United Solar OM

pending

  United Solar Polysilicon (FZC) SPC (“USP” or “the Company” - https://www.unitedsolarholding.com), established in 2023, is an Omani Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) created to construct and operate a 100,000 tons/year polysilicon manufacturing plant in Sohar, Oman (“the Project”). USP is fully owned by United Solar Holding Inc. (USH), whose shareholders include IDG Capital, Longgen Zhang and family and others. In addition to the shareholders, the sovereign wealth fund of Oman, called the Future Fund of Oman (FFO), which is owned by the Oman Investment Authority (OIA), has invested US$156 million in USP.  The proposed investment includes two separate transactions: (i) a non-recourse project finance transaction of a Gross A-Loan of up to US$200 million (m) to USP for the implementation of the Project; (ii) up to $50 million investment in Preferred Equity of USH, that will infuse these equity funds into USP to meet the Project capex. The polysilicon manufacturing plant is located in the Sohar Freezone (SFZ) in northern Oman and covers an area of about 1 million square meters. At full capacity utilization, the plant will supply polysilicon to manufacture the equivalent of 40 Gigawatts (GW) of solar modules annually.USP’s production process includes purchase of trichlorosilane (SiHCl3) and metallurgical-grade silicon (MG-Si) as main raw materials, production of hydrogen from water electrolysis, air separation, cold hydrogenation, distillation, byproducts/wastes recycling, chemical vapor deposition (CVD), vent gas recovery and product finishing. The high-purity polysilicon rods resulting from the process are crushed into pieces and, if needed, cleaned in acidic washes containing hydrofluoric acid (HF) and nitric acid (NHO3) to remove surface contaminants from rods that have accidentally come into contact with the ground. The production process allows recycling a significant portion of the gas and liquid effluents, while the remaining part undergoes treatment processes. A silicon grinding plant (associated facility) will be located inside the USP plant area and operated by a separate company (Green Origin Industry) to prepare the MG-Si as input material for the polysilicon production process.