There’s another part of this which is around the field attributes. We have a $30 million grant from the USDA and that is all about documenting fields. Fields, not farms, not regions, fields. And we actually have a tool that’s working with farmers out in the fields which has been in operation now — development and operation for three years, and we just got it onto the handheld form. And farmers can tell field by field what’s different. That’s a huge deal because that allows them to have the information available to them to make better — different and hopefully better decisions about how to improve the sustainability on their farm. It’s in those avenues that we see the potential. And there’ll be multiple ways of making money from it. Some of it would be providing a service.
Some of it would be profit share. Some of it might be actual tokenization of carbon or something like that in the future.
Derrick Whitfield: That’s helpful. Thanks.
Patrick Gruber: And it’s a big – it’s a huge potential market. The potential market, we’re told. We just had McKinsey in here doing a study, and it’s in the billions. So we’re going to — we got to do a little more work on this. I got to see the exact business plan. So when Lynn was referring to the guidance of what should happen and when should it happen, the team — they’re doing a good job. This is a huge project and it’s a software and the data collection field work, a bunch of things. It’s definitely not heavy-duty capital but the market potential we’re being told is really big. So we like that a lot.
Operator: Thank you. One moment for our next question. Our next question will be coming from Sameer Joshi of H.C. Wainwright. Your line is open.
Sameer Joshi: Thanks for taking my questions. On the DOE loan process, I know it seems to be on track, but will you be providing any like, milestones or any deliverables that happen during the quarter? How should we look at it in terms of tracking it?
Patrick Gruber: No, we won’t. We don’t plan on it. The thing that we’re watching for is getting to the close or the — I guess there’s a final notice that they’re going to give you the money. That’ll take a while to get to that. But doing the little details, I don’t want to — no. There’s just too many things. They have to go do due diligence, they hire their own consultants, they’re on their timeline. They control the timelines. We control nothing. All we do is help and provide information and input. So I can’t see any kind of a win that’s constructive for shareholders here because they’re continuing to make progress and will report on it. That’s the very best thing.
Sameer Joshi: So part of the reason for that question is how will the equity partners or strategic partners that you are working with now track that? Are you sharing information? Will you be sharing information with those kind of partners?
Patrick Gruber: We are and have been, yes. There’s quite a long queue of them and stay in touch with us. And so, the big variables that we have here are the same as we’ve talked about before. Everyone wants to know what the 45Z is going to say. We need a number. You know what, any number is better than no number because then we can get on with figuring out the margin and what’s going on and what the gaps are and how to fill the gaps. So that’s just, we got to have that. And then the DOE, the DOE program, our project is solid. We’ve done more engineering. We have never in my life, in any of the projects I’ve ever been involved with, my guys have ever been involved with, have we done this much engineering on a project? And this is partly because we’re in inflationary environments where I was having to update stuff, but it’s like never have we done this much engineering and it’s so it’s as de-risked as we can possibly make it on every front you can think of.
And so, we’ll plug through it and get it done.
Sameer Joshi: Understood. Great. On the ETO, the ethanol-to-olefins, what is the development work that is going on? Like is there — like what exactly is happening on that front?
Patrick Gruber: Sure, so that’s — we’ve licensed the technology to LG and they’re a partner with us in helping to develop it, and their particular interest is, they want to make propylene. For polypropylene, that’s a plastic that goes all the way from diapers to car bumpers and consumer goods and the whole bit, right? The proposition would be a massively negative polypropylene, and people are interested in chemicals, and so that would be pretty cool. No one was ever seen a polypropylene with this kind of negative carbon values. So that’s what’s interesting about it. We’ll have to go through the discovery of how much people will pay and all that kind of Stuff, but they’re a great partner. They’re doing a lot of work on doing development right now.
I was in Korea here with [Paul Bloom] (ph) recently and you know what? These guys are making great progress. They’re really good at the catalysts and things. And of course, those proprietary catalysts are really important, and this is stuff that we have our patents filed on. So it’s all really good. And then also, that technology, we believe cuts out large quantities of capital from making jet fuel from ethanol. And it also cuts operating costs. Now it won’t be ready in time for Net-Zero 1. So we’re going to go ahead with Net-Zero 1 anyway. Maybe it’s ready for Net-Zero 2, I don’t know. We’ll see. We have to go through the work and find out what it is we don’t know yet. We’re scaling it up. So to answer your question directly, the next stage is to get those catalysts scaled up.
That’s part of it. And then scale up the process itself. And we’ll be doing that over the next six months, eight months, something like that. No doubt we’re running into something we don’t know yet, and then we’ll have to overcome that. But it’s looking pretty good, and we’ll also bring in other partners to help develop it and get it implemented fast, because the potential is huge.
