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Moving to Slide 14, in February we announced a strategic partnership with Avantium, a leading technology company in renewable chemistry, to accelerate the mass production of FDCA and PEF for advanced chemicals and plastics. The partnership aims to bring together the strengths of Origin's patented carbon-negative technology platform, which turns the carbon found in sustainable wood residues into useful materials including chloromethylfurfural, or CMF, and its derivatives, with Avantium's YXY Technology, which can be used to convert Origin's CMF derivatives into FDCA, the chemical building block for the polymer PEF.
The partnership represents a potential breakthrough in the commercialization of PEF, a polymer that we've been excited about for a long time. PEF offers an attractive combination of performance characteristics for packaging and other applications, including strong gas barrier properties, high heat resistance, improved degradability, and full recyclability. PEF can also serve as a replacement for glass and aluminum, offering superior break protection and inexpensive light-weighting for shipping, making it well-suited for oxygen-sensitive products like carbonated sodas, protein shakes, and teas. The PEF produced is expected to be 100% plant-based, fully recyclable, have attractive unit economics, and to offer a significantly reduced carbon footprint, with superior strength, thermal properties, barrier properties, and degradability compared to today's widely used petroleum-based materials. We see an approximately $225 billion TAM for PEF across apparel, packaging, and PET applications.
Furandicarboxylic acid, or FDCA, the precursor to PEF, has many additional applications beyond PEF. Some have called FDCA the sleeping giant, named for its potentially massive impact across a broad range of industrial molecules including polyesters, polyamides, polyurethanes, coating resins, plasticizers, and other chemical products. At the molecular level, the structure of FDCA is kinked and, consequently, it doesn't lie flat. When FDCA is assembled on a plane, it tends not to internally rotate. It turns out that a polymer's ability to rotate, or not, affects its functionality in important ways. One of those functions is gas barrier. When the molecules of a polymer can spin freely, gas molecules can pass through it like a revolving door. Since FDCA has a kink, it cannot rotate, and gas cannot pass through it as easily. The structure of FDCA also changes the way it crystalizes. When FDCA is incorporated into a polymer, it crystalizes differently than a planar molecule like PET, and this feature allows us to change the applications that we can consider for polyesters. These are just some of the reasons why we are excited not just about PEF, but about incorporating FDCA into polyesters more broadly.
Regarding our relationship with Avantium, to accelerate the mass production of these materials, the partnership includes a licensing agreement providing Origin with access to Avantium's process technology for making FDCA and a conditional offtake agreement under which Avantium will supply Origin Materials with FDCA and PEF from its plants while we incorporate Avantium's process technology into the supply chain for future plants. By combining our platform, which can produce the FDCA precursor CMF and its derivatives from sustainable wood residues, with Avantium's YXY process technology, we aim to do something truly special in the polymers and materials industry at unit economics that work for our customers and us.