Origin Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:ORGN) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

You put them into the black box and you get them out for a period of time and so our view was, generally speaking, we need to process all of this information and it wasn’t really until all that recently that it made sense to take a different scenario approach to this. I think it’s also worth mentioning that it’s not just rates, right? So rates are one part of it and they are a meaningful part. But there are other things as well that have an impact. Again, I mentioned sort of labor rates, materials costs, even energy volatility and volatility around some of these things can have a pretty significant impact in the way that you have to structure the risk management around plans like this.

Eric Stine: Okay, I’ll take the rest offline. Thanks.

Operator: The next question comes from Pavel Molchanov with Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Pavel Molchanov: Thanks for taking the question and one of the earlier speaker said, appreciate the clarity on the Origin 2, economics, yes, my question about that is, given that you’ll be selling into the biofuel market where policy incentives, LCFF [ph] etcetera play such a pivotal role, what are your assumptions about, what kind of federal tax credit or carbon credits or anything along those lines. What’s embedded in those EBITDA metrics?

Rich Riley: Yeah, so we haven’t — we haven’t put a significant amount of credit value into our product values there. A lot of it has been driven by the customer application value and then specific, offtake conversations and their negotiations with specific customers. So generally speaking, now of course they are very tightly tied to the regulatory and policy measures around these sorts of things, but we’ve tried to be very customer-centric in the way that we’re approaching the value there, not really looking to the regulatory aspects nearly as much.

Pavel Molchanov: Okay, so you highlighted the Marine market as kind of one of the prime verticals where you hope to be selling. I guess, why marine versus let’s say sustainably the Asian fuel?

Rich Riley: Great question has to do with the technical components of the fuel that we’re producing, and so that fuel in particular, while it has — it is a somewhat, let’s say, flexible kind of fuel. It has some real, particular benefits in the Marine market. and that’s part of the reason why Proman, who we announced today is a very interesting and relevant partner for us.

Operator: That concludes today’s live Q&A segment. I will now turn it over to Ashish Gupta, Investor Relations to conduct the next segment of our investor Q&A. Please go ahead.

Ashish Gupta: Thank you, operator. As has become custom on our earnings calls, we invited all investors submit questions for our second quarter call as part of our ask origin campaign. In the interest of time, we’ll be taking the most commonly asked questions. Our first question is for John. When origin is producing its first CMF, when is Origin producing its first CMF made from the waste? How long does it take to produce a batch of CMF from feedstock?

Rich Riley: Yes. So, thanks for the question Ashish and whoever submitted to the ask Origin. So, we expect to produce the first batches of CMF from wood waste from Origin 1. We expect that to be a matter of really weeks for first CMF production and not too much longer than that for first CMF from wood waste specifically. So, we’re quite close now, and we’re pretty excited about it. Generally speaking, we often get the question of what’s the characteristic reaction of process time associated with converting feedstock into our intermediate products. Often that can be a useful way for people to think about differentiating, a very slow and capital intensive process from one that’s. It’s quicker and generally less capital intensive and our characteristics sort of process times are on the order of sort of minutes may be up to as much as an hour if you include all of the resin times and the various seats of process equipment beyond the reactor.