So thanks, everyone, again for joining us today t hat's on the line. We're now at the tail end of our two-day event, so I appreciate everyone sticking with us. If this is your first event, I'm Josh Spector, Chemicals and Packaging Analyst, UBS, joined by Shneur Gershuni, ESG Analyst for North America, and Chris Perrella is joining from my team as well. We're happy to be hosting Origin Materials, one of what I call a new material company, doing things a bit different than a lot of firms that we've talked to. I'll let them explain things a little bit, and then we'll jump into a lot of Q&A. Today, we're joined by John Bissell and Rich Riley, co-CEOs of Origin Materials. Just in terms of format, us, Origin team, quick overview. We have some Q&A that we'll go through ourselves.
Feel free to email myself, Shneur, Chris, and try to ask questions and work that through. Disclaimer before we start: as a research analyst, I'm required to provide certain disclosures relating to the nature of my own relationship and that of UBS with any company on which I express a view on the call today. These disclosures are available at www.ubs.com/disclosures or email us, and we'll get them to you. S o now, moving past that, thanks again, John, Rich. Maybe turn it over to one of you guys to give really the CliffsNotes version of what Origin is, who you are, kind of how you got here, and then we'll dig into more details.
Sure. Thanks, Josh, and thanks for having us. The high level on Origin is that we've spent over 10 years developing a highly proprietary technology platform that enables us to convert really any form of cellulose into a wide range of carbon-negative materials. Our flagship material is PET plastic, which is chemically identical to fossil-based PET plastic, and we also make two other intermediates; o ne is hydrothermal carbon, which is a solid that we call HTC, and the other is an oils and extractives stream that is bound for the biofuels markets.
And so we've got a very flexible market molecule in CMF, which is the target molecule that can go on to make para-xylene and a lot of other things, a solid that can go on to make carbon black and materials like that, and an oils and extractives stream that can go into a wide range of biofuels. So the platform is extensively patented and protected with trade secrets. When we started our go-public process about two years ago, we had $1 billion in demand entirely from the packaging space.
Now, that's over $9 billion of demand, and it ranges well beyond packaging into textiles and apparels and automotive and other chemical companies and luxury goods and all kinds of things across what we really think is a $1 trillion TAM that's got to make this once-in-a-planet transition from fossil-based materials to sustainable ones.
And in terms of our scale-up process, we are mechanically complete on our first commercial plant called Origin 1 and expect to begin operating that plant this quarter and are in the design phase on our much larger first world-scale commercial plant called Origin 2, which will be in Geismar, Louisiana. And so I think that's the elevator pitch on Origin.
Yeah. No, that's helpful to frame it out. I guess maybe to step back is that at least we haven't seen really many similar companies using a similar process, doing the cellulose to CMF to PET or other materials. I guess what's unique, would you say, about your process that makes it, I guess, commercially viable from your perspective? And why aren't more people doing this, or why is this unique?
Yeah. So I think that there are a couple of really key unique features here. One is the ability to use low-cost biomass. And low-cost biomass, what really matters is the cost of biomass delivered to your doorstep, not just the cost of it sitting on the ground somewhere. And we can do that. We can use timber and forest product residuals, which gives us a great cost position.
I think the other thing that's really quite different, well, lots of things that I could spend a lot of time going down, but another one to keep in mind is the flexibility of the intermediates that we can produce. So we're really not just a straight, take feedstock A and make product B story. We're making intermediates where there are a lot of different products that we can make from those intermediates.
And so that lets us get after a significant proportion of the industry with functionally advantaged products, drop-in products that are decarbonized, et cetera. So I think that flexibility that's inherent to the platform on the product side and the really low-cost feedstocks on the feedstock side, that's really the key differentiator.
Okay. And I guess when I was looking at your slide deck, it didn't appear that there was any real update to basically the model of what you guys are planning to do economics-wise, which I find no criticism there. I guess what I was curious on is what was interesting when you guys put that together is that the pricing point of what you guys are trying to achieve is different than some of the other advanced recycling materials or other markets where you needed a premium. I'd just be curious today, since we haven't spoken a while, has that changed at all? How do you price this product? And granted, now you're a near-commercial startup. What are customers paying relative to the alternative, I guess, non-cellulose or non-renewable-based materials?
Sure. Well, as John said, we're very proud of our economics being cost-competitive with their fossil-based alternatives. But when it comes to pricing, we are able to command a green premium. In a market like PET, you could think about companies that are already paying roughly 100% premiums for recycled PET and have proven that for many companies, their economics can work at that pricing.
So that becomes even a better comparative price for us versus virgin PET in that we have a better carbon footprint than recycled PET and better functionality because there's no degradation with our material like you would have there. So there's an example of being able to command a substantial premium and take credit for that additional carbon impact. On the HTC side, we're going after carbon black, where we have a major carbon advantage.
And so companies increasingly are using internal carbon pricing, under a lot of pressure to meet their net-z ero goals, and are certainly willing to pay premiums and acknowledge that a lower carbon product has more value than its alternative. And additionally, we recently announced that our carbon black product actually met or exceeded the functionality of its fossil-based alternative.
And so this is a theme you'll see from us is trying to first have significant carbon advantage for which we can command a premium, then add functional advantage for which you can command a premium, and then in some cases also have a safety advantage. So for example, our carbon black is free of the PAHs, which are a health concern in current carbon black products. And so I think that's the way to think about us is the ability to command a premium.
We're not reliant on some extreme premium, and we're also not trying to just build one plant and find a bunch of niche markets where we can get the most extreme premiums. We're trying to build lots and lots of plants and be a very fundamental partner of our customers for the long term. So we're not trying to sort of price gouge or do economics that only make sense in very niche applications.
Yeah. Maybe it's two different things I need to ask about. So I guess correct me if I'm wrong. Your economics are based on you not receiving a premium, or they are? And I guess the different pieces, in reality, with where the market's at today, you can get a premium. Is that the right way to frame it?
That's correct. The financial assumptions that we put together as part of our go-public process were based on the pricing at that time and assuming that we were not able to command a green premium, and we are, in fact, able to command a green premium.
Okay. Got it. And I wanted to contextualize what you talked about, that $9 billion in, I guess, I don't know if you call it an opportunity or sales pipeline versus $1 billion a few years ago. How does that size relative to your few facilities? So how many facilities would you need to fill that at this point? And I guess how concrete are some of these commitments? So what of these are actual letter of intents, like written, There's an offtake in place, versus just, We're interested in talking to you?
Yeah. So the $9 billion+ in demand are all signed agreements. Most of them have been press released, and the partner is excited to talk about it just like we are. So we think that number is a true indication of signed demand. They range from take-or-pay contracts to what we call capacity reservations, which are more of a, I want this many tons of this material at this price for this many years, kind of framework, but sets us up to go do that take-or-pay contract.
In our experience, doing the ironclad take-or-pay contracts is unusual to do many years in advance of a plant, for example, and makes more sense as you have more line of sight in terms of specific dates and ramp-up plans and that kind of stuff. But we think that's all our true demand.
And we don't break out sort of which products and which plants, but I think we set out to do with growing that demand sort of order book was first to prove that the demand was way beyond just packaging and to prove that this market is absolutely enormous, and we will be supply constrained for as long as we can sort of forecast.
And so we've even transitioned our sales efforts instead of focusing on sort of proving that demand further and further and further into more and more and more future plants to focus more on joint development agreements, near-term revenue now that our first plant's coming online, and things like that.
Yeah. I guess I don't have the economics in front of me to answer this, but so how many, that $9 billion, what's the total facility, roughly?
That would be several plants. Nine is cumulative demand, so some of those contracts are 10 years. But yeah, it's sort of several plants, which is one of the reasons that we stopped spending a lot of time trying to, we felt like we kind of checked that box in terms of proving, and most investors tell us, We get it. If you make these materials with these economics, the demand is basically unlimited, and so we've sort of proven that with an order book and are now more focused on developing higher-value applications, things like surfactants and other things, other places that CMF could go to get even more functional advantage in addition to the carbon advantage and therefore even higher pricing and things like that.
Okay, and I mean, so when you talked about your demand growing out there, I mean, markets beyond just packaging, what's that order book look like? How much of it is the packaging part that we thought you could win initially versus some different markets?
Yeah. So the other side of the PET market is fibers. And so textiles and apparel are a very interesting area for us in terms of that's about half the market. So all the carpets and car seats and apparel and all that. And in many cases in those markets, the polyester fibers are a smaller percentage of the end product value than it is in a water bottle, for example. And so you could have more ability to command a premium, more functional advantage, those kind of things. So those are exciting markets for us.
I mentioned automotive is a really interesting market for us. We're doing some luxury goods. And then increasingly, a lot of our customers are other chemical companies, and they're full of all kinds of ideas of the kind of end markets they can go to with our materials. We have a partnership with a European chemical company called Solvay, and they'll take our intermediates all the way into really highly engineered components that go inside the engine of a car, for example.
A nd so that's great for us because we're really upstream. They know how to engineer that component. They have the relationship with that automotive company, and they're getting to a very high-value application, so that's an example of why chemical companies make very natural partners for us.
Okay. No, that's helpful. So I guess I'd be curious when your progress to mechanical completion on Origin 1, when do you get to the point where you say, We're running at the scale we thought we could at the yields we thought we could? The economics are verified. What's the timeline that people should be looking toward?
Yeah. So for Origin 1, the strategic purpose of Origin 1 is for us to, of course, just operate a plant, right, and understand what that looks like from an organizational capability perspective, right? Actually manufacturing with a pretty good-sized facility is a skill and a capability in and of itself. So we take that part pretty seriously.
But looking at the bigger picture, I think Origin 1 is really focused on delivering rail car-sized quantities of material to our customers, not so much for things like para-xylene. Para-xylene is, look, if I give somebody para-xylene and it meets the spec, it's going to work for the application. They know what their demand is, right? It's pretty straightforward.
So a lot of what OM1's production is focused on is delivering our intermediates for applications that nobody's used them for before, right? So we often pick out surfactants as sort of a specific example of this, right? But we can make surfactants that perform differently and in many ways better than the existing stuff out there with our CMF.
And so making those surfactants, getting them in the hands of customers and partners at a scale where they can really do market development, frankly, for those products is really important, and it's very difficult to do without OM1. So that's sort of the focus for us on OM1. But to your point, it's also going to demonstrate the technology performance at scale just in general.
And so we do expect to give probably a sort of maybe a campaign or two where we're actually running it just to demonstrate throughput rather than for market development samples that are going to customers. And I'm not sure exactly when we'll do that. We haven't sat down and said, we're going to do it this month specifically.
We sort of want to get the facility running and feel like we have our feet under us before we predict the point at which we're going to give the sort of throughput benchmark. But I'd say that's in the next couple of quarters, give or take, sort of not two years from now and not six weeks after we have the facility running, somewhere in that range.
Hey, Josh. I was just wondering if I can jump in for a little bit here. Just wanted to pull it up a couple thousand feet if that was all right. Sorry, Josh. So when I sort of think about your process and sort of where you're bringing your products to, it sort of generates a few questions for me, right? The part that I kind of thought was interesting was on the biofuel side and so forth, the oils and extractives. Is that something where you expect to get a credit out of the LCFS market in California?
Is that part of your economics, or does it work without the economics of the California LCFS market? We had never presumed when we put the economics out that Josh was referring to that are in our slide deck, our sort of standard corporate overview slide deck, those are economics from a couple of years ago. As an aside, we expect to do sort of a refresh of those next quarter. The biofuels actually weren't in those economics at all.
What we were expecting to do was internally consume that stream for heat and power production, mostly heat for our purposes. We didn't think it was going to be used as a product, particularly liquid transportation fuel at all in those economics, let alone getting a credit for an LCFS applicability or something along those lines. That's all upside on that product stream.
Okay. And so your process, I noticed you saw on one of your slides that you were a negative carbon footprint. I understand that you're collecting the low-cost bio feedstocks. You're not taking farming away from and food away from people, which is a good thing, right? So what's powering the whole process? Is it compressed and it's actually generating heat, and that's what's sort of causing it? Is it an internal system essentially, and is it just based under pressure? I'm just kind of curious how that works.
So the energy consumption associated, yeah, there's some pressure. It's mostly just heat, right? So I'd say there's not anything particularly fancy about the way that we deliver energy to the process. The energy is coming through the same way that you would expect with any petrochemical plant. But what's different is the feedstock. So that's where I think you're trying to get after. Where's the carbon- negative part come from?
Well, the feedstocks that you use matter a lot for what your carbon footprint for the facility is. That's actually the primary driver. It usually overwhelms all of the other inputs that go into the process. So for us, the key sort of carbon term that gives us low carbon is the feedstock that's coming in.
So it's the ability to process these low-value, extremely low-carbon feedstocks. That's how we end up with a carbon- negative material at the end. The energy that's going in is sort of backing us off, right, of the low point of the feedstock, but it just doesn't get us all the way to being a net emitter.
Yeah. I didn't realize I was wondering if there was a flue gas inside of it because it's breaking down and so forth. Okay. Actually, so let's talk about the feedstock a little bit here. So you're using the feedstock that we have gone to the end of the line in terms of what we can do from a recycling perspective. So it's like that cardboard box that can be recycled five times, and the fiber gets smaller and smaller, and you're just taking that final piece and basically running it through. Is that?
So that would be one example. That's not the primary feedstock we look at for the first few plants, but you're thinking about it the right way. It's like, where do you find lignocellulosic feedstocks, right? So biomass-type feedstocks, whether it's a post-processing feedstock or it's just something that's leftover that somebody, it doesn't have a good high-value use yet. So corrugated would be one example.
And there are a bunch of different fractions of corrugated, some of which are really interesting and some of which are a little bit less interesting. Like waxed corrugated is not so interesting, right? But as just a specific example. But what we think of for Origin 2 is actually not so much the post-consumer residuals from the forest products industry, but the low-value residuals that come off of the processing for dimensional lumber.
When you take a round log or cylindrical log and you turn that into a square cross-section, right, there's a bunch of extra stuff that comes off of that. Some of that does get used. A lot of it doesn't get used for very high value, or in some cases, depending on the region, it may not really be practically used at all. That's sort of our starting place. A lot of that's because the logistics for that are incredibly straightforward, right?
We know how to move this stuff around. We don't have to worry about anything sort of goofy there. But as you look in Asia, looking at some of the other feedstock types, I think some of the specialized agricultural residues like rice hulls, I think, are incredibly interesting as a feedstock here because they're pre-aggregated and they're almost totally useless for any other application for some interesting reasons. I have a different feedstock opinion no matter where you go in the world, right? That could be a long conversation, but I think there are a lot of them out there.
So when I think about a location strategy perspective, obviously, you can be near anything that's going to give you your paper waste and so forth. But are you effectively best off being near where logging tends to happen or near, is it a scenario that's a lot like kind of the, I'm trying to remember that process for manure where they're using that to create?
Anaerobic digestion.
Yeah. But it only tends to work in California from a location perspective. And it sounds like the decomposition process is actually pretty similar. So is location, location, location type an important thing at this stage right now? You've got to be on the West Coast near the trees?
Yeah. So two things. One, yes, we do need to be near the feedstock, right? That's the objective. Now, I mean, you're talking about a couple different orders of magnitude of near when you're looking at anaerobic digestion versus us in terms of how proximate do we need to be. Anaerobic digestion basically needs to be piped to the feedstock for the most part. There's some acceptance.
Whereas we can be we think of it as a couple hundred mile radius is the delivery radius. So that's not too bad. The other is feedstocks for us are quite broad. So we actually think, yes, there are a lot of trees and there's a lot of dimensional lumber production on the West Coast of the U.S., but the South has an enormous amount, right?
So all the way through the Deep South, even up into Appalachia, there's a huge amount of wood. We joke sometimes that it's sort of like the Saudi Arabia of wood, which is not entirely fair, but it's true-ish. But as you sort of look across the world, there are feedstocks in large quantities in most places that you look. Of course, there are exceptions, right? So if you go to the Middle East, right, there's probably not a lot of feedstock available there.
But I could sort of go through and run through a lot of different really interesting feedstocks at incredible scale that work perfectly for us on that front. The other thing I was going to mention is you said sort of the decomposition process is sort of a little bit like anaerobic digestion, I think you're referring to. I would say maybe at the absolute highest level of abstraction, that's true.
But mostly, I would say we're completely different. In fact, one of the defining points that I could have said about the technology earlier is that we're a chemical technology. So there's no bugs. There's no microbial engineering involved, which just makes the process more predictable in a lot of ways. And there's also, you mentioned flue gas. There's not that flue gas specifically comes from gasification, but it's related to pyrolysis gases and the synthesis gas that comes off of gasification processes.
There's no gasification in our technology either, which is another really interesting technology, but one that doesn't have the level of sort of species-level maturity that you see with classical sort of thermochemical processes, right? When you're talking about chemocatalytic stuff where you're doing conversion in the liquid phase or gas phase over a catalyst, right?
This is stuff that we as human beings understand extremely well. We've been basically building our civilization off of it for a couple of centuries, right? That's really different than a gasification process or a fermentation process. It is much more recent, let's say, in development.
No, this is really cool, and just sort of one final question, and Josh, I apologize for hijacking because I have a feeling I can go longer. Obviously, you talked about the wood chips, but I mean, is it fair to say that your feedstock is also kind of a source of you're not actually looking for the tree to be cut down. You're just sort of the branches that fall. Is that kind of a source as well also? It's just more you're cleaning up what's already going to be there. Is that kind of the right way to frame it as a major feedstock?
So I think like with any feedstock curve, there's what's the best stuff to go after first, right? From an economic perspective, from a carbon perspective, all those kinds of things. So I think first you start with stuff that's a residual from some other process. And there's a lot of that out there, right? So I think there's a bit of a because a lot of technologies have a very precise quality that they need, that limits the universe of feedstocks for them significantly.
Part of our technical advantage is that we can take a very wide spec of feedstock. And so there's an enormous amount of residuals out there for us to use. I don't think we're going to have to worry about non-residual materials probably for a long time. That said, you could use fresh-cut trees or timber if you wanted to. The carbon benefit would actually still be quite significant. It would be a really good application there, but we don't see the need for doing that for maybe ever, but certainly not for a while.
Cool. All right. I'll give it back to you, Josh. It's your meeting, so.
No, no problem. Feel free to jump back in. It's a good line of thought. I actually want to kind of continue on the carbon negative side of things. And just how are those conversations with the customer? I guess, how do they think about valuing that overall? I'll leave it there and see how you answer and go from there.
Yeah. I can say first, customers prefer that they're not using a food source. So that's an important first step. And it's quite differentiated with our process versus other biomaterials that are frequently coming from a sugar food source kind of thing. And then they definitely want to review our life- cycle assessment, our LCA, which we have on our website, which is also fairly transparent in our experience.
And so we walk people through the way that it works. And I would say, well, companies increasingly have their own frameworks for sort of carbon accounting. For us, it's been really quite easy to communicate our carbon footprint with customers, integrated into how they do their own accounting. And it's been pretty straightforward.
I think, generally speaking, the thesis that we put out originally a couple of years ago, which is a huge number of companies are making a transition to zero-emissions materials and a sort of zero-emissions supply chain, I think that's happening faster, and it's more true than we thought it was going to be a couple of years ago. That feels like the world's sort of awash in demand for us right now. You see that in essentially every single conversation we have. There's almost no net-zero substitution capability outside of us. We're the only one for most of the materials that we make.
Yeah. I guess it's just interesting in terms of kind of—I mean, to me, there's a little bit of a dynamic between recyclability and net- zero. And net zero targets are generally further out there. So I mean, you guys aren't the only ones I've kind of asked on that trade-off. Some of the chemical companies I cover are doing similar carbon reduction. I guess, to me, it's less clear that a value is being placed on that now.
Oh, no, definitely.
Maybe you disagree. Okay.
Oh, absolutely. And I'd say also some things to keep in mind for recycling. That comes up pretty often, I would say, in the abstract or sort of at the financial market level. I'd say it comes up pretty infrequently at the commercial level. Our customers are not coming in and saying, Well, tell us how you're going to do better than recycling.
Generally speaking, there's pretty extreme constraints on the supply of recycled material, especially high-quality recycled material. There are pretty extreme constraints on the future supply of recycled material because a lot of especially when you're looking at something like polyester or PET, most of PET is actually going into a durable good. It's not going into a once-through single-use application.
To go into a durable good, even if you theoretically can recycle it, people don't want to. They're still using the product. So there's a pretty sizable delta, even in the let's get to the thermodynamic equilibrium of recycling, right, someday in the future, where we're recycling everything that you could possibly recycle. You still have a huge deficit in quantity of material required in that application, right?
And so consequently, these guys are looking forward and they're saying, Okay, well, how much recycled material can I actually get practically in five years, 10 years, whatever that's going to be, even with a couple of capital turns and getting more of these recycling plants online? Even if I unconstrain the number of plants I can build from a capital perspective, there's still just not enough feedstock, right, to really go after the objectives that people have out there.
And so we're a pretty natural play there. I think maybe even more important than that is we have a better carbon footprint than recycling. It's a higher quality material, generally speaking. Now, there are recycling technologies that make sort of as new quality material. So in that case, I'm sort of referring to polyester more than our other products right now, then that's essentially equivalent.
Generally speaking, our material is actually a higher quality material also. Our customers are looking to us and saying, Well, I want lower carbon footprint, and I can't use mechanically recycled material from a spec perspective. You guys are the only option to hit both of those things.
Can you just remind me on the recyclability of materials made from your products? I guess thinking about maybe the mechanical stream first and then if it matters for advanced recycling.
Sure. Yeah. So when we're making PET, right, obviously, we can talk about all kinds of different products, but we'll keep it to PET and polyester. When we're making PET, it's identical to PET that's made from fossil materials. So consequently, it recycles the same way. It's the same quality as virgin material, et cetera.
So it's sort of a great add. We kind of think of it as the system you want ideally is you have carbon-negative PET going into the system, which is then subsequently recycled indefinitely, right? That's sort of the ideal version. And then actually, when we make a next-generation PET that has better performance in a whole bunch of areas. For that PET, that's actually recyclable as well.
So even when we're looking at some of these performance-advantaged materials, of course, performance-advantaged also means different than whatever's out there originally. In most of the cases that we're talking about in the near term, those materials are just as recyclable, if not, in some cases, more recyclable than what the current material out there is. So we're trying to hit this from every side.
Yeah. I guess, are you referring to PEF?
Right. Exactly.
I mean, maybe just to jump to that quickly. I mean, I think your slide deck shows there's some advantages of that. You just mentioned it briefly there. I mean, what are the advantages of that product being bigger versus what's out there today and what's delayed adoption in the past?
So what's delayed adoption historically is the expectation that it was going to be too expensive. So most of the legacy technologies associated with things like PEF or the intermediates that you would get to make PEF, they used to be almost entirely predicated on fructose. Fructose is a very expensive feedstock to start with.
So our platform really lets us make those furan-based intermediates much more cheaply than you can if you're using fructose as your feedstock, which again, is the historical one for PEF. PEF is a really fantastic material, honestly. 10 years ago, I would never have guessed that it was such an excellent material.
And so I think from a performance perspective, it's really clear that PEF is as good or better than PET in a huge number of relevant applications, but it was always just too expensive. It wasn't good enough to justify the additional premium at large scale to start with fructose. With our platform, you cut that out. It's the right cost, right performance, really clear adoption path, I think, for PEF.
Okay. And maybe that's a good point to talk about kind of your strategy here in terms of how you go down these different routes. So you have the Origin process, which makes CMF, and then that can go into other chemicals. Do you see yourselves? I guess, how do you scale into these markets? Do you grow in that core licensing partnerships? And I guess I'd bring this up. I saw on your website that you have some type of partnership agreement with Avantium to go to the PEF market. So just what's your overall approach in terms of how you enter the market and how you scale over past Origin three?
Yeah. So our view is that the platform technology, which is taking biomass and making the intermediates CMF, HTC, and oils and extractives, that's the core value that we're bringing, again, in sort of the larger scope. So as we take CMF, HTC, and oils and extractives to other products, we obviously have technology that we've developed to make things like PET out of CMF, right, and carbon black out of HTC.
But as you would expect for the platform, we expect to plug in other technologies on top of that platform more and more as it grows and scales. And so that's how the Avantium partnership fits perfectly into that, right? It's plugging their technology that they've spent a lot of time working on into our platform to improve it. And so we're excited to do that more.
I think you hit another topic there, which is how do we expect to scale from a partnership perspective, which I presume to mean not just on the product side, but also as we scale our platform itself. We expect that there are going to be a lot of partnerships over time where it makes sense for somebody to go build a plant that uses our technology, but in their geography or using their feedstock or making an internally consumed product.
I mean, those are the kinds of conversations that come up pretty naturally, quite regularly for us. So I think for us, it's both a build-own-operate. We're going to build our own plants, operate our own plants using our technology. We think that's critical for sort of that technology development flywheel so that we're using our own technology regularly and identifying how we can keep improving it and driving it down the learning curve. We also expect that other people will build plants using our technology as well.
Okay. That makes sense. And I guess just coming to the process side again, what's the math or the mass balance here when you look at a ton of wood chips in? How much are you getting of the different materials? So how much, basically, hydrothermal carbon and biofuels do you need to find a home for or sell in addition to what these other markets we've been talking about?
Yeah. So in a general yield sense, the vast majority of the carbon that comes in the feedstock stays in products, the three products that you just listed. Now, because what we're really doing is changing the carbon-to-oxygen ratio of the feedstock coming in, we do drop in total mass, but that's just oxygen loss for the most part. It's not carbon loss. So we have a very high-yielding process from that perspective.
And we publish some of the product yields in our deck, so you can go sort of scroll through that and see what we've listed. But the other question I ask is, what's the proportion of the different intermediates that we produce? And we make oils and extractives is the, I think, the lowest volume for most of our feedstocks. There are always exceptions.
Depending on what exact feedstock you're talking about, that can adjust the proportions of the three intermediates coming out the other side. So that's sort of the little brother, I guess, of the other two. But CMF and HTC are both produced in pretty sizable quantities. And I'd say roughly similar quantities. Again, it depends on feedstock.
Okay. I guess maybe to ask a few things on HTC here. I mean, you mentioned earlier some further developments there. I guess what part of the carbon black market are you having more success or at least finding more customer interest in starting to develop and understand the opportunity there?
There's not – I don't think there's one that is head and shoulders above the others. What we're finding is there are probably two broad markets that are worth talking about. One is just mechanical rubber goods like tires. So we released recently sort of a technical press release describing the performance of our material in rubber. And we beat the N660 performance, which N660 is sort of like a really high volume.
You could argue it's a benchmark for essentially carbon black performance in tires. And so not only are we much lower carbon or lower contaminants, as Rich described, but it just performed better. And that was in a standard formulation for carbon black and rubber. So that's literally drop-in from that perspective. We were performing better with no changes in process, which is pretty – that's a game-changing thing.
That doesn't really happen in the carbon black markets, so obviously, we're excited about that. There's a lot of stuff that we can do there, but the other area that's been really interesting is a lot of carbon black, particularly the specialty side carbon blacks. Carbon black starts as a fully reduced molecule, right?
It's just essentially graphitic or called turbostratic carbon, and then if you want to make it a specialty material, often what you do is you stick a bunch of functional groups on there. You partially oxidize it. So you're putting a bunch of chemistry on the surface of the molecule. What's interesting about our material is it actually starts with a bunch of that surface chemistry, and we go the other direction.
When we're trying to make an N660 replacement, we're removing all that surface chemistry. Turns out that it's a lot more straightforward to remove surface chemistry than it is to add it from a cost perspective. So we're cost-advantaged to a lot of the more oxygenated carbon blacks. And as a consequence, we can get higher functional density.
We can get lots of different functionalities on there that you really can't do very feasibly with standard carbon black. So I think that is also an avenue in the market that's going to turn out to be pretty fruitful for us. Those are the two that come to mind. But it can be used more broadly than that also.
Yeah. I guess, I mean, how easy or difficult is it for you to fine-tune it? So it's also the carbon black. There's the functionality side of it, but then there's also the distribution within there. Can you control it well enough, or do you think you can to get into those markets at some point?
Yeah. We do. We think we can control it well enough. Now, I'd say, obviously, with no materials, you have sort of unlimited variability, right, and control. There are areas where it's very straightforward for us to make it because of the starting size distribution, particle distribution, and that tends to be where I was just describing, right, areas that have surface chemistry that fits really well with what we have, what we start with, and then on the N660 side, the particle size distribution that we produce from our feedstocks naturally fits N660 and those kinds of carbon blacks quite well, so we're pretty excited about it, but could we make any carbon black type any time? TBD. We'll find out.
Yeah. Fair enough. And I guess maybe to jump a little bit back to the other side, I guess if I think about what you guys are doing and basically CMF into the various chains, if someone wanted to use your material, say, I want to use CMF as my feedstock, and I produce whatever you want to pick, surfactants or PET today, how much investment would that customer need to take to do that? Or are you essentially building or replacing some of that infrastructure to make it work?
It depends, is the unfortunate answer, the less clear answer for you, so it depends a lot on what product it is. Unsurprisingly, so one way to think about what we're doing is we're actually replacing the refinery part of the petrochemical supply chain rather than necessarily replacing what would traditionally be thought of as the chemicals part.
Just somewhat ironic because we think of ourselves as a chemical company that develops chemical processes, but you sort of might make an argument from the value chain, looking at the value chain, that we're actually a refining company. We're using a different refining feedstock, and so consequently, though, if you think about, well, how far down the value chain in any particular application does the refinery go in the existing legacy petrochemical industry? And the answer is it depends entirely on the product, and the same is true for us.
So in lots of cases, we're looking at spots where you can drop our CMF into their existing plants relatively easily or maybe a one-step-down derivative, right? So maybe it's not CMF, it's methylfurans, one step down or something like that. You can drop that directly into their existing plants. You got to maybe operate it just a little differently, something like that, even for the new products, and then you're good to go. If you're talking about our drop-in stuff like para-xylene, then it's no different whatsoever, right? It's literally the exact same product going in.
Okay. Yeah. That's what I was going to ask. Is this some of the drop-ins? I mean, are there any other ones you'd highlight outside of para-xylene, or would that be the primary one where there's more of a drop-in effect?
Paraxylene is the biggest one. But as I said, the carbon black that we made is you can formulate differently in order to get better performance out of it. But you can drop it in, and we've shown that you can get the same performance with direct drop-in. No change in formulation, all the same equipment, same everything.
Okay. No, that makes sense. So I mean, I guess it's maybe a weird question since you're kind of carbon negative for your LCA. But when I think about your process, I mean, assuming you're not building this thing to entirely run off renewables and hydrogen and everything else, I guess when you look 10 years down the line and you have Origin 6, 7, 8 running, whatever it may be, are you able to get to the point where that could be carbon neutral itself in terms of a process? Does that technology exist? Is it renewable energy, or is it something else that needs to happen?
So you're talking about, okay, feedstock, that's really low carbon. But what about the additional processing that happens? Can that get to net zero?
Yes.
Yeah. So certainly, you can construct a scenario where that's true, right? I think electrification, for example, of a lot of these processes is not technically difficult. It's just that electricity as an energy source costs a lot more than most of the other heat sources, right? So I think certainly it's technically possible, and it'll be interesting to see where electricity prices go.
I think it solves a lot of problems just generally through the industry if electricity can get cheap enough that it can be used for process heating economically. But I think more broadly, you couldn't get all the way to net zero sort of incremental emissions for the processing without electricity or something like electric heating, I don't think. But you could get a lot better with some pretty unit ops. So one that a lot of our energy goes into relatively low-quality heat.
So that means that waste heat can satisfy a lot of our energy needs. So you could make a lot of the way there with no technology improvements whatsoever, just sort of opportunistic siting, right, where you can pull really low-quality heat off of an existing industrial facility. And that's something that we've looked at quite a bit. What are some good sites for that? How can you do that? But that's less of a general technology sort of trend and more of a how can you just find opportunistic siting locations?
Yep. Understood. With that, we're kind of nearing the end of time here. I think we've hit on a lot. I'd say for anybody listening that wants to hear more, these guys report earnings this evening. So if you could hear them again at 5:00 P.M. Eastern Time, hear the latest and greatest. But I mean, John, Rich, is there anything that we didn't hit on that you'd want to highlight before we leave it off here, or is this a good place to stop?
Nothing comes to mind for me. You asked good questions.
Yeah. Yeah. That was very comprehensive.
I think I really appreciate your time. It's always interesting talking to you guys. It's been something that's pretty interesting and worth paying attention to. So appreciate you spending time with us today. Everyone on the line listening, thanks for spending a couple of days with us. If you have any questions, reach out to me. If you have a question on Origin, I'm sure you can reach out through their IR organization or get in touch with them. But hope everyone enjoyed it and hope everyone has a good rest of their day.
Thanks, Josh.
Thanks.