Higher Performance, Carbon Negative Plastics, Maybe for Less: The Digest’s 2021 Multi-Slide Guide to ReSource Chemical

In this slide, we begin to look into the commercial appeal of having a game-changing product — 80 percent less CAPEX, higher yields, lower costs and carbon-negative. And that’s in comparison to the Seven Sisters going to FDCA from glucose and fructose. Compared to conventional plastic, this is carbon negative and performs better. What’s not to love? The initial stage of development is to “become the leading global supplier of FDCA”, that’s a pretty big initial goal, but given the advantages outlined here, why wouldn’t this technology reach that position and right quick.

One note here — later on, the company hopes to get more vertically integrated, producing feedstock furfural and end-use PEF. We have now a strategic dependence or furfural, and that’s never trivial. Economics depend on input prices of an intermediate rather than solely on the more stable economics of abundantly available waste product like forest waste, and so forth. On the other hand, if you’re using furfural, you’re out of the business of understanding how to aggregate agricultural residues, which isn’t trivial either. So, mark it as a limited risk factor, one that might be easily explained.

One thing we’d note, the development from a great technology to a great company is a very big step. ReSource is too early-stage to have done much thinking about this, but eventually this slide and the next one will be the subject of an entire investment deck. Clearly, some commercialization folk are going to be needed here, and probably soon if we are thinking about raising money for an integrated pilot in 2022-23 part of which the point of is to begin to seed samples to potential customers.