The Digest’s 2023 Multi-Slide Guide to Carbon Negative Origin Materials

by Jim Lane (Biofuels Digest) Nearly half of all global emissions come from making products. But Origin Materials’ mission is to enable the world’s transition to sustainable materials to lower those GHG emissions. In these slides, we explore how the Origin platform can replace oil as the foundational feedstock for the materials economy and more — just as news that Origin has completed construction at its first commercial Sarnia biorefinery. Origin Materials co-CEO John Bissell presented these slides at ABLC Next 2022. READ MORE

Excerpt from Biofuels Digest: Late last week, following the Q2 earnings announce, the stock price for Origin Materials dropped by 66 per cent in a day, and you might think the company announced it had a) announced bankruptcy, b) abandoned its core technology or c) revealed misdeeds by management that could lead to prison and ruin — none of that happened. What happened is that a very promising company and technology that had earlier this year a valuation north of $1 billion announced that its future capex is higher than originally expected and has led to roll-out delays, and that the product mix of the company is the future would be different, and The first is bad news, the second was bad, the last was pretty good.

Markets dislike delay, and they don’t much like pivots, and now the company has a market cap that is $40 million lower than its cash on hand, which is one way that markets tell companies that they place a value of zero on a business plan that, when the plant was supposed to be open in mid-2025 instead of 2028, was valued at more than $800 million before the company’s Origin 1 demonstration of technology was even completed. Investors are strange creatures, they behave like jilted lovers. Looks to us here in Digestville as a tremendous buying opportunity — what a bargain ORGN has become.

About those billion-dollar valuations

Now, you would be hard-pressed to find Digest column praising the market for assigning a billion-dollar valuation to an unproven technology, ever — some of this gyration we assign to the nature of the company’s emergence as a public company quite a couple of years before the ideal timing for an IPO. We understand the problem as everyone does — markets were flush with SPAC cash a few years back (boy, that fad faded more quickly than fidget spinners), the valuations were good, the cash was needed by bioeconomy companies preparing to scale, early-stage investors were enthusiastic about a public window.

To SPAC or not to SPAC, that is the question. Whether it was nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows born of outrageous investor expectations, or to take arms against a sea of future troubles and by ignoring SPAC money, end them, yet in that end perhaps to live in dread of that undiscover’d country called cash poverty from whose bourn no company returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills SPACs have than fly to others we know not of.

I think that’s how Hamlet put it in the original draft of the play. Maybe not.

True Value (in) Hardware

In any case, once we had the beauteous Origin Materials and its CMF technology, now we this ORGN, which has been sent to the stocks where for some time it will be pelted by investors with tomatoes and filth as they seek in punishment to transfer the pain of their grief — grief that their illusions have died, that industrial bioeconomy is not a walk in the park, that escaping climate change now that it has its fangs upon us and within it will be no simple act of slipping off the hook. ORGN will have the destiny of Origin Materials again, Origin is changing things of low-value into high value and has interesting prospects, but it will not, as seems to have been the expectation, there will be no fishes and loaves, walking across water, no raising Lazarus from the dead, healing lepers, giving mobility to the paralyzed, dissipating storms, or restoring sight to the blind. ORGN will be just Origin.

Meanwhile, Origin 1, the world’s first commercial-scale plant to produce Origin’s intermediates – CMF, HTC, and oils and extractives – has initiated start-up, and there are some good opportunities now to make FDCA plastics. The company explains: READ MORE