Don't know if I've got the wrong end of the stick here and misunderstood what you're saying. If so, apologies. Either way, worth emphasizing how far advanced they are in their operation.
In the Evercore Fireside chat, Taso spoke at length about their recycling operation. They are already well-established with strong relationships across the industry to secure scrap. The simplicity and long-term sustainability of their operation is brilliantly conceived. Once the relationships with scrap suppliers, component manufacturers and end-user customers are established and locked in, the circular economy of their operation creates a significant barrier to entry/moat:
30 Min: There is currently 60,000 tonnes of scrap production in the US today. Probably the same in Europe. We can take that scrap and substantially recycle it. We've got the advantageous position that we already have access to a lot of that scrap that we can start recycling and filling those gaps in supply.
The current scarp industry is quite fractured. Typically, we're taking scrap from the point where it's a mill product that's been made into a Ti Metal component.
So when you look at that, there's quite a lot of machine shops that create Ti scrap chips. Those chips are they property of that machine house. Then there is quite a large Ti brokerage recycling market across the US and Europe which takes that scrap and resells it. So we are able to engage there and take any of that scrap.
Then there's also the larger machine shops, the larger OEM's, who have their own machine scrap and we engage directly with them. That's the large manufacturers of aerospace components, of medical components, of consumer electronics, where we can engage directly with them. They have their own inventory of scrap that they are generating some of which they don't know what to do with, or they're downcycling, and we are able to enter negotiations with those groups.
We have hardly, and have not needed to, negotiate with the existing Ti metal mill product producers that are typically selling into he aerospace industry. We are dealing with the machine shops or the end-users who want to recycle their production and solve their supply chain needs in a circularity of their process.
For instance, we know of a lot of Ti metal in a particular operation that never went into operation. It's a nuclear power plant. Never went into operation. There's 500 tonnes of Ti metal in there. We can take that, recycle it, send it to the green hydrogen economy and then we can set up that continuous circular supply chain so that when those components come off we can recycle it.
I think you're going to see a lot of that. Not only are we securing the scrap, but as being the solution provider. Not only are we supplying the first pass of Ti metal into their systems, we're also doing the full recyclability for...for decades.
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