually prefer light isotopes.
We can enrich things like silicon-28, carbon-14, they can't be done in traditional centrifuge very easily. One of the downsides of our process, we use slightly more energy than a traditional centrifuge. That's one of the reasons why we intend to build plants in countries like Iceland, where energy is very abundant and extremely cheap. Our second process is Quantum Enrichment, and that uses a laser. We vaporise a metal, we pass it through a laser beam, and that excites or energises one particular isotope. We can strip that out using a charge collector plate. We've built 2 ASP plants in South Africa. We've built 1 Quantum Enrichment plant in South Africa. We intend to build much more of these plants over the next several years.
This picture here shows a picture of our carbon-14 plant, carbon-12 plant, and that's in the process of enriching carbon-12 and carbon-14. You can kind of see the size and scale of it. To summarize, our plants are cost-effective, they're modular, they're scalable, very inexpensive to build. They're very environmentally friendly. There's no nuclear waste from our plants. Let's talk about nuclear medicine first of all. Nuclear medicine is growing at a tremendous rate as we try and solve problems in cancer, try and treat cancer. We have the benefit of being kind of vertically integrated. Our goal is to produce stable isotopes from ASP Isotopes, so things like molybdenum-100, zinc-68, nickel-64, ytterbium-176.
These get transformed into a radioisotope near the point of care. For example, fluorine-18 has a 2-hour half-life. Technetium-99 has a six-hour half-life. You can't transport these isotopes very far, but they're needed to treat patients. You want a short half-life because a long half-life of radioactivity in a patient is typically damaging to that patient. A short half-life allows you to take the picture or treat the patient, to treat the cancer, but not affect the rest of the body. We have three radiopharmacies in PET Labs, and they all produce stable radioisotopes to treat patients. ASP Isotopes is producing stable isotopes, which will get transformed into a radioisotope. Our first stable isotope plant to come online in nuclear medicine should be ytterbium-176.
Ytterbium-176 is required to make Lutetium-177. Lutetium-177 is used in Novartis's drug called Pluvicto. Pluvicto is about a $2 billion drug today. It's forecast to become a $4 billion-plus drug in years to come, and it's a tremendous growth in this market. There's a lot of pipeline drugs in development for oncology, using things like Lutetium-177, Actinium-225, Astatine-211. This, we view this as the future of oncology care, very targeted medicines that treat specific tumors. You know, we believe our plant can do about a kilogram a year, and that should reach commercial production on that kind of scale at some point later on this year.
In the process of expanding the plant and putting a continuous processing vessel in that plant. The plant today has enriched ytterbium-176. We've shipped out our first sample to a customer, but in very small quantities, our goal is to scale that up into larger quantities over the coming months. zinc-68 is gonna be required to make gallium-68. Gallium-68 is used to diagnose various forms of cancer. it's a rapidly growing market, yeah, it's forecast to grow 15-fold over the next sort of 10, 20 years by external external consultants. I don't disagree with those forecasts. the only supply of zinc-68 really is Russia and a small facility in Europe.
Our goal is to build a large zinc-68 plant and supply this market, which gets converted into gallium. The largest opportunity in nuclear medicine is molybdenum-100. We believe that's, you know, potentially a multi-hundred million dollar opportunity over years to come. This is more of a longer-term project rather than a short-term project. Right now, the molybdenum-99 market is about a $4 billion market, and that's used to diagnose all kinds of different ailments and illnesses using SPECT scans. The problem with molybdenum-99, it has a 2.5-day half-life, very difficult to transport if you. You know, when your inventory halves in value every 2.5 days, that's kind of problematic. Molybdenum-100 is a stable isotope, and you can ship it in a FedEx package.
We believe it's a much more robust method of supplying this market. We'll likely start supplying this market in years to come, as and when the market is ready for it. Carbon-14 is an interesting radioisotope. This picture of our carbon-14 plant. We've signed a long-term take-or-pay agreement with a Canadian customer. The Canadian customer will supply the feedstock. We will enrich it and then send it back to the Canadian customer. That minimum take-or-pay there is about two and a half million dollars a year. The actual market is bigger than that. We expect to supply pretty more like sort of $5 million a year. We'll wait and see how the market develops. It's a very high gross margin product for us. Think about 85%-90% kind of gross margin here.
Our carbon-14 feedstock should arrive during the first quarter of this year. It's been stuck in Canada for the last sort of year and a half or so. We've got confirmation it should arrive during the first quarter. That will allow us to start producing revenues from this plant during the second quarter of this year. This plant today has been producing carbon-12, and we supplied a couple of carbon-12 samples to customers during the back end of last year. Semiconductors is the next isotope market of interest.
You know, semiconductor development has followed Moore's Law over the last sort of 70 years, Moore's Law states that a semiconductor doubles in speed every sort of 18 months to 24 months, and that's broadly held true over the last 70 years. I'm told Moore's Law will stop working in 2024, you know, we're unable to make faster semiconductors because of we've exhausted the laws of physics. By using isotopically pure materials, we believe or experts believe that we can get a couple more turns on Moore's Law. There's a lot of interest or growing interest in silicon-28. Silicon-28 is believed to conduct information as zero spin, it conducts information much more rapidly. It also transfers heat much more rapidly.
You know, we've signed three contracts for silicon-28. One is with a large U.S. semiconductor company, one is with a large global industrial gas company, and one is with another large U.S. buyer. We haven't disclosed exactly who the three customers are, but we'd expect to ship those during the first half of this year. You know, we actually shipped our first samples of silicon-28 last summer to a customer, and the customer confirmed the enrichment was in line with our expectations and in line with our measurements as well. The customer came to South Africa to visit the plant, made some suggestions of some changes. We're making those changes right now.
Right now, I believe what we want to do is finish off changing the O-rings in the compressors, that plant should restart again. 80 days later, we should get our first production of silicon-28 to ship to the customer. You know, this just summarizes other isotopes in next-generation semiconductors. Germanium-70 is also very interesting. Barium-137, Ytterbium-171, and Helium-3, all of these are needed for next-generation semiconductors. We look forward to sort of supplying those. As I mentioned earlier, our process, our plant, our ASP process uses quite a lot of energy. Our goal is to diversify globally over the next several years.
Our plan is to build large isotope plants in Iceland, probably starting this year, waiting for our final permit to do this. That should arrive during, you know, in the near future. That'll allow us to build plants in Iceland and really supply extremely low-cost, inexpensive isotopes to help fuel these emerging growth markets that the world needs. Final part of my presentation focuses on nuclear energy and Quantum Leap Energy. The problem is, it's fairly well-known, the world needs more energy. I'm told the world needs to double the amount of electricity over the next 25 years. It's likely that nuclear has to play a large part in that, particularly if we're gonna try and meet 2050 climate goals. Personally, I don't think we're going to meet those climate goals.
Personally, I don't think we're gonna meet the energy demand the world needs, that's just by the by. It's believed that the future of nuclear energy are Small Modular Reactors. When you think about a large nuclear reactor, these things take 10 years to build. They cost $billions to build. They're single, one-off bespoke projects. Nuclear energy, you know, Small Modular Reactors, it's basically taking what the Ford Model T did for cars, production line engineering, to the nuclear energy world. Make multiple Small Modular Reactors that all look identical. Most of it's built off-site and then shipped to the site. These reactors are typically between sort of 10 and sort of 500 MW, whereas a traditional nuclear reactor is more like sort of a GW.
Much cheaper to build, much faster to build. The main companies involved in this space, I've highlighted a few of them here. There's TerraPower, that's chairman and the founder is Bill Gates. There's X-energy, there's Rolls-Royce, there's Oklo, all of these reactors are expected to start up, you know, in the next decade or so. One of the problems for SMRs is they require a new grade of uranium called HALEU, high assay, low-enriched uranium, and this is enriched to 19.75%. When you think about a traditional reactor, they use low-enriched uranium, which is enriched to up to 5%, traditionally 3.5% to 5%. These new reactors have a new type of uranium, much higher energy density versus traditional uranium.
The problem for these is there's no Western supplier of HALEU. In fact, TerraPower has been delayed by 2 years because they can't get a hold of HALEU. You know, we hope to become the first supplier of HALEU, certainly the first Western supplier of HALEU, and we have two processes that can make HALEU, ASP and Quantum Enrichment. We believe Quantum Enrichment will be the best method of making HALEU, has a much higher enrichment factor. As I said earlier, we pass a vaporized through the metal, through a laser that excites one of the isotopes. This chart here describes some of the different methods of making uranium.
Gaseous diffusion was a technology, you know, 70 years ago, and the selectivity, the alpha, it's at 1.003. A very, very low enrichment factor, very energy intensive, very high capital cost to build. Centrifuges came around in the 1970s and 1980s, and you'll see the enrichment factor there is much higher, about 1.15. Again, you cascade the centrifuges and you compound that 1.15 over the cascade, and that allows you to get the enrichment you want. Very, very high capital cost still, low energy costs, but, you know, it's a vast project. These plants take sort of five to 10 years to build.
To the right you see three different methods of laser enrichment, AVLIS, SILEX, and quantum, and you see the selectivity is much greater for these laser-based approaches. Looking at the quantum, the selectivity is greater than 50, and I'll show you some examples of that in just a moment. This just shows, explains why we believe Quantum Enrichment is the best method to enrich with. This chart here just shows some of the methods our scientists have used to enrich isotopes using Quantum Enrichment. To the right here, you'll see a chart showing lithium. At the top chart you see lithium feedstock, the Lithium-6 is at less than 10%, about 7%, and Lithium-7 is at 93%.
After a single pass through the laser, Lithium-6 is over 90%, and Lithium-7 is below 10%. That's an enrichment factor, about 112. A very high enrichment factor versus traditional centrifuges. That allows you to enrich isotopes in a single step with just two steps, and we believe that's really gonna change the dynamics and the cost of enrichment. You'll see this chart here shows what's happened to the nuclear fuel supply chain over the last several years. Prices are at all-time highs, both uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment. You know, we believe that's gonna stay for some time. There's simply a shortage of these processes that are required to make nuclear fuel. What does that mean for HALEU?
If you look here, you know, the cost of a HALEU is probably over $20,000 a kilo now. When most of these plants, most of the SMRs were designed, the cost of HALEU was expected to be less than $7,000 a kilo. You see real pressure on the cost of fuel. You know, we hope to be able to enrich tails, depleted tails, that will really lower the cost of enriching uranium. You can see in this chart here, we hope to start supplying Lithium-6 and Lithium-7 in 2027. We will, you know, supply Uranium-235 as and when we get our permits for that.
Just to finally summarize, yeah, ASP Isotopes, we have a proven proprietary technology, two of them. We developed these over the last sort of five years, and they've been. They benefit from sort of 20 years of research and development in South Africa. Multiple secular and geopolitical tailwinds, to our industry to advance nuclear medicine, to advance next semiconductors, nuclear fuel, will all require new isotopes that there currently aren't many suppliers for. Obviously, given the geopolitical situation in the world right now, the world is looking to try and secure these critical material supply chains. As I said, we've built three manufacturing plants over the last five years, and we look forward to building more in the future. With that, Ana, I will stop and take any questions that you have.
Perfect. Thank you, Paul. Okay, we have so many questions for you, and we have a little bit of time. I apologize if some of these are a little redundant, 'cause you did give a really thorough presentation, but let's jump in and talk about Robert wants to know: What are the achieved enrichment level of test samples of Si-28, and when will the first commercial sales be announced?
Yeah. In terms of the enrichment, we can't really disclose that's confidential, but we've enriched to, up into, you know, just kind of above 99%, and it's pretty straightforward to do that. We've shipped three samples of different levels of enrichment to the customer. The customer has measured the enrichment. We've measured the enrichment. There are probably only two laboratories in the world that can measure silicon-28 to 99.995%, and also the impurities to parts per trillion. We have one, the customer has the other. It's really important that we make sure we're both measuring or getting the same measurements, and our laboratories are both calibrated correctly, we've confirmed that they are.
Then, we've also confirmed that the enrichment we're seeing in the plant is exactly in line with our theoretical calculations. We're making some small changes to the plant right now. The final change we're making is we're changing the ovens and the compressors to make them more durable and longer-lasting oven. Once that's done, which should happen fairly soon, we'll restart, and then 18 days later, we should get our first commercial product. You know, sit tight. It's coming soon. I say we're just finishing off the final touches to the plant.
Lots of questions about the QLE spin-off. Can you give us a timeline, and is there any restriction on QLE-related news while the S-1 filing is pending?
Yeah, there are certain restrictions what we can and can't say about QLE while the S-1 is pending. You'll have to be patient in terms of news flow and what we're allowed to say. We've publicly said that we filed our S-1 with the SEC, where the SEC, I would say, is moving a lot slower right now versus how it used to move. There's been headcount reductions at the SEC, and also the government shutdown during the fourth quarter last year, really put a delay on what's happening there. You know, we're working as fast as we can. I'd expect it to happen during the first half of this year.
You know, as I say, we've got to wait to go through the to go through the process, which is just, you know, it's just a process we have to go through. As I said, we have filed our first copy of the S-1. We should probably assume that we've received comments back from the SEC. Should probably assume we've sent back a second submission. Again, this is a back-and-forth process with the government regulator.
Clan wants to see if you can provide an update on the status of your controlled entity, Skyline Builders Group, and when shareholders can expect disclosure of the assets held within that vehicle.
Yeah. Skyline Builders, we control about 80% of Skyline Builders. That's focusing on securing critical material supply chains that both ASPI and Quantum Leap Energy will require, as well as the U.S. government's going to need. What we have said is we've made we own 20% of a mining business in Asia. We haven't yet announced exactly what that business is, but we look forward to doing so as and when we're allowed to by the Asian government and by the other party.
We've also secured an interest in a rare-earth metal recycling business, as well as a LOI to acquire a stake in or to acquire a uranium mining business that takes uranium from seawater, and that's been proven out by the DOE. We expect to get a lot of government funding and support for this business over the next several years. As I said, we're not quite ready yet to announce exactly what we've acquired. That's still confidential. We expect to make that announcement in the next several weeks or so. That's probably all I can say on Skyline Builders, but we're very excited by what they're doing, and I think it's gonna be a fantastic business. Stay tuned.
Perfect. Thank you. A quick question from Freddie: Do you think it's possible you'll get a permit to enrich uranium in the U.S. or the U.K. before you get one in South Africa?
I think South Africa will come 1st. I suspect the UK will come 2nd. I suspect the United States will come 3rd. Don't hold me to those timings, 'cause things can change. We're very close to... I think we announced, actually, we had a framework agreement in South Africa earlier this week, and actually, that comes with the license to enrich at Pelindaba using ASP. We expect to get a similar thing for Quantum Enrichment in the coming weeks or months. I think South Africa it is first or will be 1st, UK, then America.
Anthony asked about the Pelindaba: Can you give any timelines or expectations on permitting?
Yes, we actually announced earlier this week, we have a framework agreement to work with NECSA at Pelindaba. That agreement actually came with permission to enrich, and so you should expect our scientists are there, in the coming weeks, starting to run test work.
Perfect. Well, I want to give you about a minute for any final thoughts. We'll send the rest of these questions to you, Paul, so you can answer offline, but final thoughts from you.
Yeah, listen, it's an exciting year for the company, transformational year for the company. We've got so much going on, you know, to start commercial production in actually four facilities. Two ASP facilities, one Quantum Enrichment facility, as well as our helium natural gas business. It's a transformative year for the company. I look forward to updating you on the progress we make as the year progresses. Thank you for your interest in the company.
Perfect. Thank you, Paul. We look forward to seeing you again soon. Appreciate your time today.
Thank you. You bet.
All right, everyone, we'll be right back.