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spk02: Hello, everyone. Welcome to Fusion Fuel Green's second quarter 2022 investor update. My name is Ben Schwartz, and I'm head of investor relations at Fusion Fuel. I would first like to remind everyone that this call may contain forward looking statements, including, but not limited to the company's expectations or predictions of financial and business performance, which are based on numerous assumptions about sales margins, competitive factors. Industry performance and other factors, which cannot be predicted. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions, and they are not guarantees of performance. I encourage you to read the disclaimer slide in the investor presentation for a discussion of the risks that may affect our business today or may cause our assumptions to prove incorrect. The company is under no obligation and expressly disclaims any obligation to update, alter, or otherwise revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Okay, thank you for joining us today. As always, I will run through our agenda for the next hour. We'll open with some remarks from Fusion Fuels Chairman, followed by an overview of our value proposition, as well as some observations about valuations in the green hydrogen sector. And the management team will share second quarter highlights, financial results, the latest on our technology, and an update on our commercial strategy and pipeline. As we always do, we'll end with a recap of our 2022 milestones before opening up the floor for facilitated Q&A. As in previous calls, questions can be entered in the chat box in the webcast platform at any point during the next 58 minutes. Alternatively, you can also submit your questions to the investor relations mailbox at ir.fusion-fuel.eu. So without any further ado, I'll pass it over to Jeffrey Schwarz, Fusion Fuels Chairman.
spk01: Thanks, Ben. I'm Jeffrey Schwarz, chairman of Fusion Fuel Green PLC, and I want to add my welcome to our Q2 and six-month investor presentation. The equity markets have not been kind to growth stories this year. The Federal Reserve's efforts to rein in inflation by raising interest rates has had a disproportionate effect on the share prices of fast-growing companies due to the discounting of out-year cash flows, or so Wall Street analysts would have you believe. Then again, most of those strategists began the year predicting double-digit equity market returns, so I take their advice with more than a few grains of salt. I know I say this almost every quarter, and I apologize if I sound like the proverbial broken record. But I've been in the investment business for more than 40 years, and the one investment strategy that has proven to work consistently over time is to uncover businesses that serve a growing market with a superior technology and a strong management team. That is what we identified in Fusion Fuel Green. And recent events, in particular, the energy crisis in Europe and the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in the United States, have only served to magnify the opportunity. A chief concern for producers or off-takers of green hydrogen is a concept called the levelized cost of hydrogen. which is driven primarily by the interplay of two factors, the cost of electricity required for electrolysis and the capex for the electrolyzer imbalance of plant. Fusion's solution offers advantages on both counts. Grid independence and scalability are what make our solution unique and especially ideal for the high value added mobility market, which is a key near-term target for fusion. In the production of green hydrogen, grid independence enables eliminating exposure to highly volatile prices for electricity and natural gas, a benefit very much in focus during this time of historically high energy prices in Europe. The benefit of eliminating this form of uncertainty is quite straightforward. The fact that our HEVO solar generators can produce low-cost green hydrogen at even the very modest levels of production eliminates risk in a less obvious but potentially more important way. And I beg your indulgence for a moment as I use an analogy to explain. Imagine, if you will, two suppliers of equipment, which are used to produce widgets. Supplier A offers a machine that can produce 10,000 widgets per year, but at a high cost, or alternatively, a second machine that can produce 100,000 widgets per year at a lower cost, but with a significant upfront capital investment. Supplier B has a machine that can produce 10,000 widgets per year at that same lower cost, but with just a fraction of the required capex. Also, let's assume that the expectation is that the market for widgets will grow significantly over time. But next year, when the equipment will be delivered, the market is projected to be 10,000 widgets. Well, which one would you recommend purchase? To me, the answer is obvious, supplier B. The ability to meet current demand while retaining the potential to grow productive capacity as the market grows is the slam-dunk winner. And that's even more so if one believes the price of widget-making equipment may well decline in the years ahead. Well, I suspect it won't come as a surprise to you that in this analogy, manufacturers of centralized electrolyzers are supplier A and fusion is supplier B. And this feature of being able to start with modest production of green hydrogen and grow as demand grows is especially important in a nascent market like mobility. With a very large existing stock of diesel fuel trucks, buses, and heavy duty equipment, the demand for green hydrogen today is modest. However, it is expected to grow over time as existing equipment reaches end of life and is replaced by equipment powered by hydrogen fuel cells. I'll conclude by saying this. Keep your eye on the prize. If you believe that the future of green hydrogen is bright and believe our Hivo Solar solution offers unique advantages, then there is every reason to believe, as I do, and mind you, I have never sold a share of Fusion, that we will be successful in building a company that is valued highly in the marketplace. With that, I'll turn the call back over to Ben.
spk02: Great, thanks very much. So with the benefit of that context, let's begin with an overview of Fusion Fuel's business case and value proposition. So for those of you who are new to the theme or in need of a refresher, Fusion Fuel is in the business of developing and delivering cost-effective clean hydrogen solutions to accelerate the global energy transition. as i've said before at its core fusion fuel is a technology company we have developed and commercialized a proprietary integrated solar solar to hydrogen generator that unlocks grid independent green hydrogen production at a market leading levelized cost our decentralized approach is a truly unique source of differentiation in the market where everyone else is going bigger to drive down costs we have gone small scale and modular and in doing so had been able to eliminate some of the cost and complexity of hydrogen production and distribution. While others are talking about developing green hydrogen projects, we're doing it. As we speak, our HIVO Solar Technology is producing green hydrogen at our demonstration facility in Portugal, And our unique approach and differentiated technology have enabled us to build a robust commercial pipeline of tech sale and development projects led by our pilot project with Exolume in Madrid, which will be up and running by the end of the year. Yet despite all that, it's not lost on us that we continue to be persistently and significantly undervalued relative to our peers in the green hydrogen sector. a group of names that undoubtedly has advantages from a maturity, scale, and balance sheet perspective. But as our chairman rightly pointed out, in a market where most everyone has fundamentally the same offering, what customers care about more than anything is levelized cost of hydrogen. That is and will continue to be the key differentiator. That also happens to be where we believe we have a clear competitive advantage, Not only can we offer known long term certainty of costs through our integrated solution, but we can do so at market leading levels, agnostic of scale and without grants. We have a differentiated business model of selling both technology and green hydrogen and have a clear path to revenue generation and delivery at scale. So another way of looking at this chart would be to say fusion fuel is the cheapest green hydrogen pure play stock out there today by an order of magnitude. And hopefully the next 50 minutes or so together will leave you sharing a similar perspective. So I'll now pass it over to Frederico, who will provide an update on the quarter and subsequent events.
spk03: Great. Thank you, Ben. And good afternoon. And thank you, everyone, for joining us. As always, we're excited to share with you the latest developments at Fusion Fuel, particularly given the recent macro events and industry news that make it a very bright and exciting future for us. So we'll cover a few of these items during the presentation, so I'll just touch upon some of the highlights now. From a technology and production side, we've not only gone live with the production of our Hibro Electrovisor at the new Benevente facility, being the first to be producing Electrovisors at mass scale in Liberia, we've also completed an assessment of our technology and manufacturing process with Black & Veatch. In addition, we have Tuv Sud performing ongoing performance tracking of our Hibasoli unit, and it continues to perform 10% above our data sheet. As part of our continued investment and commitment to our technology development, we have filed two more patents, which we believe will continue to provide us with a technological edge in the market. On the project side, we continue to secure significant grants for our project portfolio, in particular with the recent announcement of our C14 and C5 awards in Portugal. In July and August, we also raised around $2 million through our ATM offering. This is a facility we expect to continue to tap into opportunistically. We see great opportunities for us to pursue within our project portfolio that I mentioned, and at times we may tap into this tool when we feel it's appropriate. In the past weeks, the days where we were most active were naturally around the Inflation Reduction Act in the US. That drove higher market volumes, and we opportunistically dipped into those. That said, we continue to be in strategic partnership discussions of various types, which is of longer-term importance to the firm, and hopefully we can share more details of that later on. Next slide, please, Ben. In the second quarter, we recorded an operating loss of 4.8 million euros, of which 4 million euros are related to operating expenses. Of these, 1.9 million euros are related to personnel costs, and 1.3 million euros are related to non-recurring professional administration costs, as well as one-off annual costs related to annual company and statutory audits, filings, and related legal fees. We maintain our guidance of around €3 million per quarter of operational costs until year-end. We book €950,000 of share-based expenses. These are non-cash expenses and are related to restricted stock units and options awarded to fusion fuel personnel. As previously highlighted, this is a charge that will be recurring as it is amortized over the vesting period. We do intend to keep using securities with vesting clauses as a means to attract talent, reward staff and ensure alignment with shareholders. Therefore, a non-cash expense line related to these should be expected over the coming years. Each quarter, we need to recognize fair value movements on outstanding warrants. With the market movements in particular related to energy and growth stocks, we have a positive impact to note of 6.7 million euros. This is simply an accounting recognition and it is a non-cash item. In the quarter, we also booked a half million euro gain driven by positive FX movements in our cash and short-term positions. We also had an €170,000 charge related to our future fuel Spain joint venture and our share of those results. We ended the course over 10.6 million euros in our cash and cash equivalent instruments. As previously mentioned in the second half of 2021 and the first half of 2022, we made strategic and long-term purchase orders to secure our supply chain. With those deliveries now having taken place significantly, we expect these expenditures to significantly abate in the second half of the year. We close the quarter with 63 million euros of assets, of which 32 million euros are related to PPE assets, such as our EBR projects, our HypoSoul project containers, our Beneventor facility and our intellectual property. We also hold around 21 million euros of inventory, materials we have prepaid and receivables. Our receivables and second quarter driven by VAT to be recovered, which we have split out here, and our grants awarded. At the end of the second quarter, we continue to have the same number of outstanding shares. We had an increase of around 7,000 restricted stock units versus the first quarter related to instruments issued to certain new hires. In Q3, we will have some modest increase in the outstanding shares due to the ATM facility and some shares that will vest for employees. We have added this slide to provide transparency on the grants we are pursuing and the ones that have already been approved. This is an area that we are incredibly successful in pursuing and we have amassed a great portfolio of projects with substantial support. The numbers here exclude our IPSE submission as that project is so large that it would significantly distort the numbers. But rest assured, we're still pursuing it. And as a reminder, it is a project that is in total investment size more than 500 million euros. As you can see, we have made submissions for just under 80 million euros of grant financing. These are projects principally in Portugal, but also a few in Spain. 19 million euros of grants have already been approved. And of these, we have already submitted 3.5 million euros to be released. This number will grow as we continue to implement these projects. In the 60 million euros of other grant applications, we have the C5 Senus project in there. This is a grant we have been awarded, but we have not yet received confirmation of the value. We will communicate this as soon as we can. As we've noted before, we have a differentiated value proposition with both own technology and own projects being developed, creating substantial value. We have seen several projects from developers be abandoned even after being awarded grants. We're of the very few that are in actual development and implementation. This highlights the success of our multi-pronged approach and is the strategy we will continue to pursue in Iberia and other markets. Following slide. We continue to rapidly evolve our technology to keep us ahead of the curve. And on this slide, you can see the continuous evolution of our miniaturized electrolyzer, the Hevo. In fact, I have the four of them in front of me as well for those who can see in the small screen. When it was first created, when the Hevo was first created, a significant portion of our cost reduction came from simplifying the PEM design. We have maintained that simplification principle and not only further applied it to the HEVO, but also to the HEVO Solar overall. As you can see, we are reducing the number of HEVOs per HEVO Solar, which helps us drastically reduce the number of components, the piping required, the maintenance costs of a plant, and it also reduces the installation time and costs. This more powerful HEVO and the cost reductions related to our product evolution continue to position us at the forefront of green hydrogen in terms of cost competitiveness. As mentioned before, we completed an independent assessment of our technology and manufacturing process with Black & Veatch. And in addition, Tuv Sud is performing an ongoing track record analysis of our HEVO Solar, and it continues to beat our expectation in terms of hydrogen production performance. In addition to our HEVO evolution, We're also working on new and exciting technology advances, which we hope to be able to share with you in one of the upcoming updates. With this, I will pass now to Zach, who will give an update on our commercial efforts.
spk00: Sorry, I was having a little bit of internet difficulties. Hey, thanks, Frederico, and hello, everyone. From a commercial standpoint, our mandate is simple, to secure commitments for the full production of our Benevent Day facility in 2023 and beyond. Our goal is to confirm over 2,500 orders in 2023 and approximately 4,700 in 2024. We are concentrated on efforts in Portugal and are strategically expanding into other markets such as Spain, Italy, Greece, the United States, and Canada. Each project or geography goes through a detailed review to make sure it is a good fit for our technology, our strategy, and most importantly, something we're confident we can execute. To do this, we've implemented a multifaceted approach to deliver on our business plan, focusing on technology sales and developing our own projects in the mobility sector, as well as strategic industrial hubs. Our vision is to build a mobility backbone throughout Portugal and use this as a blueprint to build into other strategic markets in Southern Europe and North America. In parallel, we're also focused on being a major part of the solution in strategic and heavy industrial locations in Portugal and other markets we expand into. We have several third-party sales in our pipeline, seven of which are in more advanced stages of development, in total over 507 Hevo solar units. That represents over $25 million in potential revenue in 2023. Our expectation is for our current fusion fuel development projects to account for the balance of our production in 2023 and 2024. Almost all of our projects have grants, which make them more competitive to our customers from a pricing standpoint and financially attractive to investors. We've secured over 14 million in grants and plan to hear back shortly on additional programs, as Frederico mentioned, in C5 in Portugal and also the PERTE program in Spain, which we've already been notified of awards. As mentioned, we've sought to narrow our commercial focus to two strategic platforms, mobility and industrial decarbonization. We continue to focus on developing a mobility backbone in Portugal by providing turnkey solutions to the market. We have a number of mobility projects in Portugal in various stages of the development cycle and are looking to build on that template into other markets. Focusing on strategic industrial locations is the other key platform. And we believe Portugal is poised to play a critical role in addressing the energy crisis, which continues to plague all of Europe. And that starts with seen as Portugal. We are committed to being a leader in decarbonizing seen as industrial zone, but also ensuring we are positioned to capitalize on the hydrogen export opportunity. We recognize that a development focused approach is capital intensive. And as a result, we are working on multiple solutions to secure equity capital from infrastructure funds and exploring project financing alternatives. Next page. Fusion fuels competitive advantages are decentralized and scalable approach to green hydrogen production. Large centralized projects require substantial investment, not just in the electrolyzer itself, but also surrounding infrastructure such as pipelines, trucks, and other balance of plant equipment. This also takes significant time and creates additional complexities for large-scale centralized projects to secure permitting and financing to develop that additional infrastructure. We are seeing the cost of last mile logistics and distribution of hydrogen to be as much as $2 per kilogram. Most of the time goes unnoticed when you talk about levelized cost of hydrogen. Our approach is to co-locate our site on co-locate our system on site next to the end user and use our Hevo solar solution. Even at even at small sizes, it's competitive. This allows customers to not have to make very capital and time intensive bets on a centralized system. Instead, start small and grow with the market demand over time. This option doesn't exist in the market today and is needed in a nascent market like green hydrogen. As pioneers in green hydrogen, Fusion Fuel noticed the problem in the market with our customers and are providing a solution to let our customers grow with us and ease into the hydrogen ecosystem while offering the lowest possible levelized cost of hydrogen in the market, especially when you include avoided distribution costs. As previously noted, we're focused on two core markets, mobility and decarbonizing specific industrial hubs. First on mobility, we've learned many important lessons from our first project with Exalume, the largest refined products distribution company in Europe. The key takeaway from our experience thus far on Exloom is that we must not just offer our technology, but we must offer a solution to our customers, which can include supporting development, permitting, grant applications, construction, and operations of the overall facility. This experience has led us to offer customers several solutions in mobility, such as just selling technology as a solution, building the facility and selling them hydrogen, or building the entire hydrogen value chain and offering hydrogen as a service. This provides our customers multiple options to transition into the hydrogen ecosystem by even offering to not only include hydrogen production, but also includes the refueling station and the vehicles. We are establishing a network of companies to offer a suite of services, including trucks, forklifts, and buses to our customers. We are seeing substantial interest not just in Portugal, but throughout the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Greece, and are beginning to see interest in North America, particularly in light of the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act. Portugal, as I noted, is a strategic market for fusion fuel, and in order to make hydrogen a reality in 2023, we have focused to develop our own pipeline of projects to build out the hydrogen refueling infrastructure in Portugal. We're focused on building out a mobility backbone centered around major distribution hubs along the coast in Azambuja and Sines, as well as in Alves and Ebro. These are key areas of focus, and we plan to build off these locations to put green hydrogen production and refueling stations every 150 kilometers to connect Porto to the Algarve and Lisbon to Spain. We also have selectively been looking at working with municipalities throughout Portugal to offer solutions to them as well. and buses, and also looking at different aspects. The Senas region also is core to fusion fuel, as I noted. And it's not just fusion fuel, it's also Portugal's, it's also important for Portugal and fusion fuel's ambition for the domestic hydrogen market. Senas currently has one LNG terminal, as well as having a GALP refinery that consumes 60,000 tons per year of hydrogen, planned green ammonia export facilities, and other industrial customers. CNES is currently planning to build a hydrogen pipeline that will supply hydrogen to customers in CNES and potentially export to other markets. To date, we have secured 14 million grants for projects in CNES and are awaiting award of additional grants to help us achieve our target of 10,000 tons per year of green hydrogen production in the region. In summary, this represents over 3,700 Hibo solar units, which will be produced in 2023 and 2024. That's over 50% of our 2023 and 2024 production, and these projects will come online in 2024 and 2025. Our company continues to evaluate, negotiate, and develop opportunities in Spain, Italy, Greece, and North America to get the remaining orders of the balance of our 2023 and 2024 production. To continue to fill out our plane capacity for 2023 and beyond, we're not just focused on development projects, but also looking to provide solutions to our third party customers. We have combined over 500 Hivo Solar units of tech sales in advanced stages that are either signed, awaiting the award of a grant, or in negotiations to be signed. The ones we are awaiting to sign or receive grants are marked as confidential. As of now, our pipeline of textile projects is focused in Portugal, Spain, and Italy. We're actively evaluating opportunities in other markets as well. We're not just selling technology to our customers, but in many cases, we're also providing a turnkey solution, as I noted before. One point I'd like to highlight is that the grant requests that are being made are exclusively using our technology, which gives us the ability to secure these projects as they are awarded. Our approach allows us to not only make margin on our technology sale, but also the opportunity for additional revenue streams with the overall construction of the facility and revenue during operations while offering the best possible solution for that specific customer. Lastly, one of our core markets we're expanding into is North America. In the USA, the Inflation Reduction Act is a massive win for fighting climate change and accelerating the clean energy economy, specifically in green hydrogen. This is a true game changer for us and the rest of the hydrogen value chain. To focus specifically on fusion fuel, we qualify for the $3 per kilogram production tax credit or the 30% investment tax credit. The production tax credit can also be taken as cash payments via direct payments from the IRS. Fusion's technology is rapidly reducing its levelized cost of hydrogen to under $3 per kilogram before subsidies in 2023, and likely well below that in regions with superior solar radiance, such as California, Southern California, or Southwest USA. This combined with our decentralized approach allows us to be able to offer lower prices than gray hydrogen or diesel costs today after monetizing the production tax credits. Our team is working hard to build a large presence in North America. We're beginning to build out our team to give us the bench strength to aggressively enter this very important market. We are in active negotiations to secure projects and partnerships throughout North America. I cannot stress how big of an opportunity this is for the hydrogen market and for fusion fuel, especially due to our unique value proposition we can offer with our decentralized approach. We look forward to sharing more significant updates on this front over the coming months. I'll pass it back to you, Frederico.
spk03: Great. Thanks, Zach. And it promises to be a very exciting future updates given the all the US development and also the technology development. So I hope you also join us in our next one. Before moving to our Q&A, I'll briefly recap on our core milestones for this year. To help understand where the progress we've made, we've highlighted which items are completed, which ones are in progress, and which ones have not yet started as of end of Q2. On production, we went live with a Hebrew production, Benevente, remind everyone that is about 120 megawatts of electrolyzer production capacity for next year. How much we produce depends on where the projects stand in licensing. Given the rapid evolution of the units in front of me, we will try to always be producing for the projects as we need to put them into the ground. The rest of the production lines in Benevente are expected to go live in Q1 and Q2 of next year. On the commercial side, we've also secured the grant for the Benevente facility. So on the production side, that is very well on the progress side as of already first half of the year. On the commercial side, Zach has already covered the great progress both in securing the orders, projects, while securing the related grants, and the very exciting developments happening in the US. On technology, we continue to evolve and maintain our leadership position. In the second half of the year, we've started designing the oxygen capture setup, and we intend to prototype this in 2023. So therefore, we'll be able to capture not only and sell or position ourselves as not only green hydrogen production, but also green oxygen production. As teased before, we hope to share some of the new innovations we've been cooking in one of our upcoming updates. Project development and implementation is well underway for several projects. As we've noted several times, we're actually making green hydrogen a reality. Safety is a central piece of our culture and a point that we've been instilling across all of the areas of the organization. And this will continue throughout our time at the firm. Overall, the momentum we see within the firm and in the whole hydrogen market has been incredible. And we're excited with the opportunity we have in front of us. Now, I'll pass over to Ben to moderate some Q&A. Thank you.
spk02: Thanks, Federico. Looks like we've got quite a few questions coming through. I'm getting some feedback on my end. I'll work through some questions via email as well. So let's let us kick this off with some questions from from Chris Zung at Weber Research on the C5 grants. If you could talk a little bit about the approval process and what determines the final approval amount. I guess that's probably a question for Frederico.
spk03: So on the C5, C5 is a component of grants that is mobilizing agendas. So these are many companies involved in these programs. There's around 90 or so companies that are involved in the discussions with the government. So only when all of those are finalized. but we have the confirmation of our final value. So we hope that that is within September. We hope to be communicating, but I say the timeline is not within our control. We have already been confirmed that we will receive an award. The question now is the value.
spk02: A couple questions on grant funding here. So for Benevente, what other milestones need to be met before you can invoice the remaining three and a half million euros? How do the tax credits work? Is it dollar for dollar or euro for euro, rather, that reduces taxable income, or is it taxes against profits?
spk03: So I'll answer those in reverse order. So it's tax against profits with the company, and we have until 2032 to make use of those. And on the what's required to take the others, it's a proportion of spend. So in line with our spending for Benevente, we are able to ask for reimbursements and parts of that spending. So as part of the production lines that I mentioned before, so in Q1 and Q2, starts to be delivered, we expect to also be submitting the reimbursement requests for parts of that spend.
spk02: I'll skip to a different question and circle back to a couple more from Weber Research related to Benevente. If demand increases significantly, at what speed would it be possible to ramp up production?
spk03: So I'll take this as well. So this is at the moment with the first production lines already designed and ready, it would likely take around a year to be able to develop the second and third production lines of copy paste of the existing ones. However, and as I teased before, we are working in some. New solutions where we believe the ramp up and our ability to scale could be faster and also cheaper. So hopefully, if not the next quarter, potentially the one after, we will be sharing that with you all.
spk02: Thanks, Frederico. Let's get Zach involved a little bit here. Slide 19 of the presentation refers to an EPC turnkey project. Can you talk about what that means? Are those potential owned projects or are those are those technology sale projects?
spk00: Thanks, Ben. So they are technology sales. We mean EPC. And one of the slides we're offering to support in grants, grant applications, development, permitting, and also includes building the entire project. So all balance of plant equipment, not just EVO solar technology.
spk02: Thanks. On that same slide for the tech sales, it looks like the cost per Hevo Solar varies from the implied cost rather varies from 31K for the two Portugal projects to 44K for the one in Italy. Can you help us understand how the pricing works and how the projects may differ from one another?
spk00: Thanks. So on some projects, we have additional equipment such as compression, storage and other balance of plant equipment that drives up the cost of the overall system that's embedded in that cost that is noted, which is why it's higher on a per unit basis.
spk02: Great question here for our chairman. So we received a question alluding to Nikola as a potential partner or customer in the US market. So while we can't touch on any individual companies or counterparts, perhaps you can share your perspective on the strategic partnership process and how you and the executive team are thinking about it.
spk01: Yeah, so as we've said on numerous occasions, we're a small company today. with approaching a very large opportunity. And we understand that our growth trajectory can steepen materially with partners who have either financial or operational scale. So we've been in conversations with potential strategic partners, whether they're technology providers. We've mentioned conversations with Toshiba, which are ongoing, with companies that might be interested in our HEVO solar solution and deploying it in their businesses, or Partners who are interested in our project pipeline and and might be interested in co-investing with us or or purchasing projects for infrastructure funds. So all of those are conversations that that are ongoing in a process that is a formal process. If you will step into their shoes for a moment, you could imagine that they would probably want independent third party validation of our technology, of our production process. confirmation of the efficiency of the electrolyzers. And that's something that we understood. We went out and have obtained that confirmation through the Black & Veatch and the TUV process. And we have been able to now deliver that to potential strategic partners who we've been in conversation with. Once again, putting yourselves in their shoes, the shoes of an interested financial party, you could imagine that the size of the grants that we might receive for projects has a major impact on what the economics of those projects are like. And C5, in that regard, C5 is an important one. It's the single largest of the grants that we have received so far. But we are in, as Frederico described, in these final stages of negotiation stages. I would think that without offering any information that would compromise our ongoing conversations, it would seem reasonable that These various strands of a strategic partnership evaluation process are coming together. We have not wanted to have any one party too far out in front. of others in order to be able to present our board with multiple options to choose from. And all I would kind of conclude with is that this is a process that we would hope to be able to provide significantly additional disclosure on before year end and just to maybe touch on what might be an adjacent question, which would be, how do we finance both our ongoing operation and these potential projects? And what I would call out to folks is we have a balance sheet that has no debt, significant assets, a factory in Benevente that is debt-free. We have claims against or receivables from government entities, whether those be VAT receivables, whether those are grants receivable. So we have significant assets that would be attractive for debt financing. We also have the potential for raising capital at the project level from financial partners. We have the potential to raise equity at the holding company level. I view all of those as live options for us, and the board will determine which and most likely what a mix of all of those would look like to finance both our ongoing operations, as Federico referred to, roughly a €3 million per quarter fund, Operating expenses and then significant investment for project development. So as a company, we're very comfortable with our financial position and the options available to us.
spk02: Thanks. So let's stick with, we've got a couple of questions here on the ATM facility. And so we'll stick on that capital strategy theme. Talked about the company being undervalued relative to its peers. Isn't it counterintuitive to use the ATM and further dilute shareholders? At this point, would it be better to uh either get a big partner on board or concentrate on the tech sale portfolio with a a faster return on limited equity instead of potentially using the atm to finance the company's production thoughts on that so i can jump in on that one so naturally and to what jeffrey alluded and also zach has mentioned given our project portfolio we have a massive runway ahead of us
spk03: and we need to think strategically on how we will cover that. We have several options available to us, The ATM, as I mentioned before, is something that we will look to tap into opportunistically and where we see the volumes of interest. And also it's a facility that allows us to find the right partnership opportunity and not be forced into something in a rush. So we do not want to slow down the activities. The ramp up in the industry is massive. We see an opportunity to take an outsized market share given our maturity. and we want to push for that. And so this is just another tool in our box. And as I mentioned before, the IRA announcement in the U.S. provided market movements that we could actually opportunistically tap into.
spk01: Ben, I just wanted to add one or two other thoughts. The first is that, as Frederico mentioned, we have built up an inventory of both key components and finished goods that will enable us to move quickly on projects that where grants have been received and where they need to begin construction by a deadline or else those grants are lost. So there are indeed projects that we are looking at that have been brought to us because the clock is ticking and the developers haven't been able to move complete to get the, the equipment necessary to complete the projects in time. We want it to be in a position and we are now in a position to, to move quickly on projects like that. But as Frederico said, having, having now built up that, uh, our inventory, our spend on, uh, on inputs will decline materially in the back half. So I, uh, in answer to that question about, isn't it better to focus on tech sales? I think that going forward, we are now positioned to not need to be building, to be investing in working capital, something that we did proactively choose to do in the first part of the year. And secondarily, I will acknowledge that the timing of the receipt of some of the grant funding has been a little bit slower than we had anticipated. This is all very new for the governments that are involved in trying to encourage development of the green hydrogen industry. And it has taken them a little longer than I think they would have expected and then we expected, both on the grant approval process, but also once grants have been approved on funding. And we think that that... that lag is something that that should be, uh, The government should be catching up on that. But we are also, as I mentioned, exploring options for getting debt financing against some of those grants and receivables. So that, too, should reduce our need for short-term funding, which an ATM can be another opportunistic source of.
spk02: Great let's do one last question on on financing maybe maybe for zach here and last quarter's call we described there being a choice between partnering to obtain capital versus using. Our own on on fusion field projects which must have which much about with much of our pipeline being company on development projects and no announcement yet of partners are you now leaning towards using your own capital for these projects.
spk00: Thanks, Ben. That's a great question. We should provide some clarity, too. So I noted on the first slide that I was speaking to that we recognize this is Jeffrey and Frederica just stated. We recognize this is a capital intensive set of projects and we are actively in discussions. and looking at alternatives with infrastructure funds and other equity sources to fund our development pipeline. So those structures will allow us to use third party capital to fund the majority of the capital cost, which will reduce the stress on our balance sheet going forward.
spk02: Thanks, Zach. Let's pivot over to our cost advantage. There's a question around scale. One would expect that even a modular technology such as our own would have a lower levelized cost for a larger scale project than a very small one. That's certainly the case for solar farms, despite the modularity of solar panels. When we describe our ability to produce small sub one megawatt projects at low cost, would you estimate that there is no increased levelized cost of hydrogen even at this small size?
spk00: The question then is, are there any additional costs?
spk02: Or the flip side is, I guess, can you talk about the economies of scale that we do or do not benefit from as we develop larger projects in our portfolio?
spk00: Charles, I'll take that one for Rico. We, like other, our peers would benefit from balance of plant equipment on compression or storage or purification as you kind of scale into an opportunity. But we're, as far as the technology on our electrolyzer, we've been able to prove even with as small as an Evra at 15 units,
spk02: that we think that we could uh we could compete at the prices that we stated in our presentation related to that uh i guess what and i i recognize that this will this will depend on the the specific application uh or or uh use case at what price per kilogram uh is is fusion fuels technology and fusion fuels green hydrogen uh profitable
spk00: Yeah, that's a great question. So that's also a very loaded question, right? It depends on the market. So let's unpack that a little bit. So let's look at Europe, right? As we noted, we're really focused in Portugal. If you look at the gas blending, one, at four bar, we can inject directly into the gas grid, right? So that reduces the amount of balance of plant equipment that we would need. That market today, if you look at natural gas, 10-year strip, plus carbon tax avoidance is north of $4.75 a kilogram. So we noted that our levelized cost is becoming around $3. So there's definitely a margin there to make selling into just spot pricing on the gas grid, as an example. Mobility, which is a key market for us, is as high as close to $8 to $10 a kilogram. at the dispenser level. However, that requires us to put compression to get to 350 to 700 bar, requires storage, but we're still able to be profitable and be below what the current market pricing is being offered today. And then looking into U.S. and other markets, we're seeing in select markets, not including even the IRA incentives, we're seeing California and other markets that we can compete heads up on mobility by just providing our technology and being under the current market pricing.
spk02: It's a great segue to this next question. Given the cost advantage both in the EU, even without grants, given that the energy market and the US with grants, why does it seem to take so long for the market to materialize, particularly in the EU? One would think that with the current obvious cost advantage, that would translate to firm orders in fairly short order.
spk00: I think, you know, industry wide, as I noted, everybody's leaning really heavy into doing large, large scale central centralized projects that requires additional land, additional permitting, additional complexities. Right. So, you know, binary, binary risks are approach and what we're doing. we're able to kind of reduce the balance of plant risk. And I think really for us, we're seeing a lot of momentum recently as we've just got our story out there more and are really pushing to really show people they can come to Evra, giving them a Black & Veatch study, showing them the tube study, and really being able to explain that our technology is reaching a certain level of commercialization that can be competitive even without brands. And we are starting to see As I noted, other opportunities in Italy, Spain, Portugal, and North America.
spk03: Zach, I'd like to just add that this is a nascent industry in a way, and there's been significant sort of progress made more recently in changing the legislation around licensing and so on. And I'll just recall how long it took us to get all the licenses and so on for EverUp. And then as a cause of our overall process, there was a change in legislation around licensing. So this is going to happen with several markets. And this is one of the reasons why things have taken just longer also in Europe. The legislative regulatory environment is catching up now with the market developments.
spk01: I'd just like to offer one more practical element, which is there's a huge amount of funding available. If you are considering installing a green hydrogen plant and your choice is pulling the trigger today, and knowing that the project is economically viable, but also knowing that if you pull the trigger today and go ahead with that project, it is highly unlikely that the government is going to provide the grant. The grant is an incentive for companies to move ahead. And so people are understandably hanging back in the hopes of being able to win grants and then move ahead with projects. And I think that as these grants start to break loose, you will see projects move more quickly. But quite frankly, I understand why the clients that we are talking to are wanting to wait on the finalization of grants before committing to projects.
spk02: Thanks. Frederico, you mentioned the permitting process for Eberra. If you could just touch on, provide a quick update on where things stand with Eberra.
spk03: So with Eberra, we have all of the permits, we have license for production, hydrogen license to connect to the grid. We are, the payload fuel cell is ready to be connected. We are waiting for just the Portuguese electrical company to do the actual physical connection to the grid. We actually expect to start, as we expect that to be shortly, we will start producing into the storage tanks, potentially as early as next week, if not the week after. And with that, as soon as we're connected to the grid, we will start producing electricity to sell into the grid too. We are in the clear. We literally now need just the physical plug-in to the electrical grid here in Portugal. And a little bit before that, we will start producing to fill up the storage tanks.
spk02: Thanks, Frederico. A couple of questions here about the German market, and I guess perhaps more broadly, Northern European or Northern latitudes or longitudes. Isn't the benefit of the avoidance of transportation costs limited to sunny countries or regions? So for countries like Germany or Northern Europe, you would only have the benefits of cheaper production. I think this is more about clarifying the choices we are making about the markets in which we're going to play.
spk00: That's correct, Ben. We are focused on markets with strong solar radiance to be able to offer the best advantage to our own projects as well as to our customers. So that's why, as I noted, we're focused on Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, and then, you know, specific areas within the United States and Canada that have good solar radiance.
spk02: Yep, thanks. I would just, if I may, I would add that, you know, what we would say is that our technology not only produces more green hydrogen in areas with greater solar irradiance, but it produces that green hydrogen more cheaply. So, in these early days, the supply-constrained days, there are discrete choices to be made about where and when, I suppose, to allocate the scarce hevosolar units. So, we want to be allocating those to the regions where we can extract the most value from those deployments. A couple quick questions here before we run out of time. How many employees do we have at this time?
spk03: We have 140. Obviously, significantly driven by our production facility in Benevente, a relatively large, roughly a third is the Benevente production facility or so, a little bit around a third is our R&D and EPC teams, and a third is the rest of the commercial and administrative teams.
spk02: And then sticking with Benevente, you mentioned on the milestone slide, we mentioned that Benevente full go-live is still in progress. Can you touch on the process of building out that facility and what that cadence will look like in the near term?
spk03: Sure. So we have our electrolyzer production is the one that's gone live. The next two lines to arrive are the production of the solar concentrator module and the solar concentrator small unit for those who followed us before with a little sort of prism on top. These are two units that the current partner manufacturing facility can produce already. So we can... service the projects that need those in the ground already from the current production facility. And that's why they are less urgent in terms of the go-live, the critical go-live with the HEVO. We expect the line for the small solar concentrator unit, the very small piece of the prism in Q1. And in Q2, the module line. And then we have the full lines live and with the production output of 120 megawatts of full production capacity in Beneventi.
spk02: Okay, thanks, Federico. So it's the top of the hour. That will do it for our second quarter webcast. Thanks to everyone who's joined. If you have additional questions or if we didn't get around to answering your question, feel free to reach out to me and the IR team at ir.fusionfuel.eu. And we look forward to seeing you all again at our next update.
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