By Tony Duncan, CEO
As CEO and Co-founder of Circa, it continues to be a great privilege to be part of this innovative and pioneering company as we move closer to replacing toxic petrochemical solvents with safer, more sustainable alternatives.
Today we publish our annual report. In 2022, we stayed on a steady path of commercialising, scaling and building our internal capacity. We’ve continued to build partnerships, enter into new commercial agreements and we’ve established the Circa Renewable Chemistry Institute at the University of York, led by our Scientific Advisor, Professor James Clark.
We’ve hired more extremely qualified people into senior positions. To steward us through the next steps in our commercialisation, we brought on board a senior market and strategy professional from the petrochemical industry.
Nick Smith brings decades of truly global experience from working with industry giants Bayer and Covestro and he has boundless enthusiasm for what we are doing at Circa.
We also recruited Philipp Morgenthaler to Head of Manufacturing. Philipp has considerable global experience in building and operating manufacturing plants and provides focus and expertise for our developing engineering team.
We added two new industry players to our Board in 2022 – Martin Laudenbach from the chemical industry and Elise Fahlén from the finance sector.
Partnerships have always been a central part of the Circa strategy. It’s how we managed to develop, test and learn so much about our product over the past ten years.
In the last year, we have entered into new partnerships with Valmet as a long-term supplier of critical plant equipment, EKATO, a globally-recognised manufacturer of hydrogenation equipment, as well as a distribution and offtake partnership with European and UK distributor OQEMA.
We’ve made a lot of progress and at the same time, there is always work to be done. Step by step, we are building a Circa team that is aligned to a common goal and that will compete in complex global markets. Today we’re shipping product from our FC5 facility in Tasmania and our next plant ReSolute, which will produce 1,000 tonnes annually in France, will come online in 2024.
We have to make smart choices on where we focus our attention especially when the market potential continues to surprise us in a positive way. As a small team, we don’t have the luxury of going down the rabbithole after every possibility and every decision we make to enter a market has to be looked at carefully.
We’re fortunate to have a leadership team, Board and shareholders who support our vision wholeheartedly.
At Circa, we are changing chemistry for good. It takes hard work and dedication to change existing systems and bring a safer, more sustainable alternative to market at scale. We are committed to the challenge and will keep sharing our journey with you.