Welcome back, everyone. My name is Steve Byrne. I cover chemical equities for Bank of America, and I'm delighted to host this discussion with Origin Materials, which is an absolute pure play in sustainable plastic. You know, for an old chemical guy like me, this whole sustainability theme has been just an incredible shift within the chemical industry. You know, it's pulled in a lot of intellectual expertise and innovation that, you know, was previously focused elsewhere and now focused on sustainability. You know, I can tell you, many years ago when I worked in manufacturing plants, the objective was to figure out, how do I make this cheaper? Now it's, how do I make this sustainable? And that's what we're gonna talk about here today.
So the Origin approach to making this sustainable is really radically different. You know, we'll get into that in more detail here, but they've developed a process to start essentially with cellulose. This is, you know, wood or wood byproducts and convert that into building blocks that you can make this. And, you know, I gotta tell you, I was pretty skeptical at first about this whole technology. And it's mostly just from my own experience. I can tell you that the chemical industry started a long time ago trying to figure out how to convert wood products into ethanol. And these were, you know, significant expertise, you know, groups. I mean, DuPont was big on this, I mean, nearly 20 years ago. So, this has been, and that whole initiative has had very limited success.
It's because cellulose and wood is very complicated. I mean, this is, these are not simple compounds. This is not a simple feedstock. You know, there's a reason why, you know, the tree that falls in the forest lays there for a couple of decades. It's complex chemistry. You know, you got a lot of different polymers in there. It's what makes it robust and strong, but it's tough to use as a feedstock as opposed to, you know, something that's, you know, like a carbohydrate or a vegetable or something like this. So, you know, this, they, they've tackled something that's quite challenging.
I toured their pilot plant out in Sacramento about a year ago, and it really brought me up the curve in terms of understanding the technology and made it much more compelling to me. So, we'll get into this. And for me, it's a pleasure to be hosting, you know, the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Origin Materials, John Bissell, and he's with me today. He's another chemical geek just like me. He's a ChemE by training, but I would highlight he's really very entrepreneurial. I mean, this is not his first focused effort on sustainable plastic. So, we'll get into it in a lot of detail here. I will be throwing questions at him, and we'll talk through it.
If you wanna send me a question, you can use the portal, the Veracast portal I have up on my screen. So send a question there. I got Bloomberg open. If you prefer to send me an IB chat, that's fine, or email. Any of those is fine. So I welcome your comments. So with that, John, welcome. Thanks for joining us today. Glad to see you.
Thanks for having me, Steve. Really appreciate it. Thanks for that introduction. That was great.
You mean about being called a chemical geek?
That's right. Yeah, I like that one. I'm gonna, I'm gonna file it away.
All right. So the chemistry, you and I have talked about the chemistry at great length on many times, but, you know, you have this process to convert something pretty complicated into a building block that you can then make various plastics. I think it would help, those that are on the call here that, you know, may not be chemical geeks to just try to get an understanding. Maybe you could talk us through how does this work? What, you know, what feedstocks can you use? What, you know, what range of different types of products can you use? Then what do you produce, and then what end products can you make?
Yeah, sure. So as you described, Steve, you know, what we do is we take lignocellulosic materials. So, you know, lignocellulose is everything from paper-type materials to like a cotton T-shirt is actually a lignocellulosic material. It's and then wood chips or plant materials, agricultural residues, all of that stuff, basically plant-based matter, is usually a lignocellulosic material. There's some exceptions, but usually a lignocellulosic material. And we can use all of those from a technical perspective as our feedstock. What we do is we take that, we put that really whole. So you could think of, you know, chips of wood. I mean, it's gotta be sized appropriately, but from a chemical perspective, we can take pretty much any of those feedstocks. We take them whole, we put it into our reactor. It's a liquid phase reactor.
You know, some people might call it a digestion, is sort of what it looks like. And in fact, notably, I, I like calling it a digestion 'cause it's actually using hydrochloric acid as one of the primary reactants. And that's, that turns out to be the same thing that we have as stomach acid. So, hydrochloric acids are pretty, pretty, ubiquitous material. It's out there, in large volume. It's used in all sorts of stuff. But if you do it right, you can react that wood, and really it's all the individual components of the wood that you just described, right? So it's the, it's the six carbon sugars, it's the five carbon sugars, it's, it's even some components of the lignin all react in that system, and it basically dissolves the wood, and lets us turn each of those individual components into platform intermediate chemicals.
Now, what I mean by platform intermediate chemical is it's a chemical that you can make a lot of other chemicals out of. And the whole industry operates basically off of platform intermediates right now. But there are, and there aren't that many of them. You know, we call them ethylene and propylene, right? And other olefins are the platform intermediate chemicals of the fossil era. And what we're doing is we're introducing another one of those, but it's a natural platform intermediate chemical to make from lignocellulosic materials or renewable feedstocks. And that's CMF. We call that chloromethylfurfural. No quiz. But CMF is what we call that. We have another product that we make, 'cause in some ways you could think of this a little bit like a refining process.
It's almost like refining the wood into chemical intermediates that can then be used to make other materials and products. And so in typical refining chemistry, you end up with a couple different products coming out the other side. 'Cause what you're really doing is taking something in and then separating it into its different components so that it can be used appropriately. We sort of do a reactive separation of those different components. And so the other product that we make in pretty large volume is hydrothermal carbon, which kinda looks like used coffee grounds. So it's a very different material than CMF. Gets used for a different set of products. And to go through our product slate, you know, the CMF component that we make can be used to make a large volume of different chemicals.
The one that we talk about the most is PET, so PET is both sort of water bottle plastic, food packaging plastic, but it's also called polyester, and it's used for fiber applications too, so apparel, carpet, upholstery. It's a pretty ubiquitous polymer up there with polyethylene or polypropylene, so we can make PET. It is exactly the same as fossil-based PET. It's just made in a different way to which gives it a lower carbon footprint, much lower carbon footprint, and it can still be recycled in the same streams. In fact, it doesn't perform any differently in the products and applications.
And so, our customers can drop it straight into their existing supply chain and decarbonize that supply chain because it turns out that a lot of the emissions from products that are made actually come from what they're made from, not just the way that they're made. And so in order to drop the carbon footprint of a lot of the physical goods that we use in our economy, you've gotta make them out of something that's low carbon. You can't just change the way you're making them. So what we do is we make the stuff, the physical matter that they're made out of differently, which gives it a much, much lower carbon footprint. The HTC that we make can be converted into a lot of things, but carbon black is one that we're really excited about. Carbon black is a major ingredient in tires.
It's as much as 30% of the mass of a tire, and frankly, pretty much anything that you see that's black around you, and it's a plastic or synthetic material is probably black because of carbon black, so it's another one of these uber materials. That's what we do, Steve.
Any view as to why this works? I guess using HCO as your digester as opposed to, you know, all the attempts of trying to use biology has really struggled.
Yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting question. I love these kinds of, like, go back and tear down what worked or didn't work about a prior, a historical process, so I think cellulosic ethanol is a really, really interesting one. And I think there are a couple things to consider with cellulosic ethanol. The first, and this is kind of the trivial answer, but it's an interesting one, is I actually think that if you took some of those cellulosic ethanol processes today in today's economy with, you know, re-onshoring of supply chains and a different approach towards sustainability, I wonder if some of them might have been more successful than they were at that time, which maybe is a bit of a clarion call for people giving a shot at those, but let's leave that aside.
From a technical perspective, the reason why those were challenged was often because, and you were just hinting, you actually gave the answer in your introduction and just now, which is those organisms, microorganisms that are used to ferment the sugars in wood into ethanol, well, they're microorganisms. They're alive. And that's a great property in many cases. It turns out that with lignocellulosic materials, many of the inexpensive lignocellulosic materials that you can use as feedstocks have a lot of lignin. That's why we call them lignocellulosic. And the trouble with lignin is that lignin has actually evolved to be an antimicrobial part of the wood. It's part of the immune system of the wood itself.
And so if you have any of that broken up lignin in your process, which of course you typically do when you're using that as your feedstocks, you want it to be low cost, that lignin itself is actually inhibiting the behavior and the activity of those microbes, which just made it very challenging. You ended up either looking for feedstocks that were particularly low lignin feedstocks that you could use, or you were spending quite a bit of processing money, removing the lignin or treating it in some way that made it more acceptable to microorganisms, or you were operating with suboptimal microorganisms. So I think that, mind you, that's a really big part of why cellulosic ethanol had challenges. And it's also why sort of we're different, right? We don't have organisms in our process. It's a purely chemical process.
That means it's not gonna be bothered in this particular case by antimicrobial species like lignin.
In the last year and a half, you and your colleagues have accumulated $8 billion worth of offtake agreements. Can you talk us through who are these partners that have, you know, signed up to get these products from you? You know, what are the end markets in general? Maybe you can put it into some big buckets. What are the end markets in the products that they intend to produce, you know, with what you're referring to as this platform intermediate?
Yeah. So we've had really rapid order growth, you know, something like $1 billion a quarter, you know, if you squint. And that's been fantastic. And I think it's a really strong indication of what you were talking about in the beginning, which is that this is a world, this is a very sustainably driven world that we live in now, as you know, compared to 20 or 30 years ago. I think so in terms of different buckets, let's say market buckets for these, you know, we see demand from pretty much all across the PET and carbon black space. So PET gets used in consumer goods. So both consumer packaged goods, food, and apparel. So that's a big driver of demand. Another one is as a feeder into sort of the automotive industry.
You know, I mentioned carpet as well for polyester, and those are really big ones. And then of course beverage packaging, right? Some of our earliest big customers and partners, true partners, who actually invested in the company really early on, signed really large offtake agreements. You know, they joined our board when we were a private company, and have really been with us through the whole thing. We're Nestlé, Danone, and Pepsi. And that's 'cause they consume just enormous amounts of PET as part of their business with carbon and soft drinks. And so they saw this as a really strategic way, our technology as a really strategic way for them to decarbonize their business in ways that are pretty challenging to do otherwise. Those are sort of the big strokes on PET, on carbon black.
You know, we are definitely seeing a lot of interest from the major carbon black users. We've talked about a couple in the compounding space, so you know, where you're looking at people who are using carbon black as a UV stabilizer in some of their products, so things like, you know, corrugated water pipe is an interesting example of that, but then also distributors who are looking for sustainable solutions for a really broad range of things, but I'd say more broadly, you know, aside from those specific customers, we see basically everything downstream of us. Every party downstream of us is turning out to be interested in this.
So everything from other chemical companies, which was actually kind of a, you know, maybe shouldn't have been a surprise, but was a little bit, that those have turned out to be some of our best customers and partners through to, you know, end retailers who move so much material. And again, for them to decarbonize, if you're a big box retailer or large scale retailer, you know, again, if you're gonna decarbonize your business, especially things like Scope 3, you've gotta drive your inventory and your sold products into sustainable materials, right? So it's really soup to nuts. The whole value chain downstream of us is turning out to be partners.
And other than PET, are there other plastics that you're looking at? I know we've talked about PEF, but, you know, what do you think of that? Is that just, you know, a little bit longer term in, or any other pathways that you see as pretty meaningful?
Yeah, so CMF, as you, you know, mentioned earlier, is a very flexible intermediate, so we can make a lot of things out of it, and in many ways, I think our challenge is what are the right places to start with CMF more so than sort of what are the limits of what it can do? You know, just to give some examples, you know, CMF can be pretty easily taken to nylon, aramids, all sorts of polyesters beyond just PET and PEF. You know, it's a very, very flexible more rubbers even, and so we're really interested in seeing, you know, exploring that manifold, but polyesters are a special spot, so PET is special, one because it's just a great material, right?
So some people call it the highest volume engineering plastic, which is a little bit of an industry sort of jargon, but engineering plastics are usually the really high-end, high-quality materials that can do sort of magical things, right? And PET is such a good polymer that it's not really sometimes considered as a bulk sort of basic polymer like polyethylene. It's often considered to be such a high-performance polymer that it's almost an engineering plastic. So it's a great material from that perspective. But what we think makes it really special is that it actually gets recycled in large volume. And so having a material which is out there already being used very widely, again, both in fiber and in packaging, and parts kind of applications, that's getting recycled at large volume, that's a big deal, right?
That means that it's way ahead of all the other materials in its end-of-life story. And so we view our technology is coming in and solving sort of the beginning of life of that material, making it carbon negative and really sequestering carbon into the material, so that it can then be recycled indefinitely. And PEF is a really interesting evolution, I think, there. So PEF is a great polymer that's actually been known for a long time, just to bring people up to speed. You can sort of think of it like the next generation PET, right? It takes all the things that PET does, does most of them better, and also adds degradability to the sort of slate of end-of-life options. It's still recyclable, so you can recycle it in the PET stream.
And in fact, it looks like it makes that stream better. So it improves the recycling quality of PET when the PEF is thrown in there. But adding degradability to the sort of list of options for how the PEF can be taken care of at the end of its life is great, right? It means if anything leaks out of the supply chain, it'll degrade much more quickly. So we really are excited about PEF, and that's been known for a long time. The problem with PEF has been it's too expensive. So the way that it's been made historically just makes it challenging to be the sort of heir or one might even say usurper to PET as a large-scale polymer.
What we're excited about with PEF is that our platform, CMF, can be used to make the key ingredients that make PEF, and we can do it in a much more inexpensive fashion than what you've seen previously. In fact, we think that over the medium to long term, we can make it so that PEF is extremely competitive with PET on just an economic basis, let alone all of the environmental benefits that come with something new polymer like PEF. We're really excited about that. We actually think it sort of goes to the next level alongside our low-carbon process for making the PET. It goes in and upgrades the rest of PET to make it really just the obvious sustainable polymer that everybody should be using for just about every application you can figure out how to.
So we're really excited about PEF, and we think it's a great material. It's just gotta be the right price.
On that point about being economically competitive, can you comment in general how, you know, your ability to produce either PET or PEF, starting with cellulose, compares economically with starting with a fossil fuel base, which, you know, those costs are gonna be, you know, subject to change? But in general, is there some characterizations you can make about the cost competitiveness?
Yeah. I like to think about these sorts of things. There's going back to the history of technology in the chemical industry. What's interesting is, if you give chemical engineers and chemists enough time, what they usually figure out how to do is just about the most efficient physically possible conversion of a feedstock into the downstream products. So you see this with oil. You see this with all kinds of things. And if anybody really wants to get geeky, the rule of thumb is usually double the thermodynamic maximum possible thermodynamic efficiency so that whatever that input energy is gonna be to separate it thermodynamically, double that is usually what chemical engineers can get it to. And which is pretty good.
And so what that means is over the medium to long term, what you actually care about is your feedstock cost, and it's the cost of the carbon. So that's what we're usually engineering for. So if you look at the cost of carbon in a barrel of oil versus the cost of a carbon atom in a ton of wood, right, a cord of wood, that's the really interesting thing. And what you find is the carbon in wood is much, much less expensive than the carbon in oil, much less. And so that's really where our advantage derives from is our feedstock on a sort of adjusted basis. So you're looking at the carbon that we're gonna use to make our products is way cheaper than oil, certainly at current prices, but even over the last decade, more couple of decades.
That's where, so from a cost perspective, we are competitive and I would say significantly advantaged over a very large oil price range, enough so that I think we feel comfortable even with the somewhat extreme volatility of oil that we're gonna be in a cost advantage spot for the foreseeable future. When it comes to, that's true sort of for PET, for PEF, of course, because you're bringing advantage properties and functionality to the polymer, in theory, that could command a higher price than PET. You could argue about how much higher, but you, it can command a higher price. But in our case, the conversion through to FDCA is probably actually more carbon efficient than it is to even go to PET.
So in our case, we think we can bring a polymer that has better properties to the market broadly at a lower cost, over the long term, right, than you would see with PET. So we're pretty, you know, you can imagine why that's exciting.
Is there any data out there on a blend between PET and PEF that renders the blend also biodegradable, or is that not likely?
Well, I think it's an interesting question. I'm not aware of public data on that front, but I think that that is a very natural path of investigation. You know, often, it feels easy to simplify things into just PEF or just PET, and any other, you know, sort of combination, these sorts of things. But the reality, of course, is that we get to select exactly how much of, how much PEF there is, how much PET there is. And there are other levers that we can use to tune those kinds of things too. And as with most things in life, the best answer is rarely 100% of something and 0% of everything else, right? Frequently, there's some balance that provides the best answer. And so I think that's gonna be a really interesting thing to see how it develops.
Let's talk a little bit about this used coffee grounds product that you referred to, the HTC. Maybe it would be helpful to kind of size these two products, you know, depending on what kind of a feedstock you feed into your process. Is it mostly come out as CMF and a little bit of HTC, or is it about the same? And other than, you know, being a black pigment, are there other opportunities to use this HTC component?
Yeah. So it's the HTC is really interesting. So first, as you mentioned, generally speaking, you can say we make similar quantities of HTC and CMF from feedstocks. That can be adjusted up and down, based on what feedstock we're using. And as sort of a rule of thumb, you could think of the lignin component of a feedstock going principally to HTC, and then some of the hemicellulose and cellulose goes to the HTC as well. So that's sort of since lignin is about 30% of the mass of lignin and cellulose material, usually, that gives sort of the how they get split out. What's really interesting about HTC is chemically it is reminiscent of the carbon in soil. So which again, if you squint a little bit, makes some sense, right?
If you have decomposing wood, that's a large part of the carbon in soil. That's what gives, you know, soil is effectively sand or clay plus carbon, right? And so what makes it soil and not sand is the carbon and the decomposed wood that's in there. And so we're sort of running a modified, rapid digestion process. And so it might make sense that you would end up with something that looks a little bit like the carbon in soil, as one of your products. So that's what our HTC is. But of course, it doesn't have any of the sand or the clay or the grit that's in there that you would usually see with soil. So that informs a couple different things. One, it turns out that you get this carbon black-shaped clusters.
It's really, they're nanospheres that are sort of clustered together, and they tend to be, you know, call it 40 nm-100 nm spheres, which is almost exactly the same size as carbon black. And that's why they tend to operate similarly. So that's exciting. We like that. But since I mentioned that already, let's talk about some of these other things, so you can also make activated carbon out of it. So activated carbon is used to decolor, to deodor, things like food and water. So, you know, in a wastewater treatment plant system, frequently you'll do all of your treatment, and then the last thing you do is run it through some activated carbon, which really pulls out, you know, cleans it up, makes it look like really nice clean water.
In fact, it doesn't just make it look like nice clean water, it makes it nice clean water, and so our material can be used for that. We've actually an extraordinarily high-performance activated carbon that we can make from our material, our HTC. It's some of the highest. With activated carbon, what you're looking for is surface area. You can have one gram of activated carbon can have the surface area of a whole football field, which is sort of shocking from just a physical perspective. Surface area is really what you're driving for in performance of activated carbon for a lot of these things. Ours has some of the highest surface area of any activated carbon that's been made, and activated carbon's a very old material that we've been working on for a really long time.
And so, we think that's pretty interesting, you know, and you can use activated carbon for water treatment, as I mentioned. But one of the really interesting applications that you see at these really high surface area levels is supercapacitors. So, you can use really high surface area activated carbon to drive, you know, supercapacitors are alternatives to batteries. They're actually used in regenerative braking, right? So the supercapacitor absorbs all the power from the braking, and then they discharge that into the battery. So that's one of the applications that could be interesting there. And then the other is that I think we've talked about before, but is worth talking about again, is agricultural applications.
The HTC, as I mentioned, it sort of looks like the carbon in soil, which turns out to be important because if you just throw, you know, charcoal on the ground, you get some of the benefits of the carbon in soil, but not all of them. I might even argue not a lot of them. If you could find a way to put just carbon in the soil that looks exactly like soil carbon or very similar to it, you could see how that might allow you to take a sandy, low-quality soil and upgrade it to a loamy, high-quality kind of material. That's sort of one of the at the big sort of framework level, that's the way we think about our HTC and agricultural applications.
But it turns out, you know, how you do that matters. So, you know, usually you don't wanna just go out and dump stuff on the ground. You wanna be thoughtful about the way that you're incorporating it in. Are you bringing other nutrients in? And so that's where we see some interesting agricultural applications for the HTC as well. We're, you know, we're chemicals guys in a lot of ways, not ag guys. And so that's been a little bit more of a slow burn development process for us where we, you know, we have partners that we've been working with. We're understanding it better. We're investigating a lot of the foundational properties of the HTC for those kinds of applications.
But it's, you know, not something that we've gone out and said, you know, here's our giant partnership and we're gonna sell this much of it. We're not there yet.
All right, well, let's talk about your production facilities, John. You have your first plant up in Ontario that you know could be on stream you know I don't know another six months or something like that. I don't know if that's correct. But then you got your next one which is much larger down in Louisiana. You know, where are you at on that one, so provide the folks listening here a little bit of an update on where you are at in production. I think we understand the technology a little bit here and what you can do with this, but let's talk about when.
Yeah. So you're right. We've got the Sarnia, Ontario plant mechanical. We expect to be mechanically complete by the end of this year, and we've been tracking towards that date for a little while now. It feels good, and as you said, you know, starting up pretty quickly after that, so revenue next year from that plant, and then the big plant in Geismar, Louisiana. That's the plant that we expect to be online in 2025, and we're pretty far along there, so we have a couple things that are interesting. One, you know, it's just a great site, so it's right on the Mississippi. It's in a pretty dense industrial area. In fact, I think by some standards, it's one of the most industrialized areas in the entire United States.
And you can really see it if you drive up and down the side of the Mississippi, the coast there or the bank there. There's a lot going on. So we're gonna be fitting right into the middle of that where we have great access to utilities of all sorts, feedstocks, you know, really the ancillary feedstocks, right, in terms of other chemicals that you need. You always need other chemicals that you're using to run your plant. So you get access to that. You also get talent, which is a big part of it, you know, being able to access really highly skilled labor. When I say labor, I mean everything from operating labor to engineers to management, right? It's the whole thing. And construction labor too for plants like this. You know, these plants aren't like building a house.
They're a bit more complicated than that. And you really do need very highly skilled humans. Not that people who build houses aren't highly skilled, but this is a different breed. And so that area gives us access to all of those things. But there are a couple other really unique characteristics about Geismar, Louisiana. One is that it has all of that, and it's right in the middle of a giant wood basket. So that means that there's a lot of processing, wood processing that goes on there, a lot of sawmills, not necessarily right in Geismar, but you know, within a truckable radius, a lot of sawmills, a lot of other kinds of wood processing. And the residue from all of those operations are things that we can use as feedstock for our plants.
So that makes that a really attractive area for us for that purpose. And then of course, the other one is Louisiana and Ascension Parish, which is where our site is within Louisiana. They have been really, really welcoming. They're very forward-thinking. They understand heavy industry. They understand sustainability. And so they've made it very attractive for us to build an asset there. They've been great partners so far. That was another big driver. You know, for example, we've talked about this private activity bond volume cap allocation , which is basically a way for us to capitalize our financing of that plant in Geismar in a really efficient way. We're excited about that too.
Maybe you wanna talk a little bit about your cash position and your, you know, how much funding do you have for that big plant down in Geismar?
Yeah. So we have a little over $400 million of cash on hand, or cash on the books, as of the end of last quarter. You know, that's more than enough for us to finish construction of Origin 1, to finance the equity component of Origin 2, and of course, to run the company in the intervening period. You know, that sort of begs the question on Origin 2. The equity component will come from our cash. We expect to project finance this. Part of that we think is gonna be this private activity bond from Louisiana. That was unexpected, by the way. We'd originally expected we would do sort of straight commercial project financing for that Geismar plant, 'cause it's a $1 billion-dollar plant.
So, you know, we can provide a significant amount of equity, but there's gonna have to be some debt that goes on it too. So that would be project financing. But as we've looked more at this private activity bond, you know, we think that that's a more efficient way to do it, for as much as you can. And you know, certainly it's at more lower rates and all those kinds of things. So that was sort of pure upside for us, over commercial project financing.
Maybe one more for you, John, and that is, other than building these plants yourself, do you have any partners in other parts of the world that would be interested in licensing your technology and build their own plant?
I think that's a pretty natural evolution for a lot of fundamental technologies in the chemical industry. You know, again, harkening back to history, you'll see that that's pretty typical. Companies make different decisions about at what point in the life cycle do you do that. For us, this is all about impact and scale. The more material that we can have made using our technology, the better we think it is for the world. We're pretty strongly incentivized to build out supply and volume as quickly as we can. That's one. Two, you know, just in our discussions with other companies, that's a topic that comes up, you know, not irregularly.
And so I think, you know, our view is it's likely that there will be licensing of this technology out over time. I think it could happen, you know, as early as pre-Origin 1. I think, you know, depending on how you do it. And I mean that from a sort of physics and framework perspective. I'm not trying to forecast that specifically it's gonna happen before then, but you know, it could happen at various points along the life cycle. So we're, you know, we're open to it, interested, and we'll see how it evolves.
In a situation like that, is it likely to be where they have their own feedstock that they would like to utilize, and that thus they would like to build it on their own facility? Is that an example?
Yeah. What I would say is there are a couple different phenotypes of partner that have sort of emerged over the time that we've been discussing this with different parties. One is that they have a specific feedstock that they're interested in monetizing and upgrading. So that's one. Two is they have a really strong demand for the product that's coming off the other side. And they, you know, a lot of companies would like to use their balance sheet in advantageous ways to secure demand. And so that would be another phenotype of party for that. Then another one that I think is interesting is parties that would like to vertically integrate. So you know, vertical integration into, let's say, paraxylene, for example, is challenging, right? Paraxylene is essentially a refinery product.
And so if you wanna vertically integrate into a refinery or into paraxylene, you actually have to vertically integrate into a refinery, which is hard for a chemical company, right? That's not straightforward. It's a different skill set in many ways than just straight chemical processing. And not only is it a different skill set, you end up with a whole bunch of other businesses that you need to manage, not just paraxylene. And so historically, it's been challenging for companies that consume refinery products to control their whole value chain the way that they might in the chemical industry, right? With ethane and then you know, building an ethane cracker is a significant proposition, but it's not the same as building a refinery, right? And so a lot of the ethylene value chain has been vertically integrated by these companies.
But it's hard to do on paraxylene. With us, it's a much more straightforward proposition to vertically integrate into paraxylene using our technology than a refinery. So that's almost sort of a sustainability agnostic reason to get involved. So I think those are sort of the three big ones. And then of course, it's just great economics to operate one of our plants. And so that's, you know, a driver for some folks as well.
Very good. All right, John, we're at the top of the hour. So, we're gonna have to cut it off there. Anybody on the line, if you wanna connect with John, let me know. You have questions, reach out to me and we'll take care of you, and until we talk again, John, my best to you and sure appreciate the time with you today.
Thanks, Steve. Really appreciate it.
All right.