Draft:Origin Materials

Origin Materials is a carbon negative material company in the chemical industry headquartered in West Sacramento, California. The company’s mission is to enable the world’s transition to sustainable materials.

Origin developed a patented process to convert cellulose biomass to the basic chemical building blocks used to make industrial and consumer products. Waste, byproducts, and offcuts from sustainably harvested timber is the preferred feedstock, but agricultural waste, cardboard, and other ligneous biomass can also be used.

They are focused on providing carbon negative materials to partner companies to help them meet their carbon reduction goals. Companies around the world have set tiered goals to reduce their carbon footprint following the Paris Agreement. The first milestone include a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, with the end goal of achieving net zero by 2050. These ambitious goals are considered “one of the greatest challenges humankind has faced” by the United Nations. While more than a third of the world’s largest companies are now committed to net zero on paper, most are not on track to concretely achieve those goals.

Origin’s partners include Nestle, Danone, Pepsi, Mitsubishi, Ford, Revlon, and others. Some of these companies have more aggressive carbon reduction goals than the Paris Agreement and are eager to find carbon neutral alternatives to their current materials. As one of the world’s largest sectors, the chemical industry is one of the most significant energy consumers and top producers of CO2.

To date Origin has produced limited quantities of their materials from their two pilot plants. Their first commercial plant was opened in June 2023.

Early Years
In 2008 John Bissell, Ryan Smith, and Casey McGrath, seniors at the University of California Davis, entered and won the EPA P3 (People, Prosperity and the Planet) student design competition. They received $75,000 in grant funding to continue exploring their technology. After graduating they founded Micromidas Inc. and continued to focus on converting wastewater to PET plastic through a biological process.

Micromidas began raising funding in 2010 to begin construction of their pilot plant in West Sacramento. Building on the research of UC Davis Chemistry Professor Mark Mascal, they shifted to a new conversion process. They developed a one-step chemical process to replace the biological process, and utilized cellulose inputs. This change reduced processing time to be within minutes instead of days, and produced additional chemical intermediaries. Origin subsequently procured a series of patent families for this technology.

By 2014 Micromidas had raised over $25 million to build the pilot-scale plant in West Sacramento and had successfully created PET plastic.

Micromidas began doing business as Origin Materials in 2017.

Production
In March, 2017, Danone and Nestlé Waters joined with Origin to form the NaturALL Bottle Alliance. Together, their goal is to provide PET plastic bottles made from bio-based material at commercial scale. A year later, PepsiCo also joined the NaturALL Bottle Alliance.

In June of 2017, Origin announced Sarnia, Ontario, Canada as the site of its first commercial plant. This plant, known as Origin 1 (O1), would demonstrate their products could be manufactured at a commercial scale. Construction of O1 began in 2018 and experienced some construction delays due to supply chain challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2020, Origin committed to the commercial manufacture of the sustainable chemical 5-chloromethyl furfural (CMF). According to Bioplastics Magazine, “5-chloromethyl furfural is a highly flexible raw material for many chemistries including para-xylene, purified terephthalic acid (PTA), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), as well as numerous commodity and specialty chemicals through its derivatives, including furandicarboxylic acid (FDCA).” Origin’s chemical process produces carbon negative CMF and other valuable chemical products.

In February of 2022, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and Origin Materials announced their second, larger manufacturing facility, Origin 2 (O2), would be built on the 150-acre LED-Certified Parks Geismar site in Ascension Parish, outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Origin announced it began startup of O1, the world’s first commercial CMF plant, on June 27, 2023, and in July the plant was opened.

Public Company
Following his tenure at Shazam, Rich Riley joined Origin Materials in 2020 as Co-CEO alongside John Bissell.

In February of 2021, Origin and Artius Acquisition Inc. announced their definitive agreement to combine their businesses  and went public on NASDAQ on June 25th with the ticker symbol “ORGN.”