So, it’s pretty quick. You put a chip in one side and you get a get a chip’s worth of CMF out the other side and about a half an hour to an hour, something like that.
Ashish Gupta: Great, thanks for that. John, I’m just turning the carbon black. Is Origin materials partnering or running any research for expanding commercial uses of carbon black at this time?
Rich Riley: Yeah, we’re really excited about carbon black. So we’ve, we’ve mentioned it quite a few times. We’ve mentioned it all the way back to since 2021, but when we talked about it then, we thought of it as a sort of far future sort of post OM3 [ph] maybe a little bit in OM3 and sort of progressively getting a lot becoming a larger proportion of the product mix. We, as I mentioned earlier, alongside FDCA, we’ve seen carbon black be a really much more meaningful part of the demand now. And what’s really interesting about our carbon black in particular is that, it starts with a very different surface chemistry than traditional carbon black made from fossil sources, like natural gas or fuel oil, something like that. And that gives us an interesting cost and performance advantage in a lot of the areas of carbon black that are considered specialty carbon black.
So, in many ways, our material starts as a very high value specialty type material compared to the existing market and then, as we do additional processing, somewhat ironically, we actually bring it down closer to the performance of the commodity carbon blacks, whereas, if you look at the traditional processes for making carbon black, it’s the inverse, right? So they start with, something very close to a commodity carbon black, and then they do a bunch of work and put a bunch of money in order to get them to the specialty and so that sort of unusual position has made us a lot more bullish on carbon black in the near term and at high value. So, we’re really excited about it. We do work both with other experts and producers in the carbon black industry and with end customers, so we do a lot of application development work with customers in general, across all of our platform molecules, but that’s still true with HTC and by the way, that kind of application development work is what leads to things like the caps business that we described earlier.
So it’s that working very closely with customers to solve very specific products and technical problems that we think really gives our platform an edge in getting into all of these different markets and getting the value that our platform intermediates really deserve.
Ashish Gupta: Thanks so much and with that, we’ll turn some questions for Rich. Speaking at caps and closures, Rich, why is Origin pursuing your all bottle cap opportunity? But you already have $10 million in customer demand.
Rich Riley: Yeah, it’s a good question and, we really got into this business through serendipity that comes from being very close to our very large customers and their R&D teams and then having world-class polymer scientists on our side and what ended up happening was we figured out how to solve a real problem in this form of packaging and that we could solve it with PET. So, today’s caps are made from HDPE or polypropylene, which are harder to recycle and cause, reduce the amount of recycled content. You can put into a bottle and cause issues in the recycling chain. We figured out how to do it and secure the IP to do it with PET and really any form of PET recycle PET, our PET and so we’re excited that we have this very big and growing market opportunity, a product that is performance enhancing and solves a major sustainability challenge.
That we can do it cost competitively with the legacy products and this business is unconstrained by our construction schedule. So we can be in market very, very rapidly. So we’re, we’re, we’re excited about this very complimentary and very on-mission business line.
