Emory Climate Talks - Dr. Jason Keiper, Stepan Company

Hello everyone, and it's great to be with you today for the Climate Talk. Thank you also Professor Saikawa and Emory for the invitation to participate today. So today I'll talk about sustainability from the perspective of a specialty chemical company, and we sit in the middle of a value chain, and I'll talk about what that means a little bit later. But first, I'd like to thank everyone for joining to engage on this topic. It's kind of a long-winded title, so I appreciate you even taking this step of joining us today, and hopefully we'll have a great Q&A later on as well. So I hope everyone can now see my screen, and I'll do my best to navigate the slides while we're going along. First, just a little bit of background, and thank you Arie for the kind introduction. So a little bit more background on myself: my wife Bessie and I are graduates of Emory University, and we received our PhDs from the Department of Chemistry. I'll speak quite a lot today about the topic of surfactants. If you had to ask who I am or what I am from a science perspective, what's my identity, I would say I'm a surfactant person. It's been something I've had the privilege and opportunity to work on since my undergraduate days and my time at Emory as well. A little bit about surfactants just to connect to my background: surfactants are surface active agents. These are chemical compounds that have both an affinity for water as well as an affinity for oil. So if you look at the cartoon on the right-hand corner, the circles being a part of a chemical that has an affinity for water and then the lines, the squiggly lines, affinity for oil or something other than water — that's what a surfactant is in a really cartoonish way. I've had the opportunity since my time at Emory and onward to really work in research and development and product development having to do with surfactants. These are molecules that self-assemble, and they're used in a wide range of critical applications globally: for cleaning, for disinfection, and very visibly recently to help deliver active ingredients for vaccines. So sometimes you don't think about the importance of these types of chemicals, but they really are everywhere and are important to sustain a lot of applications in our society. A couple other notes: you see that green image right in the middle — that's actually what we would call a liposome where there is a fluorescent marker, and these surfactant molecules essentially make an empty shell, a type of empty cell to think in other ways. This is a mimic of how researchers can use surfactants to study biochemistry as well as the biophysics of cell walls, and that was part of my research at Emory. On the right-hand side, there's another way that surfactants can self-assemble in actually supercritical CO2. So it's a really fascinating and fantastic area of research, and again I'm blessed to be part of this type of research throughout my academic and industrial career. I've also been really fortunate to work in areas of science at institutions and companies that have fantastic and inspiring people. At Emory, I was part of Fred Menger's group, now emeritus. I work with Jody Simone, formerly of UNC, on the supercritical CO2 work. And I've been very fortunate to be part of Stepan Company twice in my career, as Arie noted, based outside of Chicago, and then spent time with a great team at Syngenta between that. An important part of my job currently is our sustainability program, and as Arie mentioned, Stepan's partnership with Emory and the Resilience and Sustainability Collaboratory is something that we're really proud of. We're proud of the association and really pleased with the work and engagement that we've had so far with the Emory RSC team, and we really look forward to supporting the work that that forum is going to progress. So just a little bit more: Arie asked me to talk just briefly about my career journey since Emory, and I just want to summarize a little bit. The way I kind of reflect back and see it, I think I've had the opportunity to move from individual challenges — making pure molecules, developing test methods, writing papers, validating hypotheses on narrow scientific topics — to move on to really developing products and making things that work better, being part of collaborative teams to improve technologies from what exists. And now really working with teams that have to do all of that but also making things more sustainable and providing environmental and social benefits that will be lasting. I suspect this will be where I land for the rest of my career, however long that will be. But I really just encourage everyone, and especially younger scientists, to think about the broader implications of the research and development work that you do, the exploration which sometimes can really be very highly personal and introspective. But there's a lot of satisfaction, I think, that you'll get with really bringing that together with the greater good for future generations. So that's just a little bit about me and my journey. I'm happy to talk more about that later on as well. So on to the main focus of today's Climate Talk. I want to first just bring out what are specialty chemicals. You know, we hear every day about the serious issues of climate change, how corporations and institutions are trying to develop goals and viable plans to address emissions, reduce energy consumption, find cleaner alternatives to products and industries that have contributed to our current challenges. From a chemical industry perspective, we further hear a lot about the societal and environmental impact of companies that are either at the interface with consumers — so you think about pharmaceutical or consumer goods companies — or the environmental impact of upstream chemical manufacturers that are involved in extracting materials or converting those materials and commodities like petroleum, natural gas, and palm oil. But I'd like to talk today about companies like Stepan that are in the middle of the chemical value chain. The value chain is progressively taking those commodity or basic materials and each step converting them to something that has higher value as they move towards end use. We sit in the middle of the chemical value chain, in between those two ends of the spectrum that maybe you most often think about or are more familiar with. There are some unique challenges and opportunities that we have as manufacturers of specialty chemicals and intermediates. Again, we're not household names — Stepan and some of our peer companies are not necessarily household names — but we play an important role in this value chain, providing products that are used across a wide array of applications, some of which I'll talk about in the next slides. These companies like Stepan have a very important role to play in our system with their future. In this slide, I'm trying to depict in a very generalized way what the chemical value chain looks like. I provide up top a definition of specialty chemicals. One of the main things to think about is that specialty chemicals are really a diverse area of the chemicals value chain and chemical production, but it sits in between what you see on the left-hand side of the slide: upstream raw materials like palm oil or soybean oil that you're familiar with, natural gas, petroleum. Companies that then take that and convert into basic chemicals — things like ethylene and fatty acids and vegetable oils that are extracted from those commodities. We sit between those groups and then the companies that convert products or formulations into consumer products or industrial products that package them, that ship them in distribution across the world in various geographies, and eventually get to the end users: consumers, folks who use industrial products with chemistry to coat paints or build buildings, farmers who use agricultural products to improve the yield of their crops. Specialty chemicals companies like Stepan are in that middle, and we convert those products — essentially translate the very basic chemicals that don't have a lot of functionality necessary to having functionality that would be useful in those consumer and industrial products. I'll share some examples of the type of chemistry that we practice a little bit later on. So again, being in the middle there provides a lot of opportunities to influence what happens in that value chain, but also again a key theme to just keep in mind for today is we also have a lot of pressures and challenges that come with both the upstream side of things from the sustainability perspective as well as the expectations of our customers and end users in society for what our specialty chemicals and our products may impact. So I want to talk a little bit on this slide about some of those pressures. There's significant overlap, and I recognize that it's much more complex than depicted here, but I hope that this represents and is able to depict some of the challenges that are seen across the chemical value chain. On the left-hand side, when you think about commodities, the starting point of raw materials historically, when we think about accessing palm or using agricultural materials as commodities or chemical processing, there's the questions of food versus fuel and certainly human and labor rights as we see in many parts of the world and how those chemicals or how those commodities are accessed in the supply chain. There's certainly land, water, and environmental impact that you think about with crop-based commodities as well as petroleum and the influence on the environment. As you move further up the value chain, basic chemicals converters and manufacturers have key concerns that include process safety. There have been in the news recently several manufacturing site incidents in Europe and the U.S. that have raised significant concerns not only for human safety but also on environmental outcomes in the land and water surrounding those manufacturing, often very large manufacturing sites. I'll talk a little bit about greenhouse gas emissions, and I'll focus on this slide here to give everyone a sense of in the United States what the greenhouse gas emissions profile looks like for the chemical industry. On the left-hand side, there's data from the U.S. EPA on emissions reported in the years 2011-2019 for various basic chemical processing as well as further downstream processing, represented more or less in the yellow line there. One thing just to point out is this is some pretty significant emissions that we're talking about here, especially focused on some of the commodity and basic chemical conversions and processes that take place. On the right-hand side is data from the American Chemistry Council, a little bit of an infographic that shows the greenhouse gas as well as the financial impact of the chemicals industry in the U.S. I'd just like to note for the greenhouse gases, the chemical industry is a non-trivial contributor, and you can see that the energy use in processing chemicals is actually the most significant contributor to the total emissions. This is just something that highlights the complexity of thinking about energy and emissions in a more holistic way — it's not so much what's coming out of the stacks, so to speak, that is contributing to the emissions; the energy it takes to carry out chemical processing and the other emissions related with production also have a role to play. So I just want to share some of this background just to give you a sense of the contribution of chemical manufacturing to greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and a little bit of the breakdown of where it comes from in the processing. I go back to this slide thinking about the customers and users downstream of specialty chemicals. Companies like Stepan, our customers who turn our products with other components into formulated goods, take part into the emerging e-commerce network and get products in the hands of people who use them in industrial or consumer applications. You see a different spectrum of pressures that they're under. I think you're probably familiar — everyone here is probably familiar with some of these: plastics and packaging, the addiction on plastics in society to carry goods and the challenges of how we recycle and reuse currently in many parts of the world at a very low rate; water and energy use, this is something that does cut across the value chain, but when you think about laundry and washing clothes, what are the more efficient ways that water and energy use can be applied versus our historical and current state; and then when you think about consumer goods and goods that are used for household applications and industrial applications, they have to move and they need to be transported across distribution channels by rail, by car, and then you see what has happened with e-commerce — Amazon trucks, UPS trucks, FedEx trucks are ubiquitous, so there's fuel, there's a lot of concerns about emissions that come from that additional transport that takes place. On the right-hand side, you could see what are the concerns at end use or end of life for the products that are part of the chemical value chain: biodegradation — so you think about consumer products or products that cannot be recycled or reused, what is their environmental fate, do they further degrade into microplastics, which is really getting a lot of attention especially in Europe and that's going to be again an area that globally is going to be of a growing concern as well as regulation; and also product safety — are the products that are being used by consumers safe, what is their profile, what are their long-term effects. All of these are sustainability pressures that hit across the value chain, and the point I want to make about specialty chemicals is really we fall under the influence and the challenges from all parts of the value chain to hopefully make improvements in a more favorable environmental and societal impact, but all of this comes to us in one form or the other either in our supply chain upstream or how our products can influence the outcomes downstream. I would like to make mention of the topic of circularity. What I show in this slide is really linear, and I'll talk a little bit more about circularity and one of the projects and product areas that we're focused on at Stepan a bit later on. There's a lot of attention in the chemical value chain to have a greater ability to recycle and reprocess materials for multiple useful physical or chemical lives. For simplicity, I'm just showing that this is the value chain in linear form, but when you think about some products that specialty chemicals manufacturers like Stepan produce, there's no simple or aggregated way of recovering materials to support circularity when you think about shampoo or dishwasher detergent or coatings for painting and so forth. They will have an environmental fate, and it's not easy on a product basis or certainly on a molecular basis to recover them back into a circular stream. So when you think about the right-hand side of this slide, biodegradation, product safety, environmental fate become all the more important because that ability to reuse and be part of a circular economy is not easy to accomplish. So I'd like to make a couple of summary points here. First, there are diverse pressures and challenges to improve the environmental and societal impact of the benefits of chemicals across the value chain, and that's going to require innovation, investment, and partnership. Second, specialty chemicals companies perhaps have some of the highest level of complexity to address these issues, but we also have significant opportunity to influence them downstream if our products, operations, and business models can respond to emerging needs as we see them continue to evolve. So a few other challenges on specialty chemicals: first, carbon sourcing. For companies like Stepan, what will the future of raw materials be? How will we continue to make decisions on food versus fuel for bio-based raw materials? Will chemical recycling and repurposing be successful and be done across geographies? There are sustainability tradeoffs — what if you have a petroleum-derived product that provides high performance and lower use rates, lower energy usage downstream — is that more environmentally friendly than bio-based solutions that don't perform as well? There are supply chain limitations — raw materials with good environmental profiles may be available, but costs or logistics may not be favorable for a company and their manufacturing distribution network. Green solutions don't always mean products will work. We'll talk a little bit about product development and design later on, but a specialty chemical may provide an environmentally friendly profile, but it doesn't mean it's going to work as an agricultural formulation or a dishwasher detergent or in paint, for instance. So the innovations around sustainable solutions also need to be considered in the context of products down the value chain and the business models that will be successful around them. And I mentioned circularity earlier, and again this is really important — especially chemicals to think about how can we participate in circularity processes when many of our products are consumed and go into the environment. So the challenges for specialty chemicals manufacturers are significant — really important part of the overall value chain in commerce, but a lot of challenges to address. So I'd like to pivot now and talk a little bit about Stepan Company and some of the work that we're doing to try to step up to those challenges that are out there for the chemicals value chain as well as specialty chemicals more specifically. So we are a company based near Chicago but with global operations, and we have three categories of market focus: surfactants across a wide range of applications, polyester polyols for insulation and other purposes, and especially products for food nutrition. We're about a 90-year-old company, always based in the Chicago area. As I mentioned earlier, we're a global business — we have 20 manufacturing sites, so pretty significant footprint and capability across the world, and our R&D team has 14 laboratories that are across different regions. As mentioned earlier, we're a proud member of the Emory RSC. On the right-hand side, you see one of our three facilities in Georgia — this is our Agricultural Innovation Center. It's next door to one of our manufacturing sites, and we were really excited to host an Emory RSC event this month; it's going to be postponed a bit due to COVID, but we really look forward to rescheduling in the future and looking forward to other opportunities to collaborate with the Emory community and other stakeholders in Georgia. A bit about sustainability at Stepan: we have a continually expanding emphasis on sustainability, and the focus is really in four pillars: people, planet, products, and practices. These cover environmental, social, and governance considerations for a company like ours, satisfying the needs and really making progress on all three of those fronts for all of our stakeholders and society. From a people perspective, focused on the communities that we serve and the safety and well-being of people who use our products as well as our employees. Efficiency for the planet — always trying to optimize and improve our operational footprint and to use science-based information to have goals that are meaningful that we look to achieve. From a practices perspective, thinking about our corporate governance and also thinking about all of our business decisions and our strategies to promote resilience, agility, and responsible practices. But in the coming slides, we're going to focus a little bit more on products and some of the chemistry that we focus on, and some of the ways that we look to improve the sustainable profile of our offerings as a specialty chemicals company. One thing before I go further: this is work that's really representing a lot of great people on Stepan's R&D team and our partners, so I just want to make sure to acknowledge and thank everyone whose work is going to be described here. So in the examples I'll describe in the coming slides, we'll focus on a few of the ways that we're focused on some of the challenges that the chemical value chain and specialty chemicals companies have: alignment to UN Sustainable Development Goals, moving towards more concentrated or compacted products, holistically designing products with sustainability considerations in sight from the start, bioprocessing, and circularity. First, Stepan's products and position in the value chain — just think back to that cartoon that I showed of the value chain being right in the middle. We're really well positioned to influence and make positive impacts against UN Sustainable Development Goals. I hope everyone's familiar with UN SDGs; if not, there's a lot of great information to access to understand how the UN is driving companies and institutions towards alignment on 17 goals. We've done an analysis that at least 75% of our products have a strong alignment to just four UN SDGs that are shown on the left-hand side. Of course, we wanted to even better, and we're integrating UN alignment as a criteria for assessing our innovation projects and also our products across different markets that we serve. But you see some of the specific areas that Stepan participates in: agriculture, cold storage with insulation, sanitation and disinfection, as well as supporting renewable energy processes. We're really proud to be part of products and industries that are supporting UN SDGs, but we know there's a lot more that we can do. In addition, our operations and sourcing in the company has a continually growing focus on responsible consumption and production, leading to investments in emissions reduction as well as a really clear focus on raw material sources and how we can be traceable, ensure the right ethics and compliance in the materials that we use. So in this slide alone, you can see that companies like Stepan can drive really important improvements that are aligned to these critical goals that the UN has articulated in the SDGs. So we look forward to continuing to use the UN SDGs as a north star in our innovation and development work. So I'm going to share some specific examples in the next slides. This is an example relating to fabric softeners from our consumer products R&D team. The focus on this work is really technical solutions for more concentrated fabric softener products. Typically, fabric softeners are cationic molecules and they're formulated in liquids at pretty low concentrations, maybe 10% or so, and a lot of water. When you think about having a lot of water that you're shipping around, that will take a lot of plastic packaging to hold. There are pretty significant impacts when you think about the environment and what happens downstream in the value chain. So our team is focused on developing a formulation technology — both concentrated liquids as well as solid powders — that increase that concentration of the products by five times or more. In this instance, at least 70% liquid is shown in the top left-hand corner. One thing that's really important, and this is again a key focus of being successful and having more sustainable products, is they have to work. So the products, the concept that we developed here, the technology that we developed here, retain the high performance in softening applications, and importantly they could be readily processed by our customers down the value chain. Rather than having to apply a lot of energy and heat to reconstitute a wax or a solid, our customers are able to formulate and use less energy in their processing and take that down the value chain with a lower environmental impact. So what does all this mean? On the right-hand side, you see some of the potential impacts if fabric softeners moved from a lower concentration format to a more concentrated solution. You see the impact on potential shipments: 200 times less use of fuel versus the current requirements for low concentration fabric softeners and shipping them around, 25,000 metric tons of plastic that could be saved, and also 250 Olympic-sized swimming pools in terms of just water savings in the product. So we like to look at these types of examples to illustrate the impact that moving from a lower concentrated form to something that really delivers the same product benefits, using chemistry and formulation technology, can provide to improve the sustainability profile. I think we have a lot of chemists on the line today in this meeting, so for those of you or not, I hope it's okay to show a chemical structure too. In the next couple slides, I want to talk about thinking about sustainability from a holistic product design perspective. This is an example of what we call another cationic molecule called an ester quat that's also used for fabric softening purposes. But we worked on this product in partnership with a company called Henkel, a rather large consumer goods and diversified company, and we worked with them to try to achieve a number of sustainability goals but had to really work from first principles to design it right. Some of the key things that we had to focus on were the sourcing of the raw materials for the components, having some specific claims like vegan claims for that raw material sourcing for bio-based product, and then also again meeting the performance requirements, consumer expectations, and safety. A little bit about the chemistry: it's a cationic or positively charged molecule, and it includes what we call an ester functionality on the left-hand side. This ester functionality provides a type of degradation in the environment after use that's more favorable versus other types or older types of chemistries. Importantly, this type of molecule is really effective in softening performance for fabrics, but again has a degradation that's really important. Historically, some of these products are based on fatty acids that come from tallow or animal-based oils, so we have been a leader in converting towards vegetable-based versions. Importantly, the team worked with our partner to design a product from early stages to meet key requirements rather than incorporating sustainability considerations later in the development. So we looked for ways to have bio-based and vegan sourcing for the critical fatty acid component and also having locally derived or locally accessed rapeseed oil to use for this process, thus reducing the logistics and fuel impact versus alternatives from maybe more tropical vegetable oils. So we were able to meet the performance requirements down the value chain and improve the sustainability benefits versus incumbent products. Another example on the theme of cationic surfactants here, but another example of holistic product design connects to our focus on biorenewable carbon. Stepan has a long-standing focus on a concept called Biorenewable Carbon Index, and this is the way that we characterize our products in terms of the percentage of bio-based carbon to provide a measure and assessment for our customers as they formulate and look to meet sustainability goals or particular targets for bio-based materials to be able to formulate and develop the products with this measure in mind. It's a semi-quantitative measure in a sense, but again a good rubric to be able to further down the value chain assess how close you are to some of your goals on bio-based products. I'll talk a little bit more about quantitation of life cycle a bit later. In this product, another ester quat, we have a hair conditioner in this case called Stepanquat Soleil that's similar to the prior example, incorporates bio-based fatty acids that are flexible in terms of sourcing and processing depending on the region of production. So for North America, perhaps the use of sunflower oil, and in Europe, rapeseed oil can be used, so you could still have that local sourcing in this concept. These products are formulated as liquids, and again a lot of products — if you used hair conditioners, you know they're a bit waxy, have a fatty feel to them, often they're delivered as low melting solids and they require heat for processing. What we've done is incorporate a formulation technology to be able to keep the products liquid, easy to process, and again down the value chain use less energy to process into the end consumer product of a hair conditioner. So from the molecular design and raw material sourcing, formulation processing, our team assessed different options holistically and really looked at critical sustainability parameters to target while still maintaining product performance. Next couple slides, I want to talk a bit about biosurfactants. So far I've talked about surfactants that are manufactured from chemical processing. There is a growing interest in commercial opportunities evolving for biosurfactants. These are compounds that are either substantially or fully bio-derived through extraction of natural materials or more preferably manufacturing through bioprocesses like fermentation. Through the years, there have been some biosurfactants that have been commercialized that incorporate carbohydrate or amino acid components, and they've been commercialized and utilized across the value chain, but broadly this class of surfactants has had the challenge of having high cost profiles or maybe not having performance that is equivalent to chemical derivatives, and thus don't always fit the needs of the downstream consumer companies, industry companies, and certainly the end users. However, their sustainability profiles including biodegradation as mentioned earlier are really becoming important factors and really attractive, and more and more the application opportunities as outlined on this slide as well as our cost profiles are improving. Stepan is investing in a very promising area of biosurfactants, specifically a chemical called rhamnolipids. These are naturally present surfactants that are produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa as well as other strains that are genetically modified by bioprocessing, but they do naturally occur in the environment. We're exploring a range of applications downstream for rhamnolipids. These molecules really have beneficial properties that relate to emulsification, foaming, other applications that were noted in the prior slide like antibacterial properties, biofungicidal properties. Importantly, these compounds can be manufactured fermented from naturally sourced materials, and they're highly biodegradable and have a really excellent environmental fate profile. Now an important challenge for Stepan and other companies like us to address to ensure that these technologies make their way downstream the value chain is to make sure that they can be scaled and that they can be scaled at a cost that will help them replace incumbent technologies while still maintaining the performance needs. So that's one of our key challenges that we're focused on as an R&D team right now at Stepan. We're focused on scaling our process and moving to the plant that is shown on the right-hand side of this slide, which is in Louisiana, to be able to produce rhamnolipids and hopefully in the future other biosurfactants at a world-class scale to supply the future biosurfactants that are going to make up a lot of products in the value stream down in the future. So we're really excited about this technology. We do believe that fermentation and the biosurfactants class is going to be more and more critical and will be more used across industries in the years to come, and we're really committed to taking this forward and succeeding. This slide I want to talk briefly about circularity. Stepan not only manufactures surfactants but also polyester polyol products. These are products that have aromatic groups that are foundational components for lightweight polyurethane and polyisocyanurate foams that are used in durable goods as well as in cars and cold storage for shipping, preserving foods for safety and protection, and also for building insulation products. These chemicals provide important energy savings and they're really wide ranging in their applications. So you see here in the pictures some rigid roofing boards on the bottom left as well as spray insulation. One of our R&D team members on the right using products like spray foam actually can reduce energy usage in buildings by up to 30%, and again this is a key focus as Arie mentioned earlier on hopefully our infrastructure path moving forward in the U.S. and having more energy efficient building envelopes and save fuel and emissions. These polyester polyol products also allow for increased use of recycled materials. So you can recover materials such as plastic bottles with polyethylene terephthalate. There's also focus on other materials that otherwise would go to landfill like mattresses, and reprocessing them, re-esterifying them, and then incorporating them into products that could then be used in the building envelope while still maintaining energy efficiency requirements and fire safety requirements in the buildings. So there are a lot of opportunities in this sector to take raw materials or recycled materials rather, pull them together with freshly produced materials, and again make a favorable environmental impact using materials that otherwise would be incinerated or go to landfill. A really important point about circularity though is this sector is going to largely depend on aligning logistics and reprocessing capability. So there's a lot about where materials can be aggregated and reprocessed and then converted eventually. You can imagine that having a circular product profile is great, but if you have to ship products across the world, that's not so favorable. So really you have to think about this holistically where we're at in the value chain, especially chemicals companies can really understand what the opportunities are. So finally, again I've provided some examples of how Stepan and where we're at in the value chain, how we can make improvements in the sustainability profile of our products and what happens down the value chain aligned with these specific products and projects and technology that I talked about. We're also developing a holistic tool that integrates a wide range of information including environmental data, emissions, energy input, but also regulatory and compliance data on our sourcing to bring together an overall view to assess whether we're truly making improvements versus incumbent technologies. Again, this requires a lot of data, a lot of understanding of the life cycle impact of your products. We think it's a really important way for us to work with our partners upstream in the value chain and downstream in the value chain to make the improvements that are needed in the chemical industry and the products that go out to end users. Again, this is really important, and I think a responsibility for all companies to understand their environmental profile, their products better, find ways to improve, and partner with other companies and institutions to innovate and develop new solutions. So with that, I'll just close again a few words. Specialty chemicals — I hope I've shown that we've got multiple challenges but also a number of different ways in our products to support sustainability and improved environmental outcomes. There are plenty of challenges present across the value chain; this is not going to go away, it will only intensify. But innovation, partnerships, new business models are going to be key to ensure that progress continues and we can make meaningful environmental impacts. So I'd just like to thank a few folks: Charlotte Bryant, who leads our sustainability steering team and who is a great partner in my team and really also prepared a lot of the content you saw today. I'd like to thank the Stepan Marcom and Sustainability Steering Team as well as the Stepan R&D team whose examples I spoke to today. And finally, I'd like to thank the Emory RSC, David Lynn — Professor David Lynn — thanks for connecting Stepan to the RSC. We're really proud to be associated with the team. Professor Arie Saikawa, thank you again for the invitation to speak today and for your collaboration, and Ms. Leah Thomas for helping coordinate the talk. So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions, and I'll stop sharing from here.