The SAF Podcast

The SAF Podcast: Universal Fuel Technologies - Pick and mix for SAF production

• SAF Investor • Season 3 • Episode 3

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This week Oscar speaks with Alexei Beltyukov, Universal Fuel Technologies, a former medical doctor turned energy entrepreneur, who is now working on scaling the availability of sustainable aviation fuel. 

 Unifuel’s innovative Flexiforming process allows existing petroleum infrastructure—hydrotreaters and reformers—to be repurposed for SAF production, slashing capital expenditures by up to 75%. This drop-in solution not only reduces costs but also enhances feedstock and product flexibility, ensuring long-term economic viability for refineries transitioning to renewables.  Particularly interesting is their approach to working with traditional HEFA and Fischer-Tropsch processes, offering solutions to convert their by-products into valuable aromatic components for SAF. 

Uncover the intricacies behind the ASTM certification process for renewable jet fuel and why it's a critical step toward achieving a fully fungible, drop-in SAF. This episode sheds light on how simplifying production processes and understanding blending limits are not just technical hurdles but pivotal opportunities for investors and airlines, potentially reshaping the industry's future.

The discussion concludes with insights into regional differences in SAF adoption, and observations on the balance between gradual transition pathways against more aggressive transition strategies. Exploring how these differing strategies prove more effective than immediate wholesale changes in refinery operations, or slow long term development.

If you enjoy this discussion, check out our recent episode with Gorka Penalva, Exolum about the requirement to increase the focus on ensuring the supply chain is ready for increased SAF production: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2202964/episodes/16525321

Speaker 1:

Hello and welcome to another episode of the SAF podcast. This week, I'm delighted to be joined by Alexey Belchukov from Universal Fuel Technologies. So, alexey, before we get into Universal Fuel Technologies? So, alexei, before we get into Universal Fuel Technologies, do you just want to give everyone a bit about your background, because you've got quite an interesting background into how you ended up where you are today?

Speaker 2:

Well, hi, Oscar, A pleasure to be here. It's been a colorful journey. So, unlike many other people in the industry, I did not start out as a chemical engineer but I kind of had to catch up. So I started out as a medical doctor and then went into business, then got sucked into McKinsey doctor and then went into business and got sucked into McKinsey and then, you know, then I became basically a full time entrepreneur and pretty quickly became involved in the energy industry. So this one I might be losing count a little bit, but I think it's the fourth venture that we have in the energy industry.

Speaker 1:

And do you want to explain what universal fuel technologies is, Because I don't even know where to start with your flexiforming technology and all the applications that it's got. They seem endless. So do you want to give everyone a quick overview of those?

Speaker 2:

Of course, give everyone a quick overview of those. Of course, um, it's uh, it's actually kind of fairly easy to understand if, when you, when you look at the history of the technology. So, um, we've developed that that very technology for more than a decade now, and originally for the fossil fuel applications. In the beginning, we were using it to convert a range of different feedstocks usually including off-spec naftas and some kind of an alcohol into high octane gasoline, and then we basically adjusted the process conditions so that we can make a jet range product. And if the feedstocks are renewable as we're now focusing on renewable feedstocks in the last three years if the feedstocks are renewable, then we're getting a sustainable aviation fuel known as SAF, which is the name of your podcast.

Speaker 1:

So why transitioning into renewables from fossil fuels, to begin with?

Speaker 2:

Well, in the general sense the world is moving towards renewables and obviously there are policy fluctuations in this country or another country. One year it's more renewable friendly, the other it's more fossil friendly. But generally speaking, it looks like we, as a sort of the global society, we are moving towards renewables, more or less regardless of what regulators are thinking in any particular country at any particular point in time. And so we have perceived I mean, it's not like we have a particular crystal ball and we look through it and say, oh, this is where it's going. No, we're very customer driven and over time we realized you know, sometimes it was not a pleasant realization, but over time we realized that kind of the larger and more forward-looking oil companies and then the others are starting to reduce their investment into fossil fuel-related technologies, especially on the downstream side, but they're still very active and increasingly active in the technologies that look at the renewable fuels.

Speaker 2:

And so that's where the market led us.

Speaker 1:

So the idea behind your technology is that it can go into hydrotreaters and reformers and sort of repurpose those. You can bring new or additional life, as it were, into those bits of infrastructure. Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

Yes, that's correct, and we're actually very happy for that, because if you put yourself in the shoes of an operator of an oil refinery, you basically build a multi-billion dollar city populated with these sort of chemical sets, if you want, and it would be a complete waste, both from the economical standpoint and from the environmental standpoint and from every other standpoint, just to have to grapple with when you're transitioning to a different source of feedstocks or different kinds of feedstocks. And so we're really happy to be able to offer this to the market, that you can keep your existing chemistry set and you can just repurpose it, change some piping, make little additions here or there, but generally speaking, to keep your infrastructure and gainfully use it to conduct more interesting chemistry.

Speaker 1:

And what are the capital expenditure and the operational expenditure implications of being able to use this existing infrastructure or the existing chemistry set, as you put it?

Speaker 2:

Well, as you know, every refinery is different and every refinery has its own particulars. But what we've learned over the years is that, broadly speaking, when you can repurpose an existing piece of equipment into our technology, versus a greenfield situation or even brownfield situation, we have to build a new one. It's probably like a four times difference, right? So if you can repurpose the existing equipment, you can save three quarters of the capex.

Speaker 1:

That's amazing saving three quarters of the capex. That's a lot.

Speaker 2:

That's a lot yes, and then also, I mean mean you can imagine that, uh, the people would not need to uh produce all that steel to fabricate all these you know vessels and pumps and what have you, and the pipes, uh, so not only uh, it's a really huge, uh capital saving, it's also a big saving in terms of just sort of the amount of hassle you have to go through and all the emissions you would otherwise have to generate, you know, making all that steel and all that.

Speaker 1:

And how does this translate into sort of OPEX savings? Because saving is very much sort of the building the infrastructure. How does your technology sort of trickle down into the the OPEX side of the equation?

Speaker 2:

It's with the OPEX, it's sort of the it down into the, the opex side of the equation. It's with the opex, it's sort of the. It's hard to find a comparison right, because with the cat factors, whether you build or you don't, you know it's very easy to compare right, uh, with the cat, with the opex. You have to find the process that would be comparable uh, and then sort of put it side by side. In the fossil world it was relatively easy because we said okay, we look at. So our process back in the fossil days was used to make high-octane gasoline. Now we take another process that starts with similar feedstocks and would make high-octane gasoline.

Speaker 2:

And back in the day our one facility, one flexiformer I had a different name then but nonetheless I'm going to use today's name so one flexiformer would be able potentially to replace five different pieces of equipment. So we would take care of the hydrotreater, dehexamizer, isomerization unit, catalytic reformer and then aromatics removal unit. So five units would be able to be replaced and one unit would take on the functions of these five. And that sort of gives you a sense both of the CAPEX difference and of the ELPACS difference. So if you were in the fossil world, basically the ratio was very simple we would save about three quarters of the cost.

Speaker 2:

On the Elphi side as well, in the renewable world, it's a little trickier because there are very few processes out there that actually exist to produce SAF, for example, right and the most popular one, the HEPA process. We're not prepared for, so we can't really compare ourselves against them, because we cannot ingest the kind of feeds that they're making, that they're taking in, and our product is kind of different from what they're making too. The only process that is kind of relatively established and that can be put side by side with us, it's the ETJ ethanol to jet process, and to be honest it's not an entirely fair comparison because that process was basically by the larger licenses.

Speaker 2:

It's basically they've taken a few of the commercial processes that they've developed for different purposes and they put them together and here you have your ETJ. The obvious problem with that is that none of the pieces of the puzzle was actually designed to work together to start with, so it's not a very efficient process, but nonetheless, if you put us against that you know line by line, you would also see maybe like a three times difference in the op-packs. So that's sort of the order of magnitude.

Speaker 1:

So one of the other benefits of your flex-reforming technology is the flexibility benefits of your flex performing technologies the flexibility, the closing, the name, um that you can have in terms of feedstocks and then how you want to and what sort of end product you want to produce, because it's not just SAF that can come out the end. You can um produce different project products as well as using different feedstocks as well. So that's a big benefit that your technology has over other technologies where it's more limiting potentially.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, that's actually incredibly important feature of the technology, because, for one, if you're a plant operator, you have this plan, and if you're plant operator, you have this plant. And if you plant a mastery, you have this plant for maybe like 100 years. You've built it to last for maybe 100 years, right? And if you're effectively limited to one feedstock over these 100 years, it's not a question of if, it's a question of when your feedstock will be out of whack with the price of your finished product, so that you would be losing money.

Speaker 2:

And in this business, obviously everything rotates around long-term contracts, so you would not, at that point in time, be able to stop your production. You would still have to be making whatever product you've signed up for it to make, and you would be have to be making whatever product you've signed up for to make, and you would be losing money if your feedstock becomes too expensive. And so our technology allows you to avoid that sort of slump, because if one feedstock becomes too expensive, you just switch over to a different one and you keep producing and making money. So that's one really big benefit. The other way to point it out, you can also have some flexibility around the product portfolio, not as much as with the feedstocks, but still, and with a similar outcome maybe not as dramatic because, again, you have a long-term contract and so it will take a fairly long while for you to decide that you want to go and do something else. But you have this opportunity.

Speaker 2:

We don't expect anything bad to happen to the SAF market, but if that were to happen, 70 years from now, our customers, people using our technology, would be able to switch and start producing, for example, liquid organic hydrogen carriers, or maybe feedstock for the plastics production. So that's all feasible options.

Speaker 1:

One of the challenges challenges flexibility sounds great, sort of then the fact that you can use different feedstocks and have different products. But with that flexibility comes a complicated supply chain for feedstocks. You're going to have to go and use multiple feedstock agreements or find alternative feedstock agreements and managing that supply chain could become quite a bulky challenge if you've got multiple different feedstocks that potentially you've got to to look after. Um, is that? Is that a potential challenge that flexibility brings and just making an already complicated supply chain even slightly more complicated?

Speaker 1:

I don't know I mean when you describe it like this yeah I was thinking yeah, you can really mess it up if you want to, but you're not careful about it. It's something that you need to manage quite carefully, because there's a big drive towards sustainability criteria when it comes to feedstocks, and if you are sort of jumping from one feedstock to the other to sort of get the price that you're looking for which you know all producers want to get feedstocks at the lowest price yeah, like in every business, that there is an opportunity to outsmart yourself, that is true, but like, uh, you don't have to, uh, you don't have to over complicate things.

Speaker 2:

So if, for example, like if we're speaking about etj and then we imagine this flexi-forming plant out of the open, not connected to any particular captive source of feedstock, uh, you don't need to have 15 different feedstocks sitting in 15 different tanks. So if you're happy with the supply agreement you have, you just have this one and that's it. It's just that if something were to happen to it, it's not the end of the world for you. You can still go ahead and procure different from different costs, a different kind of feedstock and so on, but you don't have to. So that's the flexibility, it's not like an obligation.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, where is your process in terms of ASTM certification? Is it certified or is it going through certification? Where's it at now?

Speaker 2:

We're entering the process as we speak. Actually, we ran an extensive pilot campaign last year, lasted for almost half a year, and one of the objectives of that pilot campaign was to make sample material for certification. So we're now finishing these samples and distilling them, bringing them to the proper conditions and are starting to submit them so and sort of you know. I guess I shouldn't jump ahead and assume what the certification authorities will decide. So it's going to be up to them how quickly we get certified.

Speaker 1:

I was going to ask. My next question was going to be when do you anticipate that to be? Up to them how quickly we get certified, I was going to ask. My next question was going to be when do you anticipate that to be?

Speaker 2:

but you jump the gun, who knows? Yeah, I mean, I wish I wish it were next week, but probably not that soon maybe not, you can hope. Hopefully it's next week, yeah I feel like I can hope that's true um, one of the other things that you're into.

Speaker 1:

If we're talking your products now in terms of your saff, am I right in thinking that you can make a saff with the blending super suitability with, in terms of the aromatics, that could be a hundred percent drop in as opposed to needing to be blended? Is that? Is that correct?

Speaker 2:

that's the yes, so we can. There are several ways to deploy our technology to make sense, and the general idea behind every potential application is that, at the end, though, a customer will have a fully drop-in fungible, renewable jet fuel, so that even if like.

Speaker 2:

For example, one of the options is to combine flexi-forming with a heifer process or with a Fischer-Tropsch process. So one of the distinguishing features of both of these processes is that the staff that they're making is a paraffinic, especially with Fischer-Tropsch, but also with heifer. You know the different kinds of paraffsch, but also with HAFA. I mean, you know the different kinds of paraffins, but still paraffinic. And it is today's reality and that reality is gonna be with us.

Speaker 2:

For another, you know, 30 to 50 years, that jet fuel needs to include some amount of aromatics. The regulations say at least 8%, right, and so today, these half-finished shops, producers, uh, don't have a way to make a fuller job and product, so they have to blend. I mean, there are also other reasons why they have to blend, but that is, you know, if other reasons are eventually taken care of, that reason is going to be there to stay, and so what we are going to offer to them and actually not going but what we are offering to them is they can use our process and take the byproduct that they're making, the light ends, basically the nafta that they're producing, which is between 10 and 20 percent of their output. This is that nafta.

Speaker 2:

So we can take that nafta put it into a flexiform implant and convert it into the aromatic component of sand, which can then be blended with their uh paraffin extreme and the combined product will be fully dropout and obviously subject to stm approval so you're keenly keeping an eye on blending limits, because obviously currently it's limited to 50 or, and so you'd be quite keen to see blending limits increased, because you're saying you can just use a flexi forming to.

Speaker 1:

You know, put the aromatics in if you've got heifer refinery or you know, go through the whole process yourselves and then use your staff, which has already got the required aromatics into it that's right, and we know that ASPM is working on this approving procedure for having a fully synthetic kerosene.

Speaker 2:

So it's you know. I don't know how fast that's going to move, but hopefully it won't take too long.

Speaker 1:

There's been a big trend in speaking to producers developing technologies in terms of simplification of processes. You said you're taking a five-step process and moving it down as one or integrating it into one process, and that's sort of a trend across the industry. Is that something that's obviously something you're trying to buy into industry? Is that something that's obviously something you're trying to buy into? Do you think you know, talking to investors or airlines for offtake or people like that, do they think they understand the significance of this simplification and the impact it can have sort of further upstream and downstream as well?

Speaker 2:

That's a tricky question. The best of them certainly do.

Speaker 1:

We've done the easy ones. Now we're on to the hard ones.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, the best of them certainly do. For many, it's a question of proof. People who have been in the refining and chemical process industry for long enough, they do know that sometimes that there's this, you know, innovation comes through and it sort of blows everything out of the water, and we certainly hope that we're such an example, uh. But everyone requires proof, uh. So for for many them, we provided that proof for our pilot campaign last year, and hopefully we. For the airlines, it's not as important. They're just buying a product that's available, and if it's not available, there's nothing to discuss. But people in the oil refining industry, people who are trying to make renewable fuels, they certainly do understand the value of it because and this translates very directly into their bottom line.

Speaker 2:

Uh, whether you have to build uh like several hundred a million dollars kind of worth of of kit or uh, less than 100 is enough and this is a big difference are you seeing you mentioned this started in the fossil fuel space.

Speaker 1:

Are you seeing interest in your technology from the fossil fuel space? Because a lot of people's biggest bugbear is that oil majors aren't necessarily as active as people would like in terms of accelerating this. The renewable production, whether it be SAF or other renewables. The renewable production, whether it be SAF or other renewables, are you seeing interest in them, using your technology and maybe a co-processing capacity or sort of slowly adopting, as opposed to sort of going headfirst into, you know, a HEFA refinery?

Speaker 2:

Some of them I mean again, everybody has, you know their particular individual situation. Everybody's approaching it. So we're now seeing a surprising amount of interest to the fossil and the co-processing applications of our technology from the middle eastern and asian clients, right from the Middle Eastern and Asian clients. Right, let's go with the US.

Speaker 1:

The US is more I mean until now.

Speaker 2:

I mean obviously the market evolves and also responds to regulatory differences and changes In the US it's been mostly or pauses Sorry.

Speaker 1:

Or regulatory pauses.

Speaker 2:

Yeah that. But in the US people have, at least until recently, been more focused on the pure play renewable situations. I think we only have one potential client who is thinking of coprocessing and, to be honest, you know, I'm actually surprised that this isn't happening more often, because gradual changes is always easier than you know. Drop everything and start doing something, and so it would be, you know, so much more natural, I think, to just have it. So you had 100% fossil yesterday, let's do 90 fossil today, and then, you know, move on to whatever 50 you know in a couple years. Uh, it's so much easier to execute, I think, than than, uh, jumping from a to b without any particular bridge I think you're so right in that there's an element of perfection being the enemy of the good.

Speaker 1:

Like mandates are gradual in Europe and the UK where I am, so you know you don't need to have all this pure play stuff. You can gradually, as you say, build in more renewable capacity and use that as a springboard to actually get more pure play, because at the end of the day you need proof of concepts and you need increase more secure demand signals, which a small, gradual sort of philosophy or tactic could, you know, help play a critical role in further down the line leading to more acceleration, exactly and again, like if you own this multi-billion dollar refinery.

Speaker 2:

It's really very scary to make any sudden movements. It's much easier to just start, you know, with co-processing a little bit, and you know you will have this little thought at the back of your head that if it doesn't work out I'll go back to. You know what I've been doing before. Not much is lost, or nothing is lost. So in that I think this approach is much more kind of physiological, if you will.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, but you said it just there and I can see sort of in my head. I just got you know the um. The immediate objection would be that if you sort of you know, go co-processing, you go, oh, that doesn't work. That's the SAF. Price is too high and it's not coming down. No one's buying it. Um, I'm going to go back to doing fossil fuels, pure fossil fuels, because you know there's a more mature market and it's easier to be. So I think that's the argument for the pure play and sort of committing, because you don't get sort of people dipping their toe in and realising the market's not quite there yet. We'll review in a few years and then eventually, you know a few years turns into you know, five years, 10 years.

Speaker 2:

So it's a very, very tricky tightrope to walk on in terms of progress, but not no progress at the same time. Yeah, it's uh, and to to a large degree that's so regulatory, um the one and sort of that that makes the blue more scary and and uh, more. So it's like you deal with your one day all the way SAF, the other way no SAF whatsoever. So in that sense I find the approach of the chemical industry much more encouraging, because they don't have I don't believe that there is anywhere in the world that they have a government incentive to actually produce renewable plastics. But some still do because their customers are actually encouraging that with their demand and their pricing, and that, I think, is a really healthy movement.

Speaker 2:

That actually is the movement that makes me kind of believe more in humanity, right, because that means that the average Joe you know somewhere in the store is actually thinking that buying a renewable plastic is better than buying traditional fossil drive plastic. And you know that's how things start really, you know getting to take root in people's minds and everything and their everyday behaviors, and so then that translates into demand for renewable plastic components on the upstream, and so that doesn't depend on any government deciding anything, and so that is a much stickier sort of change. Not that I had any doubt that SAF is going to take over fossil jet eventually, but that seems to be more of a kind of leaps and bounds sort of road, whereas with the chemical industry it's pretty gradual. We have demand for this level today. Okay, we're going to produce this level today. The demand is increasing, okay, we're going to produce that much tomorrow.

Speaker 1:

Do you think that will work in? Take the oil and gas space with you know the incentives around, the tax incentives from governments to, you know, drill for oil or find oil, particularly when it's sort of finding new oil reserves and whatever. As long as they're in place, you're going to struggle to see that demand being strong enough for them to pivot from that core oil and gas business. Or do you think there would be enough demand signals, soft demand signals, without governmental policy to encourage that pivot?

Speaker 2:

well, it's really hard to tell. I mean, it's uh. You know, one thing that I'm that I'm fairly confident uh in is that there is uh, this sort of societal move towards renewable sources of hydrocarbons versus fossil. It may not be as fast as we would like it to be, but you know, it's there. I think it's fairly clearly there and what the governments are doing is just a reflection of that. So they're obviously playing to their electorate. You know, different parts of that electorate attach different levels of importance to it, but there is that sort of general trend. You know, if one is to think about sort of the government policy and its role and then where it's evolving, and obviously this is a very much of a situation where there are so many different factors and so many different players that it's completely impossible, at least for me, to predict anything really.

Speaker 2:

But what I'm thinking is that one day we will, as a society, we will realize that we need to have a carbon tax. As a society, we will realize that we need to have a carbon tax Because if we're saying, you know or maybe this is a poor wording for it maybe, like the emissions tax, greenhouse emissions tax, right, because if we're saying, you know, this is bad, that the greenhouse emissions are destroying our habitat effectively and so you know, we can't do away with it immediately, but we're going to have to attach some cost to that, and that cost is going to be that sort of surcharge is going to be used to favor the alternative sources. Even if this money doesn't flow from, you know, fossil fossil producer, fossil fuel producer, to the renewable fuel producer, it will have to help to level out the cost. Uh and uh, you know, look at the look at the electric vehicles. Uh, it's all of all sort of in front of us.

Speaker 2:

Uh, back in 2012, I vividly remember seeing my first tesla, which was nothing more than a rich man's toy. It had very little utility value. Uh, it was this little roadster for, you know, the rich boys in california, right? Uh, and then that was that. But today people are buying Teslas, not because they're their fancy cars, but because it just makes economic sense.

Speaker 2:

And in the beginning yes, it took plenty of government subsidies and incentives on this and that. But today you know, if you pull this plug, not much is going to change. I mean, maybe it's not going to be Tesla, it will be a different EV, but it's going to be an EV, generally speaking, in most parts of the world. So I think that kind of similar story is going to evolve with renewable fuels and SAP in particular there's sort of a carbon tax sort of.

Speaker 1:

If you talk corsier policy, iko, large global, and then in the eu you've got the eu emissions trading scheme, which is effectively a carbon tax. Um, but you know, it's not perfect, but there are sort of aspects of it. I think there could potentially be a call to beef those up a bit more and sort of have a bit more responsibility. Obviously, if I said that to an airline, they'd probably tell me I'm crazy because they're already high enough for them. But you see, potentially. I mean, I don't think there's a specific policy relating to a carbon tax in the US per se in itself, apart from Corsair. Do you think something like that could come in in the policy space? That would be a really good driver for the biofuels produced in the US biofuels produced in the US.

Speaker 2:

The US has taken more of an incentive route than the sort of the mandate route that's in place in Europe.

Speaker 2:

I think both are valid and obviously I mean in the end it's whatever the society, society, the, the voters, you know whatever they find acceptable and and uh, whatever is sort of the tradition in in the land, right? So, uh, either is fine, you know. Obviously, uh, as a uh sap technology, uh licensor, I wish for a more consistent across the board story because today, when customers from whichever country, whether it's Europe or the US, when they come to us and say, so okay, so we do this, this, okay, you have that much emission saving relative to that, so what's it going to be? You know how are the incentives going to stack up for me if I use the technology.

Speaker 2:

Basically we don't have it. It's so complicated it's too much for us to study. In every little jurisdiction I know in the US it would be state by state different. In Europe it may be slightly more consistent, but still the different federal and state and local incentives are so complicated and they've all changed so so frequently that it's really impossible to follow for somebody who's not directly into it.

Speaker 1:

So I've got a couple of questions before we wrap up. Who is your core customer base? Who are you targeting for this technology?

Speaker 2:

We have three major customer segments, so one that we have devoted most of this conversation it's decarbonizing oil refineries. So that's one really big customer segment. The other one is ethanol producers, especially in the US producers, especially in the US because, as they are seeing, with the onslaught of EVs and hybrid cars they're seeing less and less gasoline demand, to the point, actually, some of the refining capacity that's blending ethanol into gasoline, and so the ethanol producers are now looking for different ways to, you know, different outlets. What else are they going to do with the product? So making SAF or renewable plastics or something of that kind is a really interesting option for them, which we're offering.

Speaker 2:

So that's the second category of customers. And the third category of customers are independent producers of renewable fuels Fisher Trucks and HAPA, like I described. We can do, we can take their byproduct, nafta, and convert it to the aromatic SAF component so that they can offer more valuable products to their customers. I'm also lumping into their producers of methanol renewable methanol, that is, in principle. They might be kind of an independent segment of their own, but they're so young as an industry now that we're putting them together with the rest of the renewable fuel makers.

Speaker 1:

And are you talking to customers, potential customers, globally? Is it more focused in the US, eu, or is it a wide global spread of interest from potential customers?

Speaker 2:

We're a tiny little start. We have 100 sales reps that we're directing. We go there, we go here. What actually happens is customers come to us. It's even better.

Speaker 1:

You save loads of money on paying salespeople.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean that's a good part of it, but the bad part of it we have basically no control and so a lot of our customers are prospective customers, are US based, but there are some also from other places. We are kind of disappointed in not seeing enough European customers, specifically none from the UK. I mean I don't know if I could call UK part of Europe these days Geographically.

Speaker 1:

I guess that's a whole kettle of fish I'm not sure we need to get into right now. I don't think we've got long enough to get into that specific discussion. Yeah well geologically.

Speaker 2:

I think it is. Let's settle that.

Speaker 1:

And finally, just sort of wrap up what's your sort of in terms of finances investment? Have you been raising money? Have you been, are you potentially looking to raise more money as you go, sort of get past ASTM? What's your sort of investment strategy or pathway been so far?

Speaker 2:

we were quite lucky to meet a number of people who really understand either the industry or the way we operate, or both, and so we did raise a bit of money that allowed us to come to where we are, with only sample production, the pilot runs, and all that as a startup. I guess this is sort of a definition of a startup that we will keep raising money for some time more. Luckily, you know, for our funders and hopefully for ourselves, we are a technology licensor, meaning we don't build plans or operate or design them. So you know, our capital requirements are very modest, but we are raising and we will be raising, you know, maybe for another year or two before we become fully profitable ourselves.

Speaker 1:

Are you going to be constantly raising during that time? Are you going to sort of erase?

Speaker 2:

We'll see how it turns out, and you kind of you don't want to uh have no breaks between your fundraising, uh, because it means you know that's all I can do, uh. But uh, you know, sometimes it just happens the way it happens.

Speaker 1:

You have to just keep going yeah well, I wish you all the best with yeah well, I wish you all the best with future rate, future capital raising and astm certification and getting some sales reps to get out to get over to the uk thank you, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for your time, alexis thank you very much.