Thank you for standing by, and welcome to Innventure's Dow collaboration and Refinity Launch Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press Star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press Star 1-1 again. I would now like to hand the call over to Lucas Harper.
Good afternoon, and welcome to Innventure's Dow Collaboration and Refinity Launch Conference Call. My name is Lucas Harper, Innventure's Chief Investment Officer, and joining me on the call are Bill Haskell, Chief Executive Officer of Innventure, and Bill Grieco, Chief Executive Officer of Refinity. A reminder that certain statements made today are forward-looking within the meaning of the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These statements are made based upon management's current expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company, and therefore involve a number of uncertainties and risks, including but not limited to those described in the safe harbor statement in our presentation and our earnings release, Form 10-Q for the period ended September 30, 2024, and other filings with the SEC. Therefore, actual results of operations or financial condition of the company could differ materially from those expressed or implied in our forward-looking statements.
Now, I'd like to hand the call over to Innventure CEO Bill Haskell. Bill.
Thanks, Lucas, and thank you all for joining us today. We are very excited to speak to you about our recently announced Dow Collaboration and the launch of our fourth operating company, Refinity. Today's call will focus on the market opportunity we see for Refinity and the technology that will underpin its operations. While too early to discuss financials, we hope this deeper dive into the technology is beneficial for investors and analysts. To start, I'd remind everyone that Innventure's business model is to collaborate with multinational companies, source technologies that are disruptive, and build companies that solve key problems with known demand in the marketplace. The technology can come directly from the multinational, as it did for our first three companies, PureCycle Technologies, AeroFlexx, and Accelsius, or it can come from a third party like a research institute or a channel partner.
The key for Innventure is to acquire the rights to the technology, take control of it, build a company around it, and work with the multinational to accelerate commercialization, ideally as a first customer or as a partner catalyzing early adoption of the technology. On December 18th, we announced a deep collaboration with Dow and launched our newest company, Refinity, in the waste-to-value space. This is a watershed moment in Innventure's progression as a public company, adding yet another major industry and collaborating with a large, diversified petrochemical company as an MNC. The launch of Refinity as our fourth company further validates Innventure's strategy. We're very pleased to be working with Dow on Refinity and look forward to collaborating on other opportunities in the future.
Before I turn it over to Refinity leadership, I want to tell you a little bit about the process of how we came to launch Refinity. As we've spoken about, each technology opportunity Innventure evaluates goes through our rigorous analysis process known as DownSelect. The Refinity analysis over the last 12 months, including the fully integrated business plan that led to the launch, was spearheaded by the two executives that I'm going to introduce in a minute. They worked with Dow and other petrochemical companies to keenly understand the key circularity and sustainability needs with respect to different kinds of waste, particularly plastic waste, that underpin the Refinity market opportunity. They evaluated a number of different advanced recycling options and found one through a research institute in Europe that was unexploited and truly differentiated.
They are moving over from Innventure to lead Refinity not only because they're our internal experts in the space, but because they bring nearly 30 years of experience in process industries. They know the players. They know the technology. They are the right people to build and run this business for us. And now, I'd like to introduce you to Bill Grieco, Refinity's Chief Executive Officer. Bill has deep experience in both multinational companies as well as startups and holds a PhD from MIT in chemical engineering. Bill has been serving as Innventure's Chief Technology Officer since 2022. Bill will be joined by Adam Javan as the Chief Operating Officer for Refinity. Adam has been serving as a serial CXO for Innventure and likewise is a seasoned executive with deep knowledge in process industries. I'll now turn it over to Bill for a deeper dive into Refinity.
Thanks, Bill, for the introduction. I want to start with Refinity's value proposition and why we believe we're different than other recycling businesses. I'm sure that most of you have seen reports about the scale of the plastic waste problem. It's enormous, and it's global. In fact, less than 9% of all plastic waste generated each year is actually recycled, which presents an incredible opportunity. At Refinity, we're focused on the 240 million tons of plastic waste that are typically landfilled or incinerated each year. These are mixed plastic wastes that can't be easily used in other processes, either because those processes don't work well or because the economics don't pencil out. Existing recycling is also a very localized business. The resulting lack of economic viability and scalability has prevented real plastic circularity on a global scale.
Our solution to the problem uses a proprietary advanced recycling process to convert minimally sorted, low-cost mixed plastic wastes to drop-in chemicals. Refinity plans to take waste from food trays, plastic wrap, storage bins, detergent containers, and other plastics that we use every day and convert them into sustainable chemicals that today come from a barrel of oil. In other words, Refinity plans to help reduce the net need for oil production and allow petrochemical companies to make the same products at the same quality that they do today. Our process targets conversion of abundant, low-cost plastic waste to valuable chemicals at an expected high yield. You may ask why now. A number of factors make now the right time to build this business. First, consumer demand for sustainable products and the resulting pressure on CPG companies to provide those products is at an all-time high.
Second, those same companies and their suppliers, chemical companies, for example, have set very aggressive sustainability and circularity goals, and they need new solutions to meet those targets. Third, the global regulatory environment continues to evolve in support of sustainability and circularity. And fourth, we believe the recycling technology that Refinity will employ has advanced enough to meaningfully solve the problem. We see a huge opportunity here, and that's why we've launched Refinity. We believe our advanced recycling technology will operate with better economics than other recycling options and provide the opportunity for global scalability, which is what Innventure companies are meant to deliver. So what's out in the market today? This plastic waste recycling technology map from the nova-Institute in Europe provides a nice overview of the many options for converting waste plastics into valuable products. The key incumbents are mechanical recycling, dissolution or solvent recycling, and pyrolysis.
Each of these has unique attributes, but it's safe to say that all require high cost, less available, and harder to source plastic wastes as feedstock. Mechanical recycling and dissolution tend to produce niche products and are more localized businesses. Pyrolysis tends to operate at low yields, so productivity is limited, and operating costs can be high. The localized nature of mechanical recycling and dissolution and the high operating costs of pyrolysis are limitations that have prevented global-scale deployment of sustainable plastics recycling. Now let's talk about our technology and how it addresses the limitations of those incumbents. On January 8th, Innventure announced that Refinity exclusively licensed the rights to novel technology for advanced recycling of mixed plastic wastes from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The core technology is a proprietary application of fluidized bed processes that are routinely operated in the refining industry to make transportation fuels.
Fluidized bed processing uses very uniform heating and short contact times. This means that we expect to convert more plastic waste directly to the products that we want with a much higher yield than in pyrolysis or other incumbent technologies. The process can also use a wider range of plastic waste feedstocks. In fact, we're focused on low-cost, abundant plastic wastes that are hard to recycle and that are currently landfilled or incinerated. VTT has been developing these conversion processes for a couple of decades, largely in partnership with industry, and they've demonstrated consistently high yields with many different plastic wastes. They operate bench-scale and pilot-plant fluidized bed systems, and we will have access to VTT equipment and their personnel so that we can tune operating conditions and optimize yields for different types of wastes. We'll also use that equipment for the engineering studies needed to complete final plant designs.
So we expect the combination of high-yield conversion of low-cost, abundant plastic wastes to drop-in chemicals to give us an economic advantage over incumbent processes and to enable global scalability. Summarizing what we just discussed, the incumbent technologies do have a place in the market but are not optimized across the various aspects of the value chain, making them financially unattractive or tough to scale. Refinity's advanced recycling process is different. We believe we can produce high-value drop-in chemicals from our licensed proprietary technology, do it at higher yields than incumbent technologies, and do it with a broader set of plastic waste feedstocks. And we have access to VTT's proven processes and facilities that are already in place, and we can leverage those to drive the initial growth of the company. This differentiated combination of cost, quality, yield, and scalability is why we believe the Refinity opportunity is so attractive.
Now let's touch on how we expect to mitigate commercialization risks. I mentioned earlier that VTT has already demonstrated the fluidized bed technology at pilot scale. So unlike other recycling companies, we don't need to build a pilot plant. We already have access to VTT's existing capabilities and are able to optimize conditions and demonstrate operation with real plastic wastes. In other words, we have a clear path to understand and manage technical risks. Scaling up and building these processes is well understood. Since fluidized bed processes are already used in the refining industry to make transportation fuels, designing and building the pieces of equipment needed to run these processes is known. And by the way, those refining processes operate at 10 times the scale that we'll be running, so our scale-up is not expected to pose significant challenges for us.
Lastly, our collaboration with Dow should allow us to understand how best to operate our advanced recycling process and what product quality is needed to ensure that we integrate with typical petrochemical plant operations. We will also explore different site and plant integration options to take advantage of infrastructure and lower our overall costs. Ultimately, our use of industrial technology known to the process industries and the availability of an existing pilot plant for engineering design and optimization work gives us a real head start towards commercial deployment. I want to say just a few words about the critical success factors for Refinity. Creating a control point around feedstock is critical for us. So we're actively working to identify and lock up low-cost, abundant plastic waste feedstocks. We're focused on hard-to-recycle plastic wastes that are currently collected but ultimately are landfilled or incinerated.
As we progress the business, we'll work to unlock other plastic wastes that are not collected today. We intend to go to market by building and operating Refinity plants with petrochemical companies as off-takers. We expect to deploy our fluidized bed process technology to convert plastic waste to both sustainable naphtha, a liquid product, as well as to sustainable olefins, ethylene, and propylene gas products. This gives us the flexibility to site plants where they're needed. Liquids plants might be located closer to the plastic waste. Olefin gas plants would likely be located near the petrochemical plants to allow for easy transfer of our products to their facility. We do envision adding licensing to the build-and-operate model at the right time in the future. So I'd like to summarize what we believe will make us different than incumbent recycling businesses.
Our ability to use low-cost, abundant plastic wastes that are hard to recycle should enable an improved sustainability footprint and lower operating costs and our fluidized bed technology operating at higher yields to more economically produce sustainable drop-in chemicals that are in high demand. Additionally, the fluidized bed processes that Refinity plans to operate are already used at global scale in the refining and petrochemical industries. The equipment is well proven, and scale-up is well understood, which means we expect to minimize equipment complexity, drive down capital costs, and scale production efficiently. Finally, the process can be tuned to produce either liquids or gases that will directly replace the fossil raw materials that currently feed petrochemical operations. This flexibility should allow us to site advanced recycling plants where they're most advantaged, either near the source of the plastic waste or next to a petrochemical plant.
We believe that this flexibility will also enable scale because we won't be tied to any one location. Ultimately, the takeaway is that applying a known technology to convert low-cost, abundant plastic waste to drop-in chemicals presents a highly attractive, economically viable, and scalable solution aimed at solving a market need for true plastic sustainability and circularity. With that, I'll turn the call back to Bill Haskell.
Thanks, Bill. The Innventure team is excited about the potential of our new collaboration with Dow and latest operating company, Refinity. We're confident Bill and Adam bring the right experience and leadership to make Refinity a success. We'll now open the call to take your questions.
As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press Star 1-1 on your telephone. To remove yourself from the queue, you may press Star 1-1 again.
Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Chip Moore of Roth Capital Partners. Your question, please, Chip.
Hey, everybody. Thanks for taking the question. Was hoping maybe you could expand a bit more on the background in DownSelect process. Was this more borne out of working with Dow, or perhaps you identified the technology first and then found Dow as a partner, or just expand on that? And then for Refinity itself, how should we think about structure and ownership? Is this more of a JV with Dow or any color there?
Let me take a cut at it, Chip, and thanks for joining the call. And Bill can elaborate as needed. We go by sort of Mr. Bill and Dr. Bill in terms of these so we can't get the two Bills straight.
In any event, the collaboration with Dow has been longstanding. Bill and Adam actually have a long history with Dow even prior to coming to Innventure. And so we've had a longstanding relationship with them and have been looking at a range of technologies with Dow for a variety of different potential opportunities. So this collaboration was really born out of that partnership or that collaboration. And there's, again, a lot more to say about the technology and source. This was a technology that Dow was quite aware of, and I'll let Bill talk a bit more about that. With respect to ownership, we're not going to address kind of the business deal we have with either Dow or VTT at this stage just because we have arrangements with them that really preclude us from doing that. But we view this as a collaboration.
As you probably have seen in the press release, there's been a lot of discussion about the collaboration and where Dow will pitch in and help us as we go forward. But Bill, I'll flip it to you and see if you have any further elaboration.
Sure. Thanks. And Chip, thanks for the question. With regard to how we found the opportunity, as Bill mentioned, we've been working with Dow for a number of years. We have a deep relationship with them. Adam and I both do over the years. And in fact, he had a strong relationship with VTT as well. It's fair to say that over the last, I don't know, decade or 15 years, we've each looked at a variety of different waste-to-value opportunities across the space. So we had a strong understanding of the technologies that worked and those that maybe were less efficient.
When we heard about the VTT fluidized bed technology, we investigated it differently, and that came through both of those collaborations, right? The understanding from Dow of what the market needs were and our relationships with VTT as well, so again, against the backdrop of knowing kind of the history of the incumbent technologies, other things that do and don't work, this one rose to the top quite quickly, and then over the last 12 months or so, we assessed it deeply. We visited the team in Finland, built a strong business case around it, and then further developed the relationships both with Dow and VTT, and then launched Refinity.
Understood. That's helpful. Appreciate that, and if I could ask another, I guess, in terms of future strategy, obviously, these plants can be capital-intensive. It sounds like you can leverage that pilot plant near term.
Do you think you need to scale up from there to a bigger pilot plant, or you can go to a full commercial plant from there? And then how do we think about capital needs down the road if we get to that point? Is this maybe an asset-like strategy or leveraging partners, etc.?
Sure. Sure. Great question. So from a scale-up perspective, I think we envision going to a scale that will be economically viable and profitable at the next scale. We can't comment at this point on what the throughput of that is. In fact, we're just beginning relationships with some different engineering procurement and construction firms to build out those initial plant designs for different scale-up options, different throughputs. And of course, capital will depend on the scale, and we're not ready to comment on that.
Perhaps at some point in the future, as the relationships develop and the engineering designs develop, we'll be ready to talk about that, but not today. With respect to asset-like models, certainly licensing is an option that we will add in. I've mentioned that in the prepared remarks. I think we see going to a build-and-operate model where we control the operating footprint initially is the right way to start. I can't say today, and I'm not sure when we'll be able to say what the balance between our owned and operated facilities versus licensed facilities will be. But look, the scale of the problem that we're going after, 240 million tons of plastic waste to be processed, is a big opportunity. And so licensing at some point in the future to develop more capital footprint makes sense.
Got it. No, that makes a lot of sense.
And if I could just ask one last one, as we track this now, obviously, early days, but how should we think about milestones, I guess, over the next, call it, 12 months or so? What should we be looking for? Thanks.
So we're not ready today to talk about specific milestones. We may at some point in the future. I think it's fair to say that in the presentation, in the prepared remarks, we talked about what the critical success factors are around creating control points for feedstock and then developing the engineering packages and starting to deploy plant capital at the right point in the future. Bill, if you want to share some thoughts on that, happy to get your perspective.
Yeah.
I just might add that on the back of the capital needs side or the capital deployment side, recall that these plants that we'll be building will be co-located with an existing plant. So there's a lot of sort of infrastructure that you would normally need to include in a plant that we won't need to do because we're sort of bolting on to an existing petrochemical plant or other processing capability, which is quite useful. And again, we can sort of dial up or dial down that based upon how much we license and how much we do directly. But the scale of these plants and the capital needs are modest compared to other types of large chemical standalone plants that you see being utilized in other recycling applications.
Perfect. Okay. Well, great. I look forward to watching progress and learning more. Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Nehal Chokshi, of Northland Capital Markets. Your question, please, Nehal. All right.
Thank you. And congrats on forming this third company. Looks quite exciting. For Bill and Dr. Bill, with Dr. Bill moving over to becoming CEO of Refinity, what will be done with the CTO spot within Innventure? I believe that's a key part of the DownSelect process here. Yeah.
Great question, and thanks for jumping on. So I would, first of all, think about these companies that we start as being sort of the equivalent of divisions in an operating enterprise, right? So I would say that's sort of the first point to take away.
But the second thing is that we have a pretty deep bench that we've been adding to over the last six to 12 months in the DownSelect team. It's a multidisciplinary team of chemical engineers, physicists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc. So we don't feel a need to replace that position per se. We have the requisite skill sets that we need to contribute to DownSelect. And DownSelect often is the source of where our CXOs come. Many of the folks that we have in our DownSelect team have done many startups in their prior life or have even participated in some of the ones we've done under the Innventure umbrella. And so an ongoing rotation, I'll call it, of people out of Innventure into the operating subsidiaries is kind of a normal course of business thing. And in some cases, they come back to Innventure.
So there's, again, structurally, the need for somebody labeled as a CTO isn't really a hard requirement. And Bill was, of course, great at it because he's got a lot of multiple disciplines in terms of his background. But we believe we've got plenty of talent, a pretty deep bench of talent that can handle the job that we need.
All right. Great. Thank you. So forgive me. I don't know the recycling industry all that well. Slide 7 and slide 9 are very valuable to me. However, I really have no idea what high and low yields are in the industry. Could you give a sense as far as what's the disparity there? Are we talking like 10% and 90% between low and high? Just to start to help to understand what is the potential delta step that we're looking at.
That's a great question.
I would say look at it this way. The kind of incumbent technologies that we talked about, particularly pyrolysis, usually have yields south of 50% and typically below 40%. You put in 1,000 tons of plastic waste. By the way, that plastic waste usually has to be treated, cleaned up a little bit, typically not mixed waste. But you put in 1,000 tons and you get something like 400 tons of the lower oil you'd want out of that process. When we talk about high yield, we're thinking in terms of you put 1,000 tons in and you get somewhere in the 6 to 700 tons of direct drop-in chemical products out of the conversion process. Those existing incumbent technologies need post-processing. You have to clean up the product. In our case, we're producing a drop-in chemical that feeds directly into the petrochemical supply chain.
Bill, can you actually quantify also kind of the drop-off for people that take pyrolysis oil and then when they go in through the cracker and that sort of thing? There's additional efficiency loss there. Can you speak to sort of the aggregate benefit between those two?
Sure. So if a pyrolysis oil is fed to the front of a steam cracker, about 50% of that would be then converted to the kinds of olefin products that we're going to make directly. So you add up these yields and we're going direct, call it 1,000 tons of product going into our conversion process, 600-700 tons of olefins comes out the other side. For our pyrolysis process, 1,000 tons goes in the front, maybe 400 tons of oil comes out the back side, and then that gets done in half to make those same olefins.
So it's a big difference.
Yeah. So you're breaking up there a little bit, Bill, but so roughly sort of two and a half to three to one in terms of the ultimate yield of the end-use product. So it's quite a significant delta, and you can appreciate from a margin standpoint how that incremental productivity can substantially improve margins.
Right. Okay. And then you guys mentioned that 9% of plastics are recycled at this point in time. Of that 9%, how does that bucket out between these three technology types of mechanical recycling, dissolution, pyrolysis?
If you have that information, I realize that that's a big question.
I don't have the exact number,
but Nehal, I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but it is the vast majority mechanical recycling. The solvent purification, dissolution technology, and pyrolysis are much smaller players.
Mechanical recycling is the longest-standing incumbent, and it has the majority of that 9%.
Okay. And of that 9%, the initial target displacement would be pyrolysis?
No. In fact, when we talk about going after the 240 million tons of plastic waste by quota, none of that today is recycled at all. That's not part of the 9%. That's an untapped resource. Today, that's all being landfilled or incinerated, and that's what we're going after. So we're looking at adding to the 9%, not directly displacing any one piece.
We may well do that, but it's a much bigger target that we're going after.
Understood. So when you said that you expect that the incumbent technologies will have a place, you're largely envisioning that that 9% will continue to be served by these three technologies.
And then what you're really the bigger growth vector for Refinity would be addressing the other 91%. That's exactly right. Got it. Okay. Great. Thank you for the education. I appreciate it.
Thank you. And that ends the Q&A portion of our call and concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.