Gevo, Inc. Aktie

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Gevo, Inc. Quarter 1 2026 Earnings Conference Call. I am Fran, and I'll be the operator assisting you today. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the call over to Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Gevo's first quarter and full year 2026 results. I'm Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy at Gevo. With me today, we have Paul Bloom, our Chief Executive Officer; Leke Agiri, our Chief Financial Officer; and Greg Hanselman, Executive Vice President of Operations and Engineering.

Earlier today, we issued a press release that outlines our first quarter 2026 results and some of the topics we plan to discuss. Copies of the press release are available on our website at www.gevo.com. Please be advised that our remarks today, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those currently anticipated. Those statements include projections about the timing, development, engineering, financing and construction of our alcohol-to-jet project, the potential expansion and debottlenecking of our Gevo, North Dakota plant, the potential expansion of our carbon sequestration well, our expected future adjusted EBITDA, our agreements with Ara Energy and other activities described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are incorporated by reference.

We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we may provide certain non-GAAP financial information on this call. The relevant definitions and GAAP reconciliations may be found in our earnings release, which can be found on our website at www.gevo.com in the Investor Relations section. Following the prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call is open to the media, and we're providing a simultaneous webcast to the public. A replay of this call and other past events will be available via the company's Investor Relations page at www.gevo.com.

I'd now like to turn the call over to the CEO of Gevo, Paul Bloom. Paul?

Thanks, Eric. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us. This quarter was about advancing execution and strengthening the foundation for scale. Our team continued to build on the momentum of last year, strengthening our core business while advancing the next phase of our growth. We made measurable progress on our ATJ 30 project and our planned debottlenecking and expansion of Juba, North Dakota. We continue to improve the performance of our existing business and refined our financing strategy.

The first quarter of 2026 was our fourth consecutive quarter delivering positive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA and reflected better-than-expected results with improved margins on top of solid production volumes. Our carbon business continued to deliver strong returns from low-carbon ethanol compliance markets. In Q1, we sold approximately 57% of our carbon attributes attached to fuel. We also generated nearly 20,000 tons of engineered carbon dioxide removal credits or CDRs we sold into the voluntary carbon market and continue to see steady demand and relatively strong credit pricing for low-carbon ethanol sales in markets where we participate. Our customers for CDRs continued to grow in Q1, including purchases and retirements of credits by Amgen, Bank of Montreal and PayPal while continuing to advance more sizable long-term CDR deals.

Importantly, we see continued growth this year even before our debottlenecking at Vivo, North Dakota comes into effect. Last year, we reported approximately $16 million of adjusted EBITDA. For 2026, we expect approximately $30 million of adjusted EBITDA as we progress towards our previously stated target of achieving $40 million of adjusted EBITDA on an annualized run rate basis from existing operations by the end of this year. The impact of our debottlenecking and other growth plans is incremental to this target. To further support our efforts, we've launched a corporate-wide initiative we're calling the EBITDA challenge. This is about unlocking new revenue growth, improving operational performance and managing costs across our organization. We look forward to providing more updates as we make progress on this critical initiative.

Now let me turn to our alcohol to jet project that we call Project North Star since I know that's top of mind. As previously announced, we made the decision to withdraw from the DOE financing process following a conversation with them around certain new requirements for the loan guarantee, including enhanced oil recovery as a business objective. These requirements did not align with our duty to maximize value for our stakeholders from both an economic and time line perspective. Withdrawing from the DOE process allows us to fully engage with a broader group of private capital providers while adding greater certainty and flexibility to our financing efforts. I'm pleased to report that we have received nonbinding indications of interest from multiple lenders, which supports our goal of securing financing for Project North Star by the end of 2026. As a reminder, we are pursuing a combination of nondilutive project level debt and strategic capital options for Project North Star.

Beyond financing, we are making good progress on our other key milestones that include engineering and offtake agreements. On engineering, we talk about front-end loading, otherwise known as FEL for which Stage 2 has been completed. We remain on track to complete FEL3 this quarter, which will further refine our capital cost estimates and position us to move forward to detailed engineering. Regarding offtake, we've already secured approximately half of the financeable long-term contracts for synthetic aviation fuel and carbon attributes for the project. Currently, we are at the term sheet stage for additional contracts, which upon completion, we expect will meet our financing requirements. We see a clear path to final investment decision or FID and based on our progress, continue to believe that Project North Star could deliver approximately $150 million of adjusted EBITDA per year once fully commissioned and online.

Switching gears to our expansion projects. On March 30, we announced our intent to expand the capacity of Gevo, North Dakota by up to 75 million gallons per year, bringing our total capacity to an expected 150 million gallons per year. This expansion would effectively double the carbon capture and low-carbon ethanol production and all the value that comes with that from our original acquisition of the plant last year. To help finance the expansion, we've entered into a preliminary agreement with Ara Energy, a global private equity and infrastructure firm focused on industrial decarbonization to co-invest in the project. We still have to finalize the details, but we believe partnering with experienced capital providers will allow us to move faster than our balance sheet alone would support while maintaining a disciplined approach to capital projects, avoiding dilution and optimizing risk-adjusted returns. We expect construction of that expansion to take approximately 18 to 24 months following final investment decision.

Lastly, let me touch on the debottlenecking and other site improvements that are currently in progress at Gevo, North Dakota. As previously announced, the volumes unlocked by our debottlenecking efforts should expand adjusted EBITDA in the Gevo, North Dakota segment by an anticipated 10% to 15%. We are on track to deliver the debottlenecking and operational reliability projects by the end of 2026. Site improvements are underway, and Greg will talk more about that and our other operational and engineering highlights. But first, I'll turn it over to Leke to run through the financial performance for the quarter, and I'll come back at the end to recap.

Thanks, Paul. During the first quarter of 2026, we reported revenue of $43 million compared to $29 million in Q1 of last year, net loss attributable to Gevo of $22 million or $0.09 per share, which is consent the same as it was in Q1 of last year. I would emphasize that first quarter results include debt extinguishment and modification of $11 million and non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $9 million compared to a loss of $15 million in Q1 last year. Adjusted EBITDA largely reflects contributions from our carbon capture, low carbon ethanol and RNG operations and corporate expenses. While our adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2025 was $16 million, we continue to see adjusted EBITDA growth in 2026 and are excited to reaffirm our target of reaching an annualized run rate adjusted EBITDA of $40 million this year.

During the 12 months of 2026, we expect $30 million of adjusted EBITDA. Our first quarter results were better than expected due to strong production and margin performance in spite of typical seasonal softness in ethanol margins. We are optimizing value from monetizing carbon, commodities and tax credit in addition to our strong focus on fiscal discipline and cost management. As Paul mentioned, we launched a corporate-wide initiative that we're calling the EBITDA challenge. This is not just a cost-cutting exercise. This is about unlocking new revenue growth, improving operational performance and managing costs across our organization.

Going forward, we continue to expect some quarter-to-quarter variability in adjusted EBITDA. But overall, we reaffirm our targets. I also note that we see some potential upside to our targets across a number of fronts, including unlocking revenue from expected new low carbon fuel pathways approvals we've been working on for over a year.

Turning to cash flow and the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with approximately $79 million of cash and cash equivalents. We reported negative operating cash flow of $21 million. This reflects timing-related impact, including $17 million of tax credits that have been generated but have not yet been monetized and roughly $4 million of onetime costs tied to debt refinancing and extinguishment. Adjusting for these factors, operating cash flow would have been close to neutral in line with our expectations and consistent with our path toward achieving our 2026 cash flow objectives.

In financing our growth, we're taking a disciplined and methodical approach. Our priority is to ensure that any capital we raise aligns with our long-term strategy, preserves flexibility and supports sustainable value creation for our shareholders. Regarding ATJ 30, we're actively evaluating indication of interest that we have received from private capital providers. This process is focused not only on securing funding, but partnering with capital providers who understand the strategic position of our projects, share commitment to our execution time line and help minimize dilution. On debottlenecking and other asset enhancement projects, we expect to spend $26 million this year that we plan to fund internally as we have said previously. And as Paul mentioned, we expect to finance our expansion projects with capital partners like Ara Energy. Overall, we believe our cash and cash flow position puts us in a strong place to execute this year and confidently pursue our long-term objectives.

And now I will hand it over to Greg to talk about operations. Greg?

Thanks, Leke. From an operations standpoint, we saw consistent performance across our asset base in the first quarter. At Gevo RNG, we produced about 92,000 million BTUs of renewable natural gas compared to about 80,000 during the same quarter last year or a 15% increase. Last quarter saw an improved reliability as a result of our continued focus on operational stability. At Gevo, North Dakota, the plant delivered 18 million gallons of low-carbon ethanol, plus 16,000 tons of dry distiller grains, 51,000 tons of modified distiller grains and 5 million pounds of corn oil co-products. This was even better than expected as a result of our continued focus on operational excellence.

The team remains focused on executing the debottlenecking and asset reliability projects that are expected to unlock incremental volumes and expand margins. During a planned shutdown in April, we succeeded in making the process tie-ins we need for these improvements. We believe we won't need any additional or unplanned outages to complete and commission the debottlenecking. That's great because we can start adding long-term production capacity without sacrificing our short-term volume this year. We are currently in construction of a new fermenter, liquefaction tank, beer degafting system and a new milling building, which are all part of our plans to increase the plant capacity to around 75 million gallons per year of low-carbon ethanol starting in 2027.

For comparison, the current nameplate capacity is 67 million gallons per year, which we are already exceeding. We budgeted $26 million in capital expenditures this year for the debottlenecking and site improvements funded by Gevo, North Dakota operating cash flows, as Leke mentioned, and we continue to expect about that level of capital spend. On our plant expansion from 75 million to 150 million gallons a year, we are repurposing much of our work, design and team from our previous ethanol project that was originally planned for South Dakota. We believe these efforts, while working with our existing network of partners, including Fluid Quip Technologies, will accelerate the expansion.

Finally, on ATJ 30, we are on schedule to complete FEL3, which will bring us to a plus or minus 10% estimate on the capital cost of the project, including the modularization work being done by Praj along with the Gevo engineering team in India. Our U.S. engineering team and engineering partners are focused on completing the balance of plant design and integration of the entire project. In summary, we are focused on delivering operational excellence while also positioning our assets to support the next phase of growth.

Now I'll turn it back to Paul.

Thanks, Greg. As you can see, we are in a much stronger position than we were a year ago. We have a solid operating base, a clear path to improving profitability and multiple opportunities to scale our business in a meaningful and repeatable way. In addition, the conflict in the Middle East has highlighted, among other things, the relative inelasticity of jet fuel supply and demand, underscoring the critical importance of renewable alternatives like SAF. With the expected increase in global demand for jet fuel in the future, Gevo has seen increased interest in our SAF and franchise strategy, both in our carbon management and our anticipated ability to supplement regional supply with our modular approach to deploying alcohol to jet capacity.

Let me finish by saying our focus is clear. First, expand our cash-generating business; second, secure a durable capital structure; third, deliver our first commercial scale SAF project; and lastly, build a repeatable platform for growth.

With that, I'll turn it back over to the operator to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] And your first question comes from Amit Dayal from H.C. Wainwright.

Good to see all the progress, Paul. On the debottlenecking front, should we assume that the impact from these efforts will reflect in the financials in 2027?

Thanks for the question. Yes, absolutely. That's the plan here because we'll have -- like Greg mentioned, we've already got the tie-ins done for the expansion. We're working on that construction today. That will be done at the end of the year. So that should immediately start in 2027 in Q1 to start delivering that extra 10% to 15% that we were talking about compared to where we end the year.

Understood. And with the efforts with Ara, does that require any capital commitment from you? Or will that also be project financed? I'm just trying to think through whether that puts any burden on the balance sheet or whether you have optionality to fund that through project financing and outside sources?

Yes. Leke, why don't you take that one?

Yes. No, thanks for the question. So high level, we're going to arrange a project level debt to complete the capital stack. So, the combination of cash that we have on hand with capital from Ara Energy, that completes all the capital we need to complete that expansion project.

Yes. So, we are really excited about that one, Amit, to say, hey, look, we found what we think is a really good partner in Ara Energy. We're looking forward to getting that finalized, right? And then so we can get started because the clock is ticking, right? We want to get that done as soon as possible, like we mentioned, we've got a time line that we announced to 18 to 24 months to get that completed, but that effectively doubles what we've got at Gevo, North Dakota. So that's a pretty exciting project for us. And again, we just can't go fast enough.

So on that front, Paul, can we assume that work on that potentially, if everything closes timely manner, work on the build-out starts this year in 2026 itself?

Yes, absolutely. We've already started to work on this project because Amit, we had a lot of the team working on ethanol plant design back when we had the South Dakota greenfield plant. So we've done a lot already. And so we're repurposing the team. Greg mentioned, we're already working with Fluid Quip, for example. And so we've already started how do we get this done? What does that engineering look like on the site? And we started talking about that right after we got the acquisition done of the Red Trail assets, now Gevo, North Dakota. So this has been in the works and in the planning for some time. So we're ready to hit the ground running.

That's good to hear. Just last question. I didn't share too much about Verity. Just wondering how that is progressing and if you are seeing traction with potential customers, et cetera, on that front?

Yes, sure. Thanks for the question on Verity. We love Verity, right? Verity has become really part of our core franchise business for one, right? Because as you know, if you look at a bottle of Jet A and a bottle of SAF, they look the same because the molecules are essentially identical. So the only difference is how did I get there, right? What was the source of the feedstock? How did I produce it? What's the carbon intensity score and customers want that proof. So as we build out our business, right, we'll have Verity kind of inside everything that we're doing, whether it's low-carbon ethanol or on the SAF side. So think about that, right, as we continue to build. But on the Verity side, look, we've got more customers -- we had a couple of partnerships that we've announced over the past few months. One was with Bushel who basically services about 50% of the grain elevators in the United States and in Canada.

So we think that's a really good way to take Verity and combine it with already another software platform and get out to the market faster. And then we've also been working with a company called Cboe and Cboe really helps with data acquisition, boots on the ground. So we've got -- we've signed up 8 customers so far. We're really excited about this. But the one thing that we need to still see for Verity because we've designed this really to take the benefits from the field to the fleet or the field to the seat on the aircraft is that we want ag benefits, the 45Z ag benefits specifically included into the 45Z. So we've been waiting for that. We've been waiting for that. We think we're getting closer, but we really need to see that. And I think that's a catalyst for Verity to really take off and grow in the marketplace because we've got a tool that was really designed to do that.

And your next question comes from Jeff Grampp from Northland Capital Markets.

I'm curious, with respect to the project finance opportunities for both the expansion project and ATJ, given that the time lines could potentially coincide a bit, are you guys evaluating perhaps a single source of capital for both projects? Does it make sense to have varying capital for different projects? Just kind of curious how you guys are evaluating funding since it seems like there's perhaps some overlap.

Yes. No, thanks for the question. I think high level, we're evaluating all of the executable project financing plans. And some of the current project capital providers that we're talking to have expressed appetite in both projects. But at the end of the day, we have that decision to make in terms of how we prioritize the capital providers that optimize our return for each of the various projects that we have in front of us. So we're really excited about the opportunities or the engagement that we have so far. But stay tuned. We'll be sharing more definitively in terms of what those selection criteria and the parties that we are going to be developing those projects with, especially ATJ 30 in due course.

Yes. Thanks. And just to add on to that, Jeff, I mean, one of the things that we want to make sure is that we go as fast as we can on these projects. And so making sure that we've got the right options, whether they're together or independent, that could change time lines on some things. So like I said, we're looking at all the options, but really excited and happy about the response that we have at this point.

Appreciate those details. For my follow-up, somewhat related to the financing, but more specific to ATJ -- so it sounds like you have the offtake in place. You guys are working on additional offtake. Is that -- is it safe to assume that is a prerequisite disclosing anything on that side? And are there any other major obstacles, negotiating points, et cetera, outside of the offtake beyond just, I guess, kind of normal terms and conditions negotiations?

Yes. I think the offtakes are the major gating item that we're still working through here, Jeff. I mean, if you think about it, we're really focusing on delivering those bankable contracts that everybody is comfortable with on the financing side. So, we're pretty far along. We just need to finish up a few things like we said, that are at the term sheet stage. We'll get that completed here, hopefully in the near future. And then we'll see. I don't want to have everything under contract either for the ATJ 30 project. Mean Project North Star, we believe, is going to be very accretive, and we want to make sure that we've got some free to sell in the market so we can take -- so we can be opportunistic with those sales because who knows what those carbon values are going to be and the jet fuel prices are going to be in the future, right? So we'll get enough to get where we need to be for the financing and go from there.

Understood. If I could sneak one more in related to that last point. What is that right mix? I understand there's not a right number, but is it -- what kind of spot exposure makes sense for you guys, do you think?

Yes. I mean, ideally, I think to actually understand what that question means, right, is you've got to effectively do the math to understand what amount of contracted offtakes underpin the investments for our capital providers. So, it's a negotiation that we're going through and to be transparent. But typically, when you look at capital projects like ours, you typically see those facilities effectively be under contracted offtakes somewhere between 70% and 80%. So maybe we'll be in that mix, maybe we can expose our volumes to more spot upside volumes. That's yet to be determined. Did I address your question?

Yes. Perfect.

[Operator Instructions] And your next question comes from Derrick Whitfield from Texas Capital.

Congrats on the strong quarter. I'm sure -- well, Paul, I'm sure a lot of this was in process with your team before, but you've hit the ground running with this release.

Yes. We've been busy. It's a busy group.

All right. Very good. And then just on the EBITDA challenge, could you speak to the scale and scope of the program and what it could reasonably yield on the current platform before accounting for debottlenecking and expansion?

Yes, sure thing. So, I mean, we're pretty excited about this. And look, it's one of those things that we are focused on doing and delivering and getting us to the first pass there. Gets us to the run rate of $40 million in adjusted EBITDA per year as soon as possible. That's where we're headed. We said we're going to do it. But I think the main thing is you can say that you're going to do it, but how are you going to do it? How are you going to measure it? We put a process and an initiative in place for all Gevo colleagues where we're capturing the metrics of what we're putting in place. It's part of an incentive plan that all employees have to drive EBITDA, not just to that $40 million, but well beyond that, right? So, this is -- think of this as Phase 1, but it's really getting us all to think about how do we work, how do we do our jobs the most efficient way and deliver value, whether we're unlocking revenue, whether we're managing our costs, and coming up with better operational projects.

We've got a whole list of these already, and that list is going to continue to grow. So, I think it's going to go well beyond that $40 million that we've set as a target by the end of the year. But just think of it as the way we work. And if you look at the investor presentation that we've got after 40, then like you just mentioned, we're going to have the debottlenecking. After debottlenecking, we're looking at the terminal for third-party CO2. And then now we've got the expansion with our Energy and then monetizing that pore space fully, that gets us to that over $100 million in adjusted EBITDA that we're really targeting. So again, think of it as a phased approach. We'll continue this challenge. The challenge never ends. It will just go in phases as we work through it. I don't know, Leke, if you wanted to add anything.

No, I mean, you captured it. I think the like one of the key points also just identify is we're targeting sustainable EBITDA growth. So, as we look at cost management, we look at opportunities for investment to expand margins, those are aspects that we hope to translate into recurring EBITDA growth and drive the shareholder values.

And maybe just one other thing that Leke mentioned it when he was talking earlier, but it probably didn't resonate as well. So, I'll reinforce it. We've got a number of fuel pathways today where we're selling low carbon fuel with the carbon attributes attached in compliance markets as part of our carbon business. Some of those have -- are recognizing the value of carbon capture and sequestration or the CCS value. Some of them are not. So we've made sure that with our sustainability team that we're going after and making sure we've got the optionality to sell that value with or without the fuel and -- but we're getting more approvals. And so, we expect some additional approvals this year that should unlock some substantial value. So that's just an example of one of a revenue unlock that we think could be quite substantial for us going forward.

And then, Paul, kind of along the same lines, and you somewhat referenced it earlier in your commentary, but are you guys seeing opportunities to further improve your ethanol netbacks, as ethanol, if you look globally, it's the cheapest octane in the world at present and the global product markets are exceptionally tight. So, it seems like there's a fairway of ways to make more economics just on the brown molecule as well.

Yes, absolutely. Look, I mean, we've got a couple of things that are going on. One, we'll see where the farm bill gets with E15, but that could increase ethanol demand by 50% just right there if we go to year-round E15. So that's strong. We've also seen other markets that are pulling for export, just extra demand, right? So, we see demand growth in Japan, for sure, as they think about E10 and then moving on to E20. We look at marine markets where there's been a lot of talk and could expand. We're going to stay focused on the markets that we can service really well because those are also great markets for us. And we see new low-carbon fuel markets open up. Hawaii just announced a low carbon fuel standard. We've got New Mexico that's starting to take shape. And then obviously, the Canadian market is really strong today on their credit pricing and on their demand, and they're large -- a really large importer of U.S. ethanol, and we're well positioned to take advantage of that growth.

Yes. I'd add on, Paul. As we look inside the fence and drive operational excellence, we're very focused on energy consumption, how can we be more energy efficient and also how can we drive value in our co-product valorization. One project being how can we be even better with our corn oil recovery.

Yes. I think Greg brings up a really good point, right? This whole operational excellence piece, look, Red Trail assets and the team there have done a phenomenal job over time. we're bringing our team and combining forces now as Gevo, North Dakota to drive that operational excellence that we think it's not just small incremental amounts. These are step change kind of numbers that we could see in that improvement. The corn oil recovery is a big one. And as we look at even things like D4 RINs, I mean, that's -- we'll see how that continues to drive values for things like distillers corn oil as the D4 RINs and the recently announced RVO has gone up. And that is also good for potentially jet fuel in the future because we believe that, that RVO increase with SAF qualifying or anticipated to qualify for a D4, that's all moving in the right direction.

And then just with respect to ATJ project financing plans, how much of the total project CapEx could you reasonably cover with project financing? And should we think about the cost of financing is, let's call it, 200 to 300 basis points wide of DOE funding? Is that the right way to think about it?

Leke, do you want to take that?

Yes. So, we're still targeting leverage ratio of around 60% of the total project cost for ATJ 30. So that's our target. That is -- our engagement with the private capital providers is on that basis. And we do think that, that actually tracks what the market will bear or what we're going to transact. So that's the answer to your first question. And then your second question around pricing, I think what you're triangulating, I think, is close to fair, right? There is a strategic aspect of the cost of debt that the DOE brought to us that's going to erode a little bit as we are engaged with the private capital providers. And some of those reasons, I think you know why, right? The subsidized capital and the guaranteed structure ideally had, that does not exist with some of these parties, and they have to charge closer to what the market rate is. So, in fact, I think the range you gave is close to where we might end up.

There are no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn the call back over to Paul Bloom for the closing remarks. Please go ahead.

Well, thanks again, everybody, for joining us for this quarter's update. I think we're really happy with the team's performance. We're really headed strong. And I think you'll see continued focus on our EBITDA growth, which is obviously one of the critical things for us. Obviously, stay tuned for more updates on our ATJ30 financing Project North Star as we really get that done for the financing for the end of this year. But again, great quarter, really pleased with the progress that everybody is making, and thanks for joining us.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining, and that concludes today's conference call. All participants may now disconnect. Thank you.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Gevo's Fourth Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's program is being recorded. And now I'd like to introduce your host for today's program, Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. Please go ahead, sir.

Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Gevo's Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 results. I'm Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy at Gevo. With me today, we have Patrick Gruber, our Chief Executive Officer; Paul Bloom, our President; Leke Agiri, our Chief Financial Officer; and Chris Ryan, our Chief Operating Officer.

Earlier today, we issued a press release that outlines our fourth quarter and full year 2025 results and some of the topics we plan to discuss as well as a slide presentation that we will discuss on today's call. Copies of the press release and the slide presentation are available on our website at www.gevo.com.

Please be advised that our remarks today, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those currently anticipated. Those statements include projections about the timing, development, engineering, financing and construction of our alcohol-to-jet projects, our future carbon credit sales, our Gevo, North Dakota and RNG plants and other activities described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are incorporated by reference. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

In addition, we may provide certain non-GAAP financial information on this call. The relevant definitions and GAAP reconciliations may be found in our earnings release, which can be found on our website at www.depo.com in the Investor Relations section. Following the prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call is open to the media, and we are providing a simultaneous webcast to the public. A replay of this call and other past events will be available via the company's Investor Relations page at www.gevo.com.

I'd now like to turn the call over to the CEO of Gevo, Patrick Gruber. Pat?

Thanks, Eric. What a year? Successfully acquiring and integrating our North Dakota ethanol and carbon capture assets has transformed our adjusted EBITDA and has enabled us to learn to capture value from carbon, treating it as an important coproduct in addition to the ethanol, animal feed and oil that we produce.

Gevo North Dakota has performed superbly well. It's the well-run operations, combined with our learnings on how to capture value from carbon dioxide that have allowed us to turn positive on operating cash flow in the fourth quarter. We also now have 3 quarters in a row of positive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA. I'm very pleased with the progress and what we are learning. Great operating results, combined with consolidating our debt in early 2026, has strengthened our balance sheet and increased our cash on the balance sheet without tapping into equity markets. We also continue to make progress on our ATJ-30 plant, the jet fuel project that is targeted for our North Dakota site, I believe Gevo is in a really good place.

I make this point because you probably all recall, that I'm retiring as CEO on March 31. Paul Bloom, who has been with us for 5 years now will assume the role of CEO on April 1. He has been instrumental in helping us build the business platform to where it is today. He also knows technology and processing, operations, market development and business. I'm convinced he is the right person to take over. I think he would be a really strong CEO. And I'm excited for him to take the helm.

Paul, it's your show today.

Thanks, Pat. To begin, I'm extremely honored to be taking on the role of CEO starting April 1. Pat led the company for nearly 2 decades guiding Gevo through some incredible times and put us in a great spot with our current business that sets the stage for future growth. From developing our intellectual property portfolio to shaping Gevo's business system from field to flight, Pat has been a visionary leader for renewable fuels and chemicals. I'm happy to announce that after Pat's retirement, he will continue to serve on Gevo's Board of Directors, and the company will continue to benefit from his expertise and insights. Thank you, Pat.

Now I'm pleased to highlight some of the progress we made in Q4 and on our full year for 2025. 2025 was truly a transformational year for Gevo, a successful acquisition and integration of the Red Trail Energy assets now operating as Gevo North Dakota marked a pivotal moment in the company's growth story. I want to express my sincere appreciation for the outstanding people and great communities who have welcomed us so warmly. Their partnership and dedication have been essential to our success. The team did an outstanding job across the board in 2025, delivering record-setting biofuel production, starting up our carbon business and leading the industry with some of the first large-scale 45Z clean fuel production and tax credit sales. All of this was accomplished while substantially advancing our alcohol-to-jet growth platform.

Our execution in 2025 led to 3 consecutive quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA, with almost $8 million in adjusted EBITDA in Q4 as we continue to make solid progress on our goal of reaching $40 million in adjusted EBITDA on an annualized basis from our current asset base. Leke will give more color when he highlights our financial results. Gevo's operations team exceeded the nameplate capacity of our ethanol production facility, reporting a record of about 69 million gallons of ethanol produced during the full 12-month period of 2025 while capturing 173,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. To further build on these strong results, I'm happy to announce that we've approved our capital plan for Gevo North Dakota to expand capacity to 75 million gallons per year, produce more coproducts, improved energy efficiency, capture more carbon dioxide and invest in our operational reliability. We are reinvesting in Gevo North Dakota to grow our base business and improve our returns while we set the table for alcohol to jet.

We have an aggressive time line to deliver these projects and anticipate they will be starting to deliver returns in early 2027. Chris will say more on this during his operations update. During 2025, we also started up our carbon business. The team has done extremely well developing the business from scratch, and we believe we are the first biofuel producer to develop and operate this business model. We believe our flexibility to sell carbon value either with our fuel products or separately in the voluntary carbon market provides a distinct advantage for optimizing returns and will apply to our ATJ growth platform in the future. In Q4, about 80% of our carbon benefits remained attached to ethanol gallons sold into low carbon fuel markets, and we built our inventory to roughly 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits or CDRs, by the quarter's end to meet future demand from spot and contract sales.

Our customer base for CDR credits continues to grow beyond those previously reported such as NASDAQ and now includes companies like PayPal, Bank of Montreal and additional international clients. As the market develops, we are confident that Gevo is well positioned to produce, certify and supply high integrity carbon credits that can help supply the growing market demand. In addition, Gevo retired carbon credits from Gevo North Dakota to offset substantially all our own air travel in 2025. At Gevo, we're committed to leading by example. We don't just talk about our values. We put them into action by utilizing our own products and solutions.

Turning to our growth platform. Let me comment on ATJ-30, which stands for alcohol to jet at 30 million gallons per year in North Dakota. We refer to this as Project North Star. As we've mentioned before, we anticipate that by adding Project North Star, once constructed, we could deliver $150 million in adjusted EBITDA per year from the fuels, carbon value and co-products. From there, we believe we can enable and create a franchise approach to deploying synthetic aviation fuel globally. But first, we need to build cereal #1 and demonstrate the value proposition monetizing our commodities in carbon.

Project North Star is designed to be a modular build that we can copy edit paste to meet the growing global demand for synthetic aviation fuel. North Star lays the groundwork for building out a franchise that is deploying many similar plants, either with our own capital or through partnerships to meet the growing global demand for jet fuel as the world flies more, not less. We are developing the playbook containing Gevo's intellectual property and business system, which can be effectively replicated and implemented on a global scale. The work we are doing at Gevo North Dakota and with Verity is critical and provides the blueprint for what needs to happen at more ethanol plants in the future. Low carbon ethanol is the feedstock for our synthetic aviation fuel. We need more of it and we can help enable it. In fact, we started to sign letters of intent with third-party ethanol producers to bridge Gevo's carbon business and Verity capabilities to other locations along with carbon management services.

We believe our collaboration with Frontier Infrastructure Holdings and the options we are exploring to transport and store third-party carbon dioxide Gevo North Dakota, may enable more low-carbon ethanol facilities to be viable sites for additional ATJ plants. As we started to show at Gevo North Dakota, there is money to be made in setting the table with low-carbon ethanol today and potentially a lot more with ATJ additions in the future. We currently believe that this will take the form of us delivering and getting paid for our technology, business system and know-how. It could give us more flexibility between investing our own capital and more of a capital-light type growth model, the franchise model. While we are very optimistic about this growth, we will continue to be laser-focused on getting Project North Star to the finish line.

Our goal is to reach FID on the project in 2026. We have a conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Dominance Financing or EDF for a loan guarantee to finance the construction of an ATJ plant. As previously announced, we are discussing with them using that loan for ATJ-30. EDF is an excellent goal aligned partner and a strong option for us, assuming we can get all the details worked out. Our goal is project level nondilutive funding to build ATJ-30.

Finally, as part of our growth strategy and what we've learned at Gevo North Dakota, we'll also stay on the lookout for more acquisitions that are accretive that strategically fit our platform and further scale our adjusted EBITDA. We it was a transformational 2025 that we are leveraging to make 2026 even better.

With that, I'll turn it over to Leke.

Thanks, Paul. Starting on Slide 4 of our earnings presentation. For the full year 2025, we had revenue of $161 million, a loss from operations of $20 million, non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $16 million, a record-setting low carbon ethanol volume of about 69 million gallons, plus 173,000 metric tons of CCS at our production facility. .

During the fourth quarter of 2025, we turned positive on cash flows from operations, generating $20 million during the period. We increased cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash to $117 million at year-end which is a $9 million increase versus the third quarter. All of the restricted cash we had at year-end was released after we completed our debt consolidation transaction in February 2026. Finally, we maintained our strong 2026 outlook, including our previously communicated near-term organic target of achieving annualized non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of about $40 million and are neutral to positive operating cash flow in full year 2026.

Turning to Slide 5. Our full year 2025 results showcased a transformative year and highlight how we executed on and integrate our strategic acquisition of Retail Energy assets. In comparison to prior year, revenue during full year 2025 increased by 849%, loss from operations decreased by $71 million. Non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA increased by $74 million, and the cash flow from operation increased by $44 million.

On Slide 6, we can see the step change and the strong foundation for growth that we have built. The past 3 quarters have averaged $43 million to $45 million in revenue. Going forward, we expect revenue to vary quarter-to-quarter depending on the market prices of ethanol, RNG and environmental benefits. However, we expect our adjusted EBITDA drivers to remain resilient and grow in 2026. One of our adjusted EBITDA drivers, which does not depend on the market prices that I just mentioned is our production tax credit. Last year, we sold $52 million of production tax credits related to Gevo North Dakota as we produce ethanol and sequester carbon.

We received about $41 million of cash proceeds in 2025 and expect the remainder in the first quarter of 2026. As a reminder, we booked production tax credit as a reduction to cost of goods sold each quarter. Looking forward to 2026 operating results, we are confident in our execution capabilities, and remain focused on achieving our target of approximately $10 million in adjusted EBITDA per quarter in 2026 or roughly $40 million on an annualized basis. We're also now targeting neutral to positive operating cash flow in 2026.

With that, I'll turn it over to Chris.

Thanks, Leke. 2025 was a record operational year. Gevo North Dakota recorded 69 million gallons of low-carbon ethanol volume during the full 12-month period and achieved a yield of nearly 3 gallons per bushel, which is close to the theoretical maximum. Included in that number is approximately 2 million gallons of ethanol that was produced from corn kernel fiber. That adds incremental value due to its lower carbon score. Our carbon sequestration system sequestered 173,000 metric tons of CO2, exceeding our previously stated benchmark of 165,000 metric tons.

Operationally, the plant is running reliably and efficiently. Our focus now is on one debottlenecking to increase ethanol, CO2 and coal product volumes; two, reducing carbon intensity further; and three, preparing for the fabrication of modules for our ATJ-30 project. We think our debottlenecking and expansion organic growth projects can increase efficiencies, put more money in the pockets of our farmer partners and local communities, drive down our carbon intensity score, optimize our production tax credits and finally, increased ethanol production to as high as 75 million gallons per year, and we'll raise carbon sequestration to at least 200,000 metric tons a year. Most of these projects have a 1- to 2-year payback, and the remainder of the projects will improve our operational efficiency and asset life.

In 2026, we plan to deploy about $26 million of capital, which further positions us to achieve stronger operating results starting next year. In addition to incremental organic growth, Gevo North Dakota provides an exceptional foundation for our ATJ-30 project. We have our own captive low-carbon ethanol feedstock our own operating CCS, we have rail infrastructure. We have about 500 acres of space, and we have a great operations team. This is why we believe ATJ-30 is the right project for the site and why Project North Star will be a good showcase to pursue Gevo's long-term copy pay strategy.

Back to you, Pat.

Thanks, Chris, Paul and Leke. While the company has solid economic footing with a clear path to grow adjusted EBITDA even without building the jet plant, investors should be able to see how the cash flow from our businesses benefit us prior to the ATJ-30 plant coming online in the future. We built a strong foundation from which to grow. I believe the ATJ opportunity is exciting, especially with Project North Star and the franchise approach. It has taken longer than I ever wanted to get to the point where we are today, but here we are. And looking back, what a journey it's been.

I'm incredibly pleased with where we are and where we are going. I'm most proud of the terrific team we have. I hear from investors and partners all the time how impressed they are with our people. We work to deliver, and we are incredibly persistent because we believe in what we are doing with deep conviction. So for me, the timing is right. The team is strong. The balance sheet is looking good. There are what I believe to be great opportunities in front of us. It's time for me to pass the torch to Paul, who I have bet will be a great CEO.

And with that, we'll take your questions. Operator?

And our first question for today comes from the line of Jeff Grampp from Northland Capital Markets.

I was curious on the CI front, I believe there were some changes in the calculations that kicked in at the start of this year. I was just kind of curious to contextualize those a bit more. Is there any way you guys could share maybe like what your CI score were in the back half of 2025 and how much of the benefit that could be for you guys looking ahead into this year?

I think let's -- I think what we should do is give an outlined Leke of the kind of numbers that you're seeing.

Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Pat. I think high level, so last year, our Gevo North Dakota, as you know, we generated and monetized $52 million of tax credits. That was based on a CI score of low double digits in last year. With the changes to the guidance and then the 45Z great model, how that's going to work in terms of no eye lock effectively. I think that's what you're referring to, that impact is going to be reflected in the amount of 45Z that we generate for our Gevo North Dakota asset in 2026, not necessarily 2025. And the impact that it has on our CI score is it going to reduce RCI score by pretty much 6 to 7 CI points. And when that happens, we expect to generate an incremental $0.10 per gallon in 2026, that is what we expect to see from our facility in 2026 in terms of 45Z. So based on our projected production of our Gevo North Dakota asset in 2026, of 67 million gallons, we are going to be in that threshold of $0.90 per gallon of credit jet generation in 2026. Changes to the 45Z guidance has very little to no impact to the 45Z degeneration for our RNG production or our RNG asset at this time.

Perfect look. I appreciate it. That's exactly what I was looking for. My follow-up on the ATJ side. I believe that DOE extension that you guys got last year has maybe a couple more months remaining at least on the original extension. Is it fair to assume that something gets figured out with them or another party by that deadline? Do you think additional time may be needed? I know you guys are targeting this year for FID on that, but wasn't sure if there's other things at play to reach that FID outside of financing.

Paul? Your question.

Yes, sure. Great question, Jeff. Yes, we're working -- we've been working on this for a number of years now, 3 years going on when -- so we want to get this to the finish line with the -- and we're pretty excited about where we're at and continuing to move this forward. But yes, we're absolutely -- when that got extended through mid-April, so we'll be working with the DOE to reach a decision there on most likely an extra extension is what we're looking for. But we're also working with a number of other parties who were excited about who see the value in the ATJ platform. So it's a combination of things.

Yes. I'll add to this point is that the economics look good. One of the interesting things that happened was that we're having that we're engagement with the DOE and they fully understand that we're -- we want to build that ATJ-30 plant up there in North Dakota rather than a 60 million-gallon plant down in South Dakota, outstanding. You know what? The economics are good. We have low carbon ethanol. It's a great site. Carbon capture is under our control. We've got half of what we would have had to build in South Dakota already built up there in North Dakota. And so other parties are interested, too. And other people are in working with us to finance that particularly because of this franchise model that Paul was talking about.

And our next question comes from the line of Dushyant Ailani from Jefferies.

And yes, Pat it was a pleasure working with you, and Paul, congrats on the new role. My first question, I know that you kind of talked about that incremental $0.10. Maybe could you give a little bit more detail on the -- details on the path to get to that $40 million in EBITDA, the bridge? I know you've guys have highlighted that before, but maybe if you can talk a little bit about the timing of it and how we can think about that going forward.

Paul, that's a question for you, and then you and Leke came up, I think.

Yes. Sure thing, Dushyant. I mean you see what we've done right now. I mean, last quarter, we were kind of at this $20 million in EBITDA run rate. And with the after push on the carbon and our good -- low carbon fuel sales, we've got that coming forward. Now we're looking at -- you heard what Leke was saying we can't get more than kind of this dollar per gallon. That's where we're going to cap out with the 45Z tax credits. So you put those kind of things together with the existing assets even before expansion, and we're really looking at how this shapes up. There's something like around a $10 million kind of average per core going forward. So that kind of puts in perspective. Leke, maybe you can chime in with a few extra details there.

Paul, no, I think you captured it. I think the trajectory is we are on track with really just how our EBITDA mix is made up to be tracking exactly as to how we're projecting, which is that $10 million per quarter. We feel very confident. I think 45Z is going to be part of the story, but we also do believe that really the intrinsic EBITDA margin that our assets can also generate also from the carbon monetization that we're doing, we are on the right track to achieve that growth.

Understood. And then my follow-up was I know you mentioned some talk around potential acquisitions as well. Maybe could you dive a little bit further into that, what kind of assets you're looking for and maybe around timing of those?

Yes. I think I'm going to follow up on whether to think about an important point about Gevo and Leke and his team compared to other companies who talk about 45Z, we actually -- Leke, his team actually brought the money in the door. That's an important distinction. And it shouldn't be -- that's an important point. It's not a hypothetical. It's a real thing that's been brought in. Now as far as looking at are there other Gevo North Dakota that we could apply our skill to and bring value to. Paul, do you want to comment on that?

Yes, sure. Look, I think this is what we're learning, Dushyant at Gevo North Dakota that there's a lot of money to be made kind of setting table as we think about the ATJ franchise, so as we look for how do we build out that franchise, we're looking for similar things that we've already identified, and it was a good learning for us going from South Dakota to North Dakota. We have on-site CCS and capture. So that's good. You got to have good corn. You got to have good logistics, right? You have to have all the good things that we're proving that are critical. And again, that kind of sets the base for then how do you grow ATJ. And so as we look through this and we talk to others, we know there aren't that many of these different assets out there, but we're going to keep our eye on that because I'd sure like to have another Gevo North Dakota if it exists. But we're going to just keep watching for that and be opportunistic.

And our next question comes from the line of Sameer Joshi from H.C. Wainwright.

Just sticking to ATJ-30 and the financing thereof the FID is expected during 2026. Is it dependent on the EDF loan guarantee transferring to this? Or it is independent of it?

Sure, Sameer. Look, I mean, it definitely accelerates things quickly, right? We can get the debt sizing right and move this forward and get the loan completed here. So that's a fast track that we want to try to keep moving forward. But like we said before, we're working with others because we're advancing the engineering along. And if you remember, we did a lot of work in South Dakota. So this is -- as we're thinking about how do we fit this project into -- at North Dakota, it's really taking it from that 60 million-gallon size that we have there to a 30 million-gallon size. Good news is now we've got 2 different size designs for our franchise. .

And then we basically have a little bit less on the capital to go out and get. But it's a combination of looking at what's the debt and the equity that we're going to have and who are the partners to put that together. Either way, we want to get this thing moving because we want to get like Pat was saying before, North Star has just fantastic economics. And we think that the returns at for themselves with potential add up to $150 million in EBITDA from adding the ATJ-30 and Gevo North Dakota.

And you have to remember that we're a lot more interesting than we used to be. We're positive cash flow kind of situation here. And so that makes us a whole lot less risky. And that's not lost on all kinds of people who invest in these types of things, right? There's a good base, same thing we were talking about, strong base, good economics up there. Everything is under our control, and it's a good situation. So yes, there's other options available.

Makes sense. It was interesting to see the 2 million gallons of corn fiber cellulose ethanol being produced. Is it -- like what are the considerations in either increasing that volume or in order to get a higher CI score like -- can you go -- do $4 million next year or $7 million? I just wanted to understand what the limits or extend is?

Chris?

Sure. So the way we make that corn fiber ethanol is really through the new enzymes that we had. And there's definitely room to optimize things, absolutely. We continue to do that. So you might expect incremental increases. At the same time, we are working on getting more ethanol gallons out of the plant, including the capital investment to further debottleneck the plant. And likewise, that will result in more corn fiber ethanol. So that's really -- it's really in the enzymes.

And I think as far as improving the overall economics, you've got several levels, levers they're working on, right? Chris just mentioned the increased production of ethanol, reducing quite a lot of CO2 right now capturing more of it. and then capturing the additional that comes off as we produce more ethanol, that's awesome. We have -- we can optimize coal products, the protein in the Corn [ Belt ]. And of course, we were just talking about the cellulosics. So there are several levels. And that's why helping debottlenecking up there is important is every little bit matters, because we really would rather have $1 a gallon on the tax credits, plus it generates more CDRs and those are valuable in the marketplace. And those are completely separate than those production tax credits. They're not the same at all. So that's an important point. We're increasing the number of products available by increasing how effective we are capturing the co-products.

Got it. Got it. Just one last one. I don't think we discussed Verity in any detail. But are we on track to sort of commercialize that during this year for feedstock, traceability, agriculture applications, I just would like to see where Verity is at.

Great question. So we're pretty excited. I think we finally got a really good catalyst and we talked a little bit about the 45Z tax credits, and if you see -- if you look at what guidance came out from treasury recently, while it didn't perfectly include that ag benefits would be counted, it indicated that ag benefits would likely be part of what is going to be added into 45Z tax credits, which is exactly the kind of carbon accounting and traceability solution Verity was designed to actually deliver. So we've been actually signing up more customers over the past quarter than we ever have before. So it's -- it's a combination of traceability and basically think about compliance services that need to simplify it, right? These are a lot of complicated calculations that need to be done.

Gevo has to do them for ourselves. This is why we created it. We created it as a tool to simplify our lives and make things more accurate and easier to do. But that's the same thing that our customers Verity needs. So we're really excited about that, and we're trying to make it more operational friendly and work with farmers. So you may have seen that we also announced the partnership with bushel who has a lot of farm management and grain software that help farmers just with their regular business. And so this is how we're now starting to integrate Verity with actual farm business software to make it really an integral part of how people do their business and also do their tracking and and traceability that is needed to monetize. So we're pretty excited about that. So thanks for asking the question.

Yes. No, sounds really good. Thanks, Patrick, for bringing the company so far. And Paul, good luck for the future.

And our next question comes from the line of Derrick Whitfield from Texas Capital.

Congrats on the strong year-end. And Pat and Paul, congrats on your respective updates. And Pat, hopefully, you can enjoy some well-deserved time off and retirement. Starting maybe first with bigger picture. With what you guys have accomplished over the last year, I mean, it's quite remarkable as you look at Slide 5? Paul, for you specifically, as you think about, again, this progress that the organization has accomplished and where you like the organization to be next year this time, how would you paint the picture of what changes that we need to expect? And it could be emphasizing certain aspects of the business, but just kind of how you think about the business and where you'd like to be 1 year from now?

Yes, sure, Derrick. And look, it's an exciting time, right? Because we have come so far in this past year and started things. I think the carbon business is one that we're really excited about, and we've been working on growing and it's just getting started, right? So we're selling with carbon detached or pulling that off separately. And I think the biggest thing that we've learned and the biggest -- maybe the biggest opportunity is just how do we really sell and monetize that carbon. We're starting to see our sales pick up with brand names. And obviously, there's a long way to go because we're just getting started. But really, the market is just getting started. .

So I think as carbon develops, if you look at some of the stats on the carbon market, about 44 million tons of carbon has been sold in these carbon dioxide removal markets, but only about 2.8% of that has actually been delivered. We're one of the first companies to be actually producing and delivering carbon credits and have a model where we can basically select between do we sell into low carbon fuel markets that have good returns or do we separate that carbon if there's more value to sell into the separate markets. So really getting that -- dialing in that carbon business and improving on it because we're just getting started, I think is a big deal for us. And that not only rolls into how we're doing our low-carbon ethanol business. That's exactly the same way we're thinking about the ATJ business as we think about a franchise, right? Because we can sell that fuel with those carbon attributes, it's called a little bit different terminology, Scope 1 and Scope 3s was sold with the fuel, but we can also separate those off and sell customers those Scope 1 and Scope 3 separately from that physical fuel.

So it's really the same business model, just applied to different commodities. And so as we get good at this, and we've already got essentially half of the output of the carbon sold from ATJ-30 under contracts. So I think that's going to be a bigger part of what we do. And that's a bigger part of the business that we believe we can bring to others, right, as we franchise this business. We don't have to own all the ethanol assets in the world. We don't have to own all the ATJ plants in the world. We have a business system that we can kind of copy pace even on that side and help people get paid for our know-how and our business system as we bring that playbook, right? And so this will be kind of the piece we really look at is what is our -- how capital intensive do we want to be? Obviously, we like to -- we love the returns that we're getting from Gevo North Dakota and so it's great to have that asset, and we'd sure love more. But we realize that we've got to manage that growth and how can we do that in an efficient way to balance our capital versus a capital-light strategy, which is where we think that franchise model comes into place.

And that's a model to just think about how else we grow. We're talking a lot about ATJ, but we just licensed our technology to Praj for IBA for diesel in India. And I think this model really applies not only for what we're doing in ATJ, low-carbon ethanol, but it applies for what we can do in renewable chemicals. It applies for what we can do in isobutanol. So just think about that as we bring these business systems forward, that's the picture that we're going to be working on and developing with partners, and we're excited to get this going. And like we said, earlier signing LOIs with even other ethanol companies to bring kind of Gevo's know-how and business system to help them and then for us to get paid for it.

Great. That's a great update. And maybe shifting over to ATJ with my follow-up. One of your industry peers has experienced some challenges with their ATJ project over the last year. As we inch closer to your FID, could you speak to how your ATJ-30 probably is different from a scale process and risk perspective to that other project that we're referring to you?

I can give -- I think I can give a perspective. And then, Chris -- one of the things that we did, we're using known unit operations, proven at full-scale commercially unit operations. We didn't rely on anything new like other people might have done. We didn't take something off of a laboratory in a national lab and never have it seen proven out. We're using unit operations that anyone can go kick the tires upon because they come directly from the petrochemical industry. So there's nothing new in that regard. How we put it together, how you lower CI score, how you optimize that's different, but that's not what makes or break it. Chris, Paul, you guys want to add anything else?

I'll add just a bit and then Paul can chime in. So Pat, I'll echo what you just said, which is, yes, we're using proven technologies and their technologies from a proven company that has commercialized many, many things at large scale, including at oil refineries. In fact, the engineering that's been done. So at the heart of the process is from a company called Axens. But as we design the entire process around it, we only use engineers that have experience working on these things and have the capability of supporting operations once we get operating. So these engineers are just desktop engineers. They've actually operated assets, and they have experience starting up plans. And so it's that experience. And like what Pat said, there's no new technology gives us a lot of confidence this is going to start up very easily. Paul?

Yes. I think Chris nailed it, right? I mean when we talk to a lot of companies in diligence, right, they figure out especially on the petroleum side that they've got these assets already running not all coupled together in the same order, but individually running in operations that they already are running. So it's one of those kind of things where we took a proven approach, right? So we know these unit operations work. yes, they're integrated together a little bit differently, but we've also been working with companies like Praj and Praj actually just put all these unit operations together in a fully functional integrated pilot plant. And I was actually there and got to open the spigot and jet will port out the other end, ethanol going in one end. So it was great. But I think we've really -- the combination of using known technologies and really good partners and great engineers who understand this have really put us in a very different spot from that other group that you're mentioning, if I'm assuming who it is and how we're ready to execute. .

And I'll add one more thing is that we think about it completely differently. We're trying to do something that's scalable to really big scale and really low dynamics. I'm not trying to do some one-off specialty thing, and we're not venture backed. We weren't -- it isn't that kind of a perspective. we're actually trying to solve a real-life problem, deliver jet fuel that's cost competitive with petroleum. Yes, we're going to sell the carbon attributes to go with it. no waste is not a strategy. You can't get there from here. I was just doing some research about this again, where it's you take waste products, yes, it drives up the price. We've seen this over and over again. You know what? Carbohydrates are a great feedstock. They're way abundant in oversupply across the world. Paul's got a great saying that I love take carbohydrates, right? Paul, what do you do with them from the waste line to the airline, I think?

We take those carbohydrate calories from the waste line to the airlines.

See what we're [indiscernible] or she make jet fuel out of it. Come on. So it's all different perspective of scale of what we're trying to do, and that's how we think about it, super pragmatic. We don't want technology risk. That's why we're able to clear diligence at the DOE. That's why we've been able to clear diligence with our other big partners. It isn't a -- it's not a project just to generate vibes is to make it breaking real for the long run and win.

That's a great answer. And maybe one, if I could just follow up on the $40 million run rate I think based on what I've heard you guys say, there appears to be some upside with debottlenecking that hasn't necessarily even factored into the $10 million per quarter run rate. And then also, when you kind of think about what's happening in the LCFS markets now and where you're going to place the product, it feels like there might be a little bit of extra outside there because you now have a few more markets competing with one another for those molecules. But I guess, any color you can offer on that front would be helpful.

Paul?

Yes, sure, Derrick. A couple of things there. If you look at the LCFS markets first, right, we're still applying for pathways where we want the tape with carbon capture. We've got pathways today without carbon capture and sequestration, but we'll look at applying and we're in the process of applying for those today and positive outlook on getting those done. But places like Canada in Canadian CFR, right, where the credit prices are [ 250 ] or higher, right, really nice from a carbon perspective. and that looks positive. We're obviously selling into markets today that have good returns on markets.

But the other thing that you have to remember is we're also inventoring some CDRs to build inventory to satisfy some of our contracts and spot sales in that market that we think is going to grow later. And as we do that, that's carbon value that we can't sell into those existing LCF markets that we're selling into today. So it's a little bit of a delayed delayed revenue there. And so what you probably will see, and like was talking about this a little earlier, we'll have this kind of put in full with inventory build on carbon that we sell separately into carbon dioxide removal markets. LCF markets that have more immediate returns. And so you'll see that kind of balance out a little back and forth. And then, yes, I think, of course, as we continue to finish up some energy efficiency projects, we get a lift from additional or lower CI score on 45Z going forward. All those things are going to be adding up to get us to that number.

And our next question comes from the line of Peter Gastreich from Water Tower Research.

So congratulations to the team on the results. Also, Pat and Paul, many congratulations to you and really wish you both the best during the transition. Just a couple of questions. First of all, you're just talking about the -- or apologies talking about the CDR inventory and carbon credits. Just curious what you're seeing in terms of pricing in terms -- in the voluntaries CDR market? And what is your outlook there?

Thanks. First, Peter, for the congratulations. And when you look at the carbon markets, like we said, it's a developing space, right? So it's hard to peg it at kind of a number. And that's why if you look at our investor presentation, we've got a range. So typically, we have a range in the voluntary markets anywhere from $100 to $300 a ton for those voluntary carbon dioxide removal credits. And like I said, we're on the top 10 list of the suppliers in that market today. So that's pretty exciting for Gevo to move from basically nonexistent there to 1 of the top 10.

And then when you look at the low carbon fuel markets, I would have said even in the investor presentation that's on our website, we've got that pegged a little lower. Typically, we've seen markets like California be down even as low as $50 a ton, which that's not very attractive, especially if we're -- we have this optionality. But now when you see Canada and Oregon start to really ramp up and get up to these $200 or $200 plus or $200 numbers, then this is where we've got good competition between carbon dioxide removal markets in the voluntary space and the compliance markets with low carbon fuel. And so we're going to continue to leverage that to our advantage. So we can make some decisions and figure out where to place volume both with our commodity and our carbon value to get Gevo the best returns.

Okay. Great. So my next question is just about your share CCS capacity. So it looks like the Frontier partnership that's really going to help accelerate the plans there. I'm just curious First of all, are you able to share what would be a realistic time line for starting to bring in that third-party CO2. And the question also -- a second question related to that would be once you reach a critical mass of volume, I don't know if that's in terms of contracts or whatever, will you have incremental CapEx of any sort, perhaps above ground that will be required to those incremental volumes?

Yes. Sure, Peter. I mean I think when the Frontier infrastructure holdings partnership or collaboration that we've been working on, it's been really interesting because I think what -- there was a lot of promise from these pipelines. And obviously, we had a pipeline that we thought was going to come to us in South Dakota that didn't materialize. So we feel that. And so this is exciting to think about CO2 by rail. And I think it comes back to we're going to be producing more fuel and more carbon dioxide co-product and capturing that and capturing more in North Dakota.

But today, for example, we're only using 15% to 17% of what's called our poor space, which is the available volume for storage. So we've got a lot of extra capacity. So really, our goal is to figure out as we expand, we want to make sure we're capturing Gevo's carbon oxide, but we can help others and what we learned working with Frontier is that there is there are a lot of ethanol companies out there that we can help. And this is where it comes back into this approach where our carbon management services, if we can bring in CO2 by rail and monetize our first space, this is a big deal for us because we could get paid in things like storage fees. We can help with carbon marketing. So we're still in the design phase of this.

So we're scoping this out. I think it's still going to take a while because you have to build basically a terminal to put in place. But that does get pretty exciting if we can connect the dots between the rest of the capacity that we've got and it doesn't mean that we have to stop there, we could probably access more capacity in the port space around us. but pretty good opportunity for us. And if you look at our investor presentation, this is where a lot of the unlocked going beyond that $40 million up to the $110 million in adjusted EBITDA and the carbon value comes from how do we monetize this floor space, how do we help others with the carbon business.

And that, in turn, right? I mean the other piece that I'll just try to connect the dots full circle here is the more low carbon ethanol plants we can enable by helping them with carbon management services, whether it's the actual physical removal and storage of that carbon or the digital services like Verity and things like our carbon business that sets that table for more sites to be fully enabled and ready to be a site for an alcohol-to-jet plant. So I think that's really that combination and how it fits. It's not just the revenues that we could generate today from that kind of relationship. Those are great. but it's really how do we have -- or enable 10, 15, 20 more sites in the future.

This does conclude the question-and-answer session of today's program. I'd now like to hand the program back to Pat Gruber for any further remarks.

Well, thank you all. It was a fantastic year. It's a lot of potential. This carbon business is extremely interesting. It gives us the ability to arbitrage look at make decisions discretely about where can we capture the most value. We're the first to do it, and we're breaking a lot of new ground at it, and it's quite interesting. I'm really grateful for the team up there at Gevo North Dakota. They've done a fantastic job running that plant.

Congratulations to all the folks who have done it. Chris, great job. And it was really a good move for us to acquire that and bring it under our -- get that asset under our control because it solves all kinds of problems. We have low carbon available, boom, box check, that question is answered, sequestration available. It's a beautiful sequestration site. I don't think we had a full appreciation of how great it actually is compared to the others that are out there. It's outstanding in that it's a -- we're the only ones in that formation, and it's an outstanding well.

And so we're learning more and more about why that's so important. And you see the results in that we got certified as a 1,000 year well by pure.earth. And I look at the potential of what's going on here, and you see these things that Paul mentioned, like the IBA in diesel field, who have thought. We never have quit working on IBA. It's just in the background because you don't need it for jet fuel, but it's good for other stuff, other fuels. Great. Those things are going to happen sometime in the future using partners. Awesome. And so get the ATJ plant done. You heard Paul talk about it. We got to get that done and then do the franchise model.

Already, Paul talked about bringing the -- being able to go to other parties or other ethanol companies who want to learn from us, and we can -- we have a service we can provide and get paid for. Those are all very interesting things. So we're in a hugely gear situation compared to where we've been. We have a huge amount of intellectual property, huge amount of growth potential. And so this is, I think, something around my 59th or 60th earnings call, I very last one. I want to thank you all for your investment. Thank you for your questions and sharpening us forcing us to sharpen up over the years, especially mean thank you for all the opportunity to work with you all. I truly appreciate it, and I wish the team the very, very best. With that, I sign off.

Thank you. And thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.

Hello, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's virtual non-deal roadshow. My name is Noella Alexander Young, virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in Atlanta and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Gevo, Inc. trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Presenting today is Patrick Gruber, CEO and Executive Chair of the Board; Paul Bloom, President of Gevo; and Eric Frey, Vice President of Strategy. The presentation will last approximately 20 to 25 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A session for which you can participate using the chat box in the top right corner of your screen. That being said, I will now hand over to Pat. Great.

Thanks for joining us today. And the primary topic of this meeting is actually the transition of management. So this means that I am the outgoing CEO, and Paul Bloom is the incoming CEO. And I wanted you all to have the chance to hear from Paul directly about what he sees and why he likes it here. Gevo has been a really fun road for me, and I love this company a lot. It's really an important company. I've met my whole professional career pretty much on it and my life savings on it. And so I'm entrusting that to my team in the future to carry it forward.

The -- when we look at -- you get stolen moments like this where you look back and say, [indiscernible] when I came here in 2007, it was all about this dream actually now making a reality, the turning into making hydrocarbons, the big fuels, the jet-fuel gasoline and diesel fuel from renewable resources, but coming from alcohols. We've been pursuing that ever since. What it takes to be successful is you have to be able to have a technology that's outstanding, really low cost. Guess what? We've achieved that. It works. You have to be able to sell all the attributes, the carbon, Well, guess what? That's starting to happen. Now finally, that's taken a lot longer than I ever would have dreamed, but now we're learning to monetize the carbon value itself. That's a big deal, and Paul Bloom has been a leader in making that happen. He's been with us for 5 years. And of course, the jet fuels all have to be drop in, you've got to use existing infrastructure.

One of the things that is astounding in what we're doing here is the scale. The scale is immense and the opportunity is absolutely immense. We've done well, and I'm pleased with our acquisition of the plant in Gevo, North Dakota. Our timing appears to be really, really good, and we needed that. It's low carbon ethanol and that's the feedstock to make jet fuel. So I've built a team. They're really, really strong. Paul Bloom has been with us for 5 years already.

I've had my eye on Paul for a long, long time. And because Paul had a job, he's got a background, he'll tell you more about in a minute. But he's got a chemist, a broad business background, but a lot of new businesses. He's operating businesses, had business succeed. There's other ones that he had to work through that were struggling businesses, and he's got a lot of experience, and he's a really capable person, and I'm glad to have him. And I'm glad that I had a long look at them and how he operates. And I'm glad to be able to turn the company over to you. I honestly could not think of a better person on earth to take over this company and lead it. And the thing is, and for me, and people wonder why I'm leaving now, it's like, look, I'm going to be 66 years old here this summer, 66.

I had a few years ago at about with cancer as like that maybe we think about how I want to do things in my life. This company is at a super stable place is solid. The cash flow is building. We've got good cash in the balance sheet. It's about execution, building the business, growing. The team is in place. I got a guy Paul, who's an outstanding leader. I want to see who he does. He's good. he's really good.

And I will be around. I'm the Executive Chairman, and I'll be Chairman later. And I'm here to help in whatever way I can. Paul's team is good. And I'm not proud of what's here, and I'm not going away. So I think we do -- do now is I'm going to introduce you, Paul -- the incoming CEO of Gevo.

And Paul, I think you should start and talk about your background a little bit and to tell people why you're qualified, I put him on the spot a little bit. Sorry, Paul, but tell people why you're qualified to be CEO of Gevo.

Thanks, Pat. First, let me big thanks to Pat, big thanks to our Board and the confidence that they put in me and the honor really to lead the company to the next chapter. This is -- is fantastic. But -- like Pat said, Pat and I actually have known to them for a long time. I've actually -- Pat and I actually have very similar backgrounds, right? We're both technology guys at heart. I'm a chemist by trading just like Pat, I grew up in the Midwest, and really focused on -- spent most of our careers developing bio-based technology all the way from the laboratory all the way through commercialization and really making them turning it from an idea into a profitable business.

And so this is exactly the path that Gevo has been on. Obviously, we've had a transformational year last year. But that background that I got great education at place starting actually at Valspar was when I got out of school, I was a paid chemist, right? So making things like paint, coatings, a lot of house paint, that type of stuff. Great education on what are all the raw materials that have to go in to make finished products and make them really good and last for 30, 40, 50 years on your house our automotive applications and protect those assets that we have. So great education there, but I needed more chemistry in my life went back to graduate school. And get a degree of chemistry and then joined ADM and ADM was really just a fantastic place to work. I can't say enough good things about ADM and my time there.

I got to develop early on, I got involved in a lot of joint ventures, things that the company is doing, both on food and some on feed, some on industrial products and on fuels. So I got to get this broad experience, kind of fun fuels and industrials and and across the board. And when you listen to Gevo, is exactly the same things that we're doing, right? We can't help but make feed at the same time and food.

At the same time, we're making fuels, and that's just part of our focus. But all back to agriculture, right? How do we turn the bushels and work with farmers and to make this the best. So that's been the history of my career. I got to do a few really cool things. taking technology from the lab to commercial scale. One of them was we had co-products, just like you heard Pat monetizing all the things that come out of a biorefinery that's really important to us, right? So we make a ton of fuel, a ton of feed a ton of carbon dioxide for every time that we process our grain coming in the door. Well, at ADM, we were doing the same type of thing, and we had co-products, things like glycerin when we started biodiesel that we had to find new homes for create new demand. And today, farmers need more demand for their corn than ever before, right?

So this is great to unlock this sustainable aviation fuel business. But One of the things that is critical is when you monetize coproducts, you have to develop the market at the same time. So I got to do things like take glycerin from biodiesel and make it into industrial products like propylene glycol, that's the same compound that comes from petroleum.

So not only did we do things like that and make propylene glycol, but then you had to go out and sell it in the market. So I got to transition from developing technology scaling up technology, helping to build plants being part of the team to run in the commercial chemicals business where we actually then have to go sell those products, right? And that is critical because even big companies when you start to sell a new product, you're new in the market. And you have to figure out how do I break into that market, how do I monetize that market? What's really the value proposition. And part of it is just how to -- what are my economics? And that's really important, right? So you have to really start with what those economics are, how do you build that business, how do you sell the product. So did that. I've been there, done that, got to do it even more -- took over more big technology programs at ADM and then ended up doing sustainable materials.

I was the VP of Sustainable Materials before I joined Gevo and then we've been with Gevo 5 years. So as Pat said, I know the company, this has been a long planned transition that we have had. It wasn't a give me. I'll tell you that much. So this was -- this is how do you come in to Gevo, how can you help? How could you help shape the business and develop things. So last year was a big year where I got to take over as the Chief Business Officer. After spending time on technology, building things in carbon, right?

That was the Chief Carbon Officer before that. And that was instrumental, I think, in a lot of what we had to do to shape Gevo because, again, we make commodity, right? So we have to monetize our commodity, we have to monetize our carbon value that we create, and we have to maximize our incentives. So really building that carbon business and getting that started was critical in developing tools and platforms like Verity, right, which is a great new business for us, and we're really excited about it. But then being able to put it to use and getting it installed in places like Gevo North Dakota has been critical steps. And then taking over the business, like I said, hitting the ground running after the acquisition last year was just a transformational year for us.

It was great to move into that position and now really getting into the management of the entire company, taken over for Pat starting in April. But like Pat said, he's not going anywhere. He'll be around. He's the Executive Chair of the Board right now. It's fantastic, right? So -- but I think it's really important during the same time, right? It's not about me so much as it's about that team that Pat talked about, right?

So when you think about our team, we've got the best in the business, right? So from whether it's in advocacy and the things that we've got going on, on the policy side, people like Lindsay Fitzgerald, we've got sustainability covered, Nancy Young, veteran in the industry, have been working with heading our sustainability team heading up all of our commercial efforts and getting things done. We've got a new Chief Carbon Officer. You probably saw that recently. We got Alex Clayton, who just is coming on. So it's great. I was the first Chief Carbon Officer, which was really Pat's idea. But we've got a new one. So because it's important to us. We're going to spend the time, and we're going to be dedicated to that business and continue to grow it because it's a new business, right?

It's just like the other things that Pat and Chris Ryan, who has been instrumental in developing the path for which Gevo has been on. We've all developed these new business. businesses in the past. Carbon is the next one, right? This is the one that we're working on today. We're being -- we're making some really good progress. We're going to make more. So it's all good.

But I think this is really the strength of the team, the people that we're putting together. We've got a lot of functional players who can execute on this business. And you hear a lot from Eric, and he's on the call. He does a great job articulating everything that we're talking about and how does it all synthesize and come together to make us money and to benefit our shareholders, right? So this is really the path that we're going to be on. We're going to continue to grow that. Very excited about where we're going next with the company. But that's a little background on me.

[Indiscernible] The next thing I want to talk about is what do you see? Like look in the vision, what's going out? What do you see coming? Or tell us what are you looking at? Why do you think this is a good spot to be?

I know Pat knows the answer. We're both really excited about this...

I'm just a listener, Tell us what's the opportunity here? Why is this an exciting play? Or what's the exciting opportunity for Gevo?

It goes back to the, I think, the dream Pat had, maybe a little early, right, to say like how can we make energy dense liquids, hydrocarbons, things like jet fuel, right? Because that's what we're really doing. We're turning renewables into jet fuel. And the important thing there is -- and this is great because the technology is here, right? So it's all about commercialization today. It's about how do we drive this to a successful business and how do we provide for the energy needs that the United States and really the world is going to require. And aviation fuel is one of those perfect ones where we've got more demand coming. So where is that going to come from?

And we think this is a perfect way that we can marry agriculture and energy together to go forward. So we're -- I think, Pat, as you say, what am I most excited about? One, there's really 2 things that are front and center right now. One, continued profitability and driving EBITDA at Gevo, North Dakota, right? Transformational year. And so what are we going to do? We're going to continue to drive that forward. We hit the ground running, selling tax credits, monetizing those probably first in the industry, developing things like unique insurance products that help us get out there and be front and center, selling the carbon, selling the commodity, putting all that together and driving positive adjusted EBITDA for the company first time ever, right? That's fantastic. And then as we look forward to what's next, right, the whole point of what we're trying to do is provide the solid base and the foundation at Gevo, North Dakota, so we can execute on what we call Project North Star, which is really our ATJ-30 or alcohol to jet 30 million gallon plant that we're working on really daily with the Department of Energy and others to secure financing for that facility and drive that forward to reality because if we're going to deliver jet fuel to the market, we have to have our first plant, first large-scale plant. Gevo has been doing this for a long time.

We've got a lot of first at Gevo, which is one of the things that brought me here, right? So that's just fantastic because it's not that the technology hasn't been there or Gevo hasn't been the leader. We do. We've got a patent portfolio over 400 patents. Now it's about taking all that technology and all those firsts and turning it into the first large-scale commercial plant, right? And that's what gets exciting for me about the ATJ-30 project at North Dakota and getting that thing to the finish line because the growth trajectory from there, it's huge. You think about this, and Eric's got some slides on this. We don't need to put up the slides right now. But by 2035, the United States is going to need an extra 2.3 billion gallons of jet fuel. Notice, I didn't say SAF. I said jet fuel. right? So where is that going to come from? Well, nobody is building any new refineries today. And even if they did, only 9% of that barrel turns into jet fuel, right? But we have a great technology that we can take ethanol. And as you know, we had more yields for corn this year. Farmers need more homes for the commodities and the U.S. needs more demand for corn that we can grow right here in the United States and provide for our energy needs, right? So this is all about how do we provide as part of our energy solutions for the country. And we can do that, right?

We can take ethanol. We can turn it into an energy dense liquid. We can -- back to Pat's dream, right? So we're just trying to help Pat realize his dream here. This is really what it's all about. But producing those energy dense liquids because you can't just stop an aircraft and fill up at the gas station, right? There's -- you just can't do that, right? So you have to have energy dense liquids that you can fly for long distances. That's why you're not going to electrify a jet anytime soon. You're not going to use hydrogen. They don't have the energy density that you need. But guess what, we can densify ethanol to energy dense liquids. This is what we're all about, making jet fuel out of ethanol at Gevo, North Dakota. And once we have that first plant, then we're going to be targeting that 2.3 billion gallons of need that the U.S. is going to have by 2035. And so that turns into something like Eric's done the math, it turns into something like we need 70 of these kind of facilities that we're going to be building first of its kind, we anticipate there at Gevo, North Dakota. And at that scale that we would need to satisfy the demand for that market. So if you ask me what gets me excited, Pat, it's that opportunity. But I think it's a little more than that because it's the entire business system that goes into putting this together. And what do I mean by that? I mean it all starts at the field, right?

So this is back to what -- part of what I've been doing and with the team, I'm really proud of at Gevo is we've always been, first and foremost, thinking about farmers, putting food first and making sure that we can continue to grow our future, right? And that starts at the field level. And as we have worked with farmers, just a tremendous group of who have been participating in our Verity programs and our USDA programs that we've had in the past, we've seen tremendous improvements on that front, right? And we can track all of this and prove it and showing that it's not only that you can reduce something like carbon intensity, carbon intensity at the end of the day is just a proxy for a lot of good things that happen. It's a good proxy. If you do more with less, you're more efficient. That's actually what carbon intensity is all about, right? Being more efficient. How do I do more with less? The carbon intensity also goes down. But we get other benefits. So back to the field, when we're working with farmers, they're doing things -- they're not only using less inputs to get more outputs, but they're improving soil health, right? And this is really important long term and how we think about this, that as we're building our business system, we want to track and show how agriculture continues to get better, and we make these continuous improvements over time because, guess what, we're not making any more land.

So if we can make that asset or our land healthier, more resilient to extreme weather events and produce more all the time, we get not only more fuel, we get more food, we get more feed, we get more industrial products. So it's really important that we start there and that farmers get rewarded for that. And then we also focus on that same efficiency and how we manage our inputs and maximize our outputs to do more with less at our production facility. So it's all the way to deliver it from the field to the seat on the aircraft, right? And that's the other piece that I think Pat had this vision a few years back on we're delivering an energy dense liquid. Well, guess what? If you look at a gallon of jet fuel and a gallon of SAF, right? What's different? Well, not much. They look the same. You can't tell the difference. The molecules are the same molecules, whether you make it from corn or if it comes from petroleum. And really, we're working on you blend those together. So then it's all about the proof. How did I get there? What did I put into that? And that's what our customers need. And this is why we built the Verity business so we can work with farmers, we can track everything from the field all the way to the seat on the aircraft and prove how we made that and the other benefits, including carbon of what -- how we manage that carbon in that whole value chain and deliver value then to the final customers.

So long answer to Pat's question, but it's a combination of things, right? There's not just one thing I'm excited about, but there's many things that we've got. And we haven't even scratched the surface on some of the other opportunities that Gevo has got because we're still working on great technology platforms like isobutanol, which has been the history of Gevo, which we think is going to be another key technology in the future as we drive forward. It's not -- it's alcohols, right? Pat said to start with, it's not just ethanol, it's isobutanol, it's alcohols, it's ethanol, all those together, how can we be -- whatever the most efficient technology is to get us to the final products, to make the highest quality products, that's what we're going to do. So I think that's really, really critical. So what we've got today at Gevo one, great growth platform, things we can execute on today, but we've got a huge portfolio of opportunities that we'll be building graduation plans for in the future that we can get those things to the commercial realities as well. But we couldn't have done it without the great things that Pat has done, Chris Ryan has done. A lot of the people who have worked at Gevo for many, many years have really provided a fantastic foundation now to take forward to this next stage.

Yes. It's interesting. And this thing -- this point about you need low carbon ethanol, you got to have -- this is a trickier part that's a subtlety that's hard to see if you're an outsider, but it's the size of the systems we're talking about, the tonnages we're talking about, the volume and scale. This is where we're different than most of the companies out there in my opinion. And the reason is that we have always thought about the scale in this business system that Paul referred to. You have to be good at selling the co-products. You have to be good about managing the inputs of who comes in from where and how and keep track of it because someone is going to say, where do you get that? Is that legit or not? You see this problem showing up in other companies who are trying to do waste products. Yes, where that waste come from exactly, how do to get there? And now you're seeing companies super fraud all over the place, not us. And because ours is a straightforward, here's how you get it, we keep track of everything.

And you have the ability -- you got to have the ability to sell carbon. Paul has built a business to sell carbon of actual real monetization, selling the carbon dioxide, 1 ton of corn makes 1 ton of CO2 plus 1 ton of jet fuel plus 1 ton of protein, animal feed. So you have to be able to monetize all 3 to make an economical product. on a fundamental level, yes, the technologies work.

We have this huge -- and we have some that are very advanced technologies. We've been working on ethanol to make it into jet fuel and diesel fuel and gasoline since 2007 -- or no, before that, yes, 2007 when I got here. We've been doing ever since. We worked on isobutanol. And so it isn't a one-trick pony like that, but the big commercial opportunity is just what Paul said, 2.3 billion gallon shortfall, how is it we're going to import more jet fuel really and pay a premium to other countries or should we build it ourselves and have it here and we have it cost competitive at the marketplace. Why is it cost competitive? Because monetizing the carbon, monetizing the protein, monetizing any other co-product and then you get the good netbacks. So it's a good system. So Paul, what are you looking forward for next year? And can you give a little color on that in terms of I know that there's work being done for Gevo, North Dakota, and we've talked in our slide deck, our public deck, there's talk about the growth there of what we're doing.

One of the things that people always ask us about, and I'll head off the question, you're all going to raise more money anytime soon? Well, for Gevo, Inc., we're pretty -- got a strong balance sheet, a lot of cash. We do have to raise money at the project level when we do an alcohol-to-jet plant, we do. That's why we're having the dialogue with the DOE and others.

But for us, it just growing EBITDA, what we have for a company with a whole bunch of technology and a whole bunch of development and market development capability, we're in a pretty darn strong position, more strong than almost anybody that I'm aware of in our space. And that's because the strength of the balance sheet, what's in front of us and our opportunity specifically. So you want to talk about that, Paul, what's going on?

Absolutely. Eric, maybe I'll ask Eric to throw up the slide that we typically use on this because I think picture is worth a thousand words on this one, especially and help everybody understand where we anticipate that the business is going from exactly what Pat said, what do we have today? Where are we looking at in the future? And some of this, this is a couple of things here. Eric, if you can keep -- go to there we go. This is the one I like.

So if we think about -- this is also in advance of ATJ-30 or the alcohol to Jet 30. We'll get to that in a minute. But this gets pretty exciting, pretty fast looking at what's our potential today on with the existing business that we have, thinking about how do we optimize what we have, what we can do to grow that business in advance of ATJ30. And then when we get to ATJ-30, putting that all together. So just think about this for a little bit. We -- last year was really a transformational year. We knew that we wanted to get the Red trail assets. We completed that acquisition. And then we just think the big beautiful bill was great from a standpoint of -- with 45Z tax credits that were also there. And we started on that on the early side, right? So when you look at the stack of the potential EBITDA for us, think about the main things that we just talked about, how do we monetize for Gevo, the value that we create comes from the commodity, the carbon and maximizing the incentives. Well, for the production tax credits, we hit the ground running and anticipate over time, we're trying to get -- the maximum you can get there is $1 per gallon.

We've got a 67 million gallon ethanol plant. So you can kind of get the idea of where we're headed with this. But CI's carbon intensity is just a proxy for that. So we're trying to get lower and lower scores. Our carbon capture helps us a lot with that, but it also helps us with this carbon value. And the carbon business, while we've got it painted a little bit smaller, you can see in the future, this continues to grow for us.

And the carbon business is super important, and we really break it down into 2 different things. We can attach that carbon value and monetize it with -- into low carbon fuels. And this is where it's great to have a team that can enable as many pathways as possible into different markets because we're selling today into low carbon fuel markets multiple states and in Canada and different places. And we can balance -- we call it carbon arbitrage, but we balance that carbon sale, whether it's attached to the fuel or separated out, and it's something called a carbon dioxide removal credit. And this is a global growing market that's about $10 billion today. We think it's going to continue to grow. And just an example of that, this past year, we signed a deal with a company called Biorecro out of Europe.

They're actually purchasing that carbon for us. It was a $26 million deal over multiple years. So this is the kind of exciting thing that we're just starting, but we're having some really good progress. So we think that we can build this business, the combination of the incentives, the carbon.

And then, of course, we've got the commodity. You see all of those things in that stack that take us with -- we anticipate we could get to today, where we could be is around a $40 million EBITDA business even without doing additional things, right? This is how do we monetize, how can we keep driving that process forward, but pretty exciting place to be. Then we start thinking about what do we do around debottlenecking? Can we expand our production? I'm not talking about building a new plant. I'm talking about unlocking more value, creating several million gallons more at a time coming from the efficiency gains that we need to continue to see, maybe some equipment, maybe some extra projects. But another one that we see as you're moving more to the -- what can we do to unlock that business is also we didn't just purchase an ethanol plant with carbon capture. We purchased the entire asset, which includes a lot of pore space today. And what is pore space? Pore space is where we actually can sequester store carbon dioxide long term, right? That's in demand.

More people want to store carbon dioxide. What else can we do with carbon dioxide? We can also sell it to other people, and they can use it for things like enhanced oil recovery. They can use it for chemical manufacturing. A lot of it is used in food and beverages. It's how you carbonate your beverage, right? I mean I've got a carbonated beverage in my hand today. Where did that come from? It probably came from ethanol production for that CO2. But what we're really excited about is because we got this extra pore space, we have the opportunity to bring in potential third-party CO2 to that facility and store that for other people and then help them monetize their carbon. Just like Alex Clayton is out working today as our Chief Carbon Officer to continue to help Gevo monetize carbon, other people can see the value in working with us to help them monetize their carbon. Where are they going to store it? We have unique geology. We're only using 17% of our pore space today. That means -- and we'll use more of it for ourselves as we continue to debottleneck the plant. If we make more ethanol, right, every ton of ethanol that we produce, we produce an extra ton of CO2. We're going to continue to produce more, and we have this opportunity because we can capture it. The equipment is all there.

We're ready to go, and we can continue to do that, monetize it and then either attach it with fuels or separate it for carbon value. And look, with other people, we can bring that in. So you think about growing our internal carbon business, maybe we can grow that to a $30 million business, maybe it's more. we're not sure yet, but that's a growing global market that we're really excited about.

But then we can monetize this pore space and work with others and bring in extra value. So that carbon business is really critical for us. Again, in advance of ATJ-30, we're going to be working hard to say how much of this potential $60-plus million can we go get and develop and bring back as real new business opportunities for us. And at the same time, as we increase production and continue to have low CI score, those incentives that came out in 45Z or clean fuel production tax credits will -- as we have more fuel, we have -- we can get more clean fuel production tax credits. But it's all based on our ability to produce those gallons, right? That's how you produce it. and we're going to continue to focus on operational excellence.

We added Greg Hanselman to the team. He's come on, and he'll be working on operations and engineering, great background on doing that, helping us drive these projects, just a tremendous background, very similar ag processing, making products for food, feed, fuels and industrials, just like the rest of us. So he knows how to get things done, and we're really excited to have him on the team now, and he's hit the ground running. So when you put all this together, you still have the commodity.

We got to make the commodity. We got to do all this, but really exciting potential here to take a great business and make it even better. And that's where we're going in the future. So hopefully, that gives you a little bit of idea of what's possible in advance of ATJ-30. And I would say the other thing that gets us excited is because we're making progress in doing this with our existing assets, now we can start to think about, is this a transformation? If we're really going to grow a franchise of ATJ-30 plants, this is kind of the base thing that's needed in order to drive this not only for one location, but multiple locations across the country and really around the world, how do you make sure that you can provide the right type of low-carbon ethanol, the right type of business system that the ATJ-30 plants could be built on as a foundation, right? So we're learning that, and we're developing this business.

And this is really important for us that we can show that we execute on this. I think this also helps like why would you trust Gevo, right? We've been -- until this year, we haven't been really running these bigger, larger assets. I mean, a lot of us individually have been not at Gevo, but at different companies. But now, look, I really believe this is showing that can we do this?

Yes. We want to build our right to win. And again, when we think about future business, when we're making things like jet fuel, well, today, we're selling commodity, carbon, maximizing incentives. That's exactly the same thing that we're going to do in the future. It's just a different product. It's just a different commodity, but you have to monetize the same way. You have to monetize all your co-products. You have to maximize your carbon value. You want to really maximize your incentives. And we'll continue to do that. And again, this is kind of a proof point for me, can we do it? The answer has been yes. Now we need to just keep making it better, drive forward all the great things that we know we can do and unlock more value at our existing site while we get ready for really the build-out of the ATJ-30 plant for first serial #1.

Good. That's good. And then now look forward and say, why don't you give a little color on what ATJ adds?

Yes. So this gets really exciting, especially because when you think about -- and Eric, if you want to move -- maybe I can move forward here. Yes. Well, let's go back to this. We talked about -- Pat and I were both talking about this. This is what's exciting for us because there's a real need, right? We always have to think about how are we going to develop growth for Gevo? Well, what's the need? Well, the need is we need more jet fuel. I didn't say SAF. We just need more jet fuel. And again, when we think about this, the U.S. is going to need 2.3 billion gallons per year. This is not our data. This is EIA, right? So this is coming from the U.S. Energy Information Administration about what the U.S. is going to need. And as we do that, nobody is building a new refinery today. Maybe they do. But again, only 9% of that barrel turns into jet fuel, where we can target jet fuel specifically as our primary product coming out of the ATJ plant. We could also make diesel, right? I mean we can turn the knob and make diesel fuel as well if that's really what's needed. But again, think about us filling the gaps, how do we supplement what's out there from petroleum. Petroleum is not going away, right?

And we're not a replacement strategy. We're really supplementing that, blending up to 50%. That's what you do with the synthetic aviation fuel and jet fuel to blend together to deliver these solutions to the market. But the demand is there, right, we believe. And the other piece that's really important as we go for this next stage, just like we are talking about being competitive on our current businesses today, we believe that the ATJ-30 and the technology that we're deploying is the lowest cash cost technology that's out there, which is, again, really important. You look at this chart, what we're really seeing is that if you look at jet fuel prices and price of crude oil, can we be competitive with where that's been. And we believe that the cash cost is really a solid, strong competitor, especially compared to other options. But things like power to liquids, interesting technology. We think that those need to be invested in more, but they're not ready to be competitive today.

Things like HEFA, that's oil-based oilseed technology, so using fatty acids and those products. still good. We're believers in that. We need a lot of solutions. But what we're getting excited about is that we believe that the ATJ-30 technology and alcohol to jet that we're working on is already kind of the lowest in this cost stack of these options, which is great because that marries with this increasing supply of corn in the United States where we can produce more and more, right?

We need a growth strategy. Well, growth strategy, you need to grow. We've got corn. You grow the corn. We've got a growth strategy then to turn that into more fuel. And what gets really exciting then for us, back to Pat's question around, hey, what's the future look like here? The fantastic, right? So just to give you -- you saw where we were kind of leaving off in advance of ATJ-30, and we anticipate that after building the alcohol to Jet 30 plant, we can get to something like $150 million in adjusted EBITDA from that plant. Okay. So how do we get there, right? This is really important. And what's the size of this investment? Roughly, we've mentioned this a few times now on calls and our last earnings call, roughly a $500 million total installed capital to get something like this done. Pretty exciting when you think that the adjusted EBITDA from that opportunity could be upwards of $150 million a year. Now it's also important to note that we're not including a lot of incentives here. This is where the carbon -- selling the carbon and now in this case, those carbon manifests itself in sales called Scope 1s and Scope 3s.

I know we need a vocabulary list, we need a dictionary for Gevo, when you're listening to us talk because there's so much of this. But Think about how airlines and the customers of airlines are trying to make sure that they're part of the solution. We're actually selling our commodity and our carbon either together sometimes or we're separating that out and selling it. We've got real deals that we've produced -- that we've made in the market today. And so we're already showing that this business model is functional, right? Now we need to build a plant, now we need to deliver this kind of value that we anticipate can be done. And so it's not dependent on things like 45Z tax credits because by the time we get this built, maybe there's a little bit of time left, but we really build this based on the commodity value, things like RINs and then the carbon value that exists. So we're very excited about this. How do we do this and then be very efficient, but it's about how we manage carbon, how do we have the operational excellence that's already starting today in Gevo, North Dakota and really get cereal #1 built so we can prove this because we've got to have cereal #1 that delivers the economics and the proof that then we can start to franchise this basically and think about plant #2, 3, 4, 5, 6, right, maybe 70, maybe more.

We're not sure. But this is what gets us very excited. This is what gets me excited and driving forward to make sure that this is a model that then we can kind of copy it taste over and over again, right? And that, I think, comes down to fundamentally the concepts that all of us have been delivering about how to build these plants in a modular style, how can we build them and then be able to drop them in next to low-carbon ethanol plants, not just in the United States, but globally because it's a global business, right? Aviation fuel is -- aviation fuel demand, while we talk about the U.S., it's something that every place is developing. So we do have projects that we're starting to develop internationally and excited about those, but we're going to keep our eye on the prize here to get this first one done.

Yes. And I think it's very interesting. And one of the things that when people wonder, what's Gevo been doing, oh my goodness, I don't get it. I just can't just prop a plant into existence, a jet plant. Well, no. The jet plant needs -- here's a prerequisite. You got to have low carbon ethanol. And here's a thing. You've got to have a business system that actually works. Well, guess what we just proved over the last, what, 18 months, yes, you can make low-carbon ethanol. Remember, before we came along, people didn't do that. No one had done it.

Now we did it. And guess what? We, under Paul's leadership, created a marketplace and how to monetize the carbon value. No one had done that. And it is the same business system that's required for project us. we just did, we took a whole lot of risk off the table as you're looking at this. And now all we have to do -- I shouldn't say that minimalization, but all we have to do is make it -- get the ATJ plant financed. There's still people will look at that and go, well, no one's done this giant scale plant before. And of course, we want a large plant, not one of these pilot plant demonstration projects. We've had one of those already for years and years and years. We need to get on with the large-scale plan and is the market going to be there? Well, that's what the team is proving out and the price looks good and the fund demand is good. We're in the right spot. Remember, this plays the overall strategy in the U.S., more energy, cost effective, delivered, fills the gap, fills the need. This one creates jobs, creates new demand for corn. It's good for the rural economy and all the rest.

Oh, yes, it happens to monetize carbon value, but that's -- it's jet fuel underneath that creates the flywheel, the demand flywheel. And yes, for those people who want to abate carbon and get -- and do something about carbon, cool, we got some really good products. And our approach is to cut through the BS that's out there. You got so many people out there with their hype and BS, it's mind-numbing as to what we hear. You know what, disciplined approach. The carbon is going down the hole. We're certifying where we can certify where the carbon came from throughout. So it's not this foofy BS. It's real. You know what, the world hasn't seen that before, not with this clarity, and that's a new market attribute. And Paul's team has done a great job. And so with that, unless Paul, you want to anything else, we could open it up for questions. questions would be great.

Thank you both for that discussion, and we'll now move on to the Q&A. Your first question is, how are the bottlenecking efforts in Richardson going? Can you share progress, challenges, successes and expected results?

So we're just getting started on this, right? So we're really still a little bit in our planning phase. But look, the team is already doing this, right? And the thing that I think we've learned about the Richardson team, right, as it started with under Red Trail and now its Gevo, North Dakota, they're fantastic, right?

The people there are great. They are always doing more with less. So we continue to see the team and its plant be innovative even without additional capital being innovative in doing this. Now we're in the phase of getting what are really the top list of projects how do those projects pay back? So what are those returns? How fast can we get them done because we can't go fast enough for some of these projects that as you're looking at them, then we got to get them approved, and we got to get them executed. We're in that process today of what that debottlenecking is going to deliver. So more to come on this, but it's very exciting. We've talked about debottlenecking to something like 75 million gallons in the past.

So that's really the path that we're on today. And now it's about like turning that plan into action and then delivering the results that start to move us in that way. And again, we're not just making more fuel, we're making more feed and we're making more carbon dioxide. And as we think about that, we have to capture value from all of them. So the pie just gets bigger from all the different things that we're producing, but we have to keep our eye on the prize, right, which is how do we monetize all 3 of those things through combinations of the commodity, the carbon and maximizing our incentives.

Thank you, Paul, for your comments on that. Your next question is, what financing does Gevo currently have in place? And what is the current status of the DOE loan? What requirements or milestones are still outstanding before the loan can be finalized? Additionally, from an investor perspective, can we realistically expect in 2026 outside of the DOE loan in terms of operations, revenues or strategic developments?

I think, Paul, you should take that on. The first part of the question is -- this is going to be a long -- that's a long -- it's a multipart question here, so I'll help you remember it, right? And so the first part is about financing requirements looking forward. What are you seeing? What are we talking about? What are you thinking? And then we'll come back and you'll have to remind about that latter part of the question because I've already forgotten it.

That's good. So Pat, it was already -- we were talking about a little bit earlier, too, right, that our financing requirements, like we've got a good balance sheet today. So debottlenecking projects, things like that, that we're doing, we're going to be moving ahead with those as soon as we get all of the plans lined up. The big ones, ATJ-30, obviously, we're working closely with the Energy Dominance finance group from DOE and really excited that the loan -- conditional loan guarantee got extended this past year. So we're working daily on this, trying to get that to completion. The the financing that's required, we talked about it in total installed capital for an ATJ-30 plant, we think, is a little over $500 million. So -- but by the time you have total installed finance costs for the finance project, it will be more than that, right?

So that's why that total conditional loan guarantee was a lot higher. We're doing all kinds of stuff that we're really excited about and how we put that together. So that's going to be really the focus for where we drive forward, but it's a combination of everything that we have to do to get that secured. Team is working hard on that. And Pat mentioned, too, that's really a project, right? So we think about that as how do we set that up as this ATJ vehicle and a project that we'll be working on the financing for that entire project there. What was the other part? Let me add to this.

Yes, one of the interesting things about the DOE loan guarantee is that the more attractive it gets on a commercial basis, the less likely they are to help. It's a crazy thing, right? Because they're going, well, heck, you can get that done with a commercial bank. Well, we're talking about how our incentives are attractive. So right now, we're in this -- they want to see this happen. They want to see bigger projects. I can tell you that, that's what the interest is. How do you do stuff bigger? Cool. We'll have to think about that, too.

And so we got work to do with the DOE, and it's good. They're interested. And you know what, but the project is strong, irrespective of what happens with those guys. And so it's looking good. And yes, we got to finance it. It will be a mix of debt and equity, and the team is all over it. And we got a guy in our CFO, Leke Agiri, who is really good at this, and he's just all over it. And the second part, I'm going to try to remember, Paul, it was something about -- I forgot in your mind. what was it?

Yes. So the second part was additionally, from an investor perspective, what can we realistically expect in 2026 outside of the DOE loan in terms of operations, revenues or strategic developments?

I think we talked about it, debottlenecking the plant, continue to driving positive adjusted EBITDA, continuing to create some more tax credits. Again, like Leke Agiri, our CFO, just -- he did a fantastic job getting out in front of monetizing tax credits this last year and then really developing our carbon business, right? So you think about what we can do on the chart, we're going to be pushing as much as we can on that chart to drive our adjusted EBITDA towards the targets that we've kind of painted here as our aspirational goals. But it's -- we're going to be making it real. That's really what we're about.

And another thing that Paul is reluctant to talk about, but I'll mention it is that a lot of -- and we hear from shareholders all the time, we all do, but gosh, that retro thing is really cool that you've got acquisition. Are there other ones like that, that you could also do and come and add value to? And the answer is yes, probably. We can't talk about stuff like that. So what we may or may not do and when we may or may not do it. We can't talk about that because those are the strategic things that, that question might be referencing. Yes, it's not lost on us. Remember, what Paul said, he's got it 100% right, prerequisite to making any kind of a hydrocarbon fuel, you got to have a well-operating low-carbon ethanol plant that can capture carbon -- a low-carbon ethanol plant that can capture carbon in a good location. That's not lost on that team, Paul's team. It's not lost on those guys.

Thank you both for shedding some light on that. Your next question is, given Gevo's current production ramp-up and commercialization milestones, what specific strategic actions do you believe will most meaningfully drive Gevo's share price appreciation in the near term, next 6 to 12 months? And what measurable milestones should investors watch for as indicators of that progress?

That's a tough one. You got to predict the stock price now, man. Good luck, guys. I'm out...

I'm going to let Eric take a shot because he's doing this all day long, right? I mean Eric Relations guys. So he's got this answer, I know.

Yes. I mean -- and hopefully, you can hear me okay. The video spiked a couple of times. Just let me know if you can. But Gevo was a $20 million per year revenue company. If you look at the last couple of quarters, we should be in the $150 million to $200 million of revenue per year. So look for that. We went to positive EBITDA, and we said we were going to get to $20 million on an annualized rate. Last quarter, we had $6.7 million in adjusted non-GAAP EBITDA. So you should see that increase each quarter.

There may be some noise in that. But over the next several quarters, you should see us starting to get to that $40 million per EBITDA that Paul mentioned earlier that we can get to without capital. And then the question is how much can we go beyond that to that $110 million number that Paul mentioned. And the last thing I'll mention that shouldn't be lost on anyone is like a, our CFO, said in our last quarterly earnings call, our operating cash flow is -- should be getting to effectively neutral to positive in the next couple of quarters. We'll see how quickly that happens. That's just a question of the timing of when the sales of our tax credits catches up to our receipt of cash. When those things catch up to each other, we'll have really transformed financially because that's now a sustainable operating cash flow positive business that can fund its own small growth and then get capital from other sources like the DOE to do the big growth, like the APJ-30. So that's -- these are things that you should look out for in the next couple of quarters to few quarters.

I mean all that's great, right? So that's really what is driving here. But if you think about our future, this is a model that while we're demonstrating it today at Gevo North Dakota, we believe we can replicate over and over again. So the combination of Pat's ailed answer there earlier about growth and Eric's spot-on piece of what we're really trying to do for transformational after buying Red trail assets, that combination, right, I think I feel really good about the path we're on to develop this as a -- as a business that we can continue to grow well beyond the one site that we have today.

Yes. And I'll put -- here's something that I really want people to understand. We're out of the world of having to do dilutive fundraising to survive. That's not our world, guys. That's not our world. That's not where we are, unlike most all the other companies in our space. We have a strong balance sheet. This is about growth projects, accretive stuff. We have a business that can operate and make a ton of money just by growth and expanding it between the ethanol plant and the site itself without doing the ATJ. And learning how to sell more and more of the carbon, increasing the value of the carbon. ton opportunity. Great. And we happen to be the best technology portfolio with the best technology to make jet fuel.

Awesome. So Paul, that's -- as he's talked about, has a huge growth opportunity. How do we do that best? And so it's accretive stuff that we're interested in. And so yes, will we need to raise more money as Gevo, Inc. over time? The Board is fully understands that we will have to do that. But it's for projects and growth and accretive stuff. It's not to survive. That's a completely different world. So a lot of people who have been long-time investors in Gevo, they go, "Oh, my God, you guys are going to have to raise money. No, pay attention to the balance sheet. I just got an e-mail from somebody here the other day, and it was like, gosh, the person must not be paying attention to anything we talk about. Our cash flows have changed. What -- it's changed. We're on the positive. We're headed positive people. And so that's a completely different world. It's a different business. Now by the way, this is all a reason, then it says why this is a good time for me to retire. We're in a good position, and there's a great team. And so hey, and I'm here to help, Paul.

Pat makes a really good point, but the future looks potentially even better because we've got new technology. Probably everybody saw that we were awarded another patent in our ETO portfolio or ethanol to olefins. So all the economics that we were just talking about projecting for ethanol to jet to make more jet fuel, we believe this even gets better. S

o we are investing, continuing investing in technology that we believe drives down our cost, drives down our capital. So the ETO patent, which again, these are real assets. These patents are real assets for the company that give us this protection long term to operate this business. But we believe that, that technology can decrease our capital by up to 35%. So that's huge, right? And our operating costs by up to another 35%. That makes everything that we just talked about even better. So we're very excited about the future. And if we can continue to do that, we've got great partners like Axens and LG Chem working on those things with us. We're not doing it in a vacuum. We've got pathways to deploy that technology, but we got to get it out of the pilot and development stage to commercialization. Again, we've all had a history of doing these kind of things.

We're very optimistic about what that can look like and great to see that we have this future that we can potentially grow. But we need to grow while we're winning, right? I mean I think that's really the important thing that we're showing we can do is how do we operate a quality business today? How do we deploy this technology going in the future that can be even better and more cost competitive to deliver the energy solutions and really, at the same time, delivering food and feed to the marketplace because the world needs it, right? And we can do it, we can do it better, and we can do it while we're managing our carbon and we anticipate very profitable for Gevo and our shareholders.

Thank you all for sharing your perspective on that. We'll take a couple more questions here. So the next one is, do you plan on extending the business to naval market this year, 2026?

I understood. The question...

Say it again. Say it again, Noella.

Yes, I'll repeat it. Do you plan on extending the business to a naval market this year?

Was it naval market?

Yes.

Think of it like marine fuels.

Marine fuels. Marine fuel. Yes, let's talk about -- Paul. Tell us about marine fuels and how you're thinking about it.

I think the marine fuel industry is interesting, right? You've gone through some cycles of can we make renewable methanol? Can we make all kinds of different things. I think the industry is now waking up to that, hey, look, ethanol is a great fuel, not only for on-road applications, but potentially for marine applications. And the same business system that we're talking about to provide low-carbon ethanol, why not, right?

I mean, so this is a new area that we're really -- we're digging into now. We've got some pretty interesting and exciting feedback from that market. So yes, we'll be looking at all the options of where can ethanol make us the most money, right? And especially as we monetize the commodity carbon and maximize our incentives, we'll just always be balancing that out to say like is it in a low carbon fuel market that's on road or on the water. So all good. We also have a really interesting -- it's interesting because our isobutanol portfolio, we've got a lot of interest there even in performance marine applications. So for outboard engines, that type of stuff. So we think that there's a lot. When you think about alcohols, marine is a good market. We think it's going to grow.

And there's one that's emerging that has been published. So people are paying attention to what's published around the world, you'll see that isobutanol is being qualified to work in diesel fuel as well. So that's interesting as a blend stock. Kind of like ethanol is in gasoline, you can do that with isobutanol in diesel fuel. And that offers an interesting one that was not on our radar screen years ago, but is now emerging as a real opportunity. And so that will be interesting to see how that unfolds. Still got to go through qualification periods and things, but there's publications around that, particularly in India.

Well, thank you both for that response. And then we'll take one last question. So the last question is, what locations do you see as the best opportunity zones for future plants? And what supporting factors do you need in that area to support your development?

Yes. Look, that's a great question. We've got a whole site selection team that's been helping us -- focused on this from a Gevo perspective. It's how we identified with our partners, Red Trail as an acquisition. But look, you got to have great corn, great farmers. We like having carbon capture and sequestration on site. That's great. We want good logistics, access to low-cost energy and potentially decarbonized energy.

So all of those things together wrap up into kind of the things that we need when we're looking at additional locations. The U.S. is great, right? We think that the potential -- I was just talking with some folks from NCGA, National Corn Growers Association the other day, the outlook on corn in the United States to continue to have year-on-year yield improvements on existing acres is tremendous, right? The new technology is being deployed, what farmers are able to deliver. This creates an abundant feedstock, and we like that growth potential. So U.S. definitely is good. We've also started to see some opening up for policies around crop-based fuels in places like the U.K. So we get excited about this because for a long time, we've said no crop-based fuels for not really what we believe is a good reason. But now we're seeing them open the door and say, look, we should take a look at the crop-based fuels back for exactly the same reason Pat said, if you just think about waste, waste, I don't believe waste is a growth strategy.

You want to minimize waste, right? So as we think about what can we do? You minimize waste, you can use it, that's fine. But if you really need to service a growing market like the dynamics that we talked about in jet fuel, you need something that you can grow, you can do it in a very sustainable fashion while improving soil health and delivering more food and using land wisely. I mean all those things are good, but we see that going well. But U.K. looks kind of interesting with their potential relaxation and stuff. Australia has some really interesting things going on. So this is a global market. We're going to continue to look at those opportunities while we stay focused with our eyes on the prize here in North Dakota to get that done into the finish line.

Yes. It's a pretty interesting world out there and this -- I think our team has done an outstanding job. This is Paul's got a great team. And it's like getting this thing he just mentioned of changing the opinion about what's possible on agriculture and why you can do good agriculture, agriculture done right, where you're actually building up the quality of the land, improving the yields, reducing the inputs, that people are teaching people about that, how that works. I mean how many people do you suppose have come up and done tours at farms because they've never been to a farm before. 300 or so.

It's a big number. I guess.

You got to teach people because they've been told by environmental groups, farming is bad. Well, guess what, farming, that's an overall blanket statement. We all know overall blanket statements aren't true. So which is true, what's true, how do you show it and what's done. And this point that Paul has been talking about of, no, we can document which farmers, which corn, which makes sense, which growing practices. It all ties together and you can create these attributes. Remember, our view is that if we can create a good attribute of carbon that goes back to the field, that's something you can monetize in the marketplace and create revenue from it and EBITDA from it. So it's a valuable thing to do with people. And the mentality is with people who come up these farms, we didn't know that was possible.

You can do that. You can -- the farming done right, wow, I had no idea. But that's a part of why this is new and what's been so done and why this is so transformational for us to have this big operating system from Gevo, North Dakota because now it's that much bigger and now people can see farm, they can see the production. They can see the carbon capture. It's going down a hole.

There's no denying it. And now that no one's done that before. No one has done that before. And so we get -- when I'm complaining, I think we're underestimated. People don't -- they just -- well, this should be easy because the way people talk about it kind of casually and blithely in the marketplace, hell no, these are big systems that have to be done. We did it first to show people it can be done. That's we just did this last year. That's amazing. Find me, we're getting there and showing what we had envisioned can be made real.

Excellent. Well, thank you all for your comments today, and thank you to everyone who submitted questions. If you did not get a chance to submit your question, you can reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Renmark. That concludes our presentation for today. But before we go, I will turn back the floor to the Gevo team for final remarks.

Well, I'm going to hand it over to Paul. Paul is the guy in charge. He's got the leadership, and he's the guy I want and leading. And I'll be a supporting player for him and whatever I can do to help this team, his team be successful, and I'm still one of the larger investors. And so I really kind of care a lot about this. And so I'm going to be helping wherever I possibly can. But I'm going to turn it over to Paul because it's your show, Paul.

Thanks, Pat. And look, I no doubt Pat will keep the pressure on, like he said. So that doesn't go away. But look, we had a transformational year last year. This one, we anticipate to be even better, right, as we drive everything that we talked about on this call, very excited. We got a great team, putting all that together, monetizing our commodity carbon, maximizing incentives, continue to grow.

You'll hear more about the debottlenecking that we've got to go on. And really, it's about building this carbon business that we believe is kind of our superpower going forward and unlocking that extra value for us in the marketplace. And then not just doing it one time, but doing it multiple times over and over and over again as we copy edit pace, right? You'll hear us talk more -- we've already talked about a lot, but this copy-eded paste.

How do you grow this business, right? We're building a franchise. We need it because we've got demands, jet fuel, we need more jet fuel. So how do we do that? Well, we got to franchise these plants, but we got to get serial #1 done first, and we're well on our way to getting that done and making good on that whole deliverable. So I think it's a really exciting year. We expect more results because we've delivered results, and I'm sure everybody has got high expectations for us, and we're going to continue to meet those expectations as we go forward. We've got the team. We've got the capabilities. And hopefully, what everybody is getting the ideas that we've got the right to win. And that's really the important thing to me is proving that we've got the right to win and that we can grow this business and continue to grow it well beyond where we're at today. So thank you very much.

And thank you all of you for your presentation today. Once again, this was Gevo, Inc., trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Thank you to everyone in Atlanta and surrounding areas for joining us today. The playback for this virtual non-deal roadshow will be available on our website 24 to 48 hours after this presentation under the VMDR Library tab. Please stay tuned for other presentations in your area and see you next time.

Hello, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's Virtual Non-Deal Roadshow. My name is Julia Perron, a virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in Seattle and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Gevo, Inc., trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Presenting today is Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy.

And with that, I will hand it over to Eric.

Gevo, we're stock GEVO trading on the NASDAQ. And we announced our 3Q earnings on Monday. So please check out our third quarter earnings release and our earnings call should be available on that website, too. So I'm not going to rehash the earnings call, but really wanted to give an overview of Gevo to those who may not be familiar with our story and also do Q&A for those who might already be familiar with our story. So if you're a shareholder, thanks for supporting our mission. And if you're considering becoming a shareholder, I hope that you'll consider joining us.

I'm going to try to keep it to maybe 15 minutes. We'll see how quickly I can go to keep it succinct since, as I said, we did release our 3Q earnings. But what you're seeing here is the corporate investor presentation that's on our website. It's the first one in the IR section of our website. And I'm just going to go through that and give you the high-level takeaways. Like I said, for those who may not already be familiar with what we do. Just keep in mind that there may be forward-looking statements of what I'm about to present. So take into consideration the risk factors that are in our SEC filings and in our third quarter release.

So the first thing about Gevo is we think we have a great team. We have a lot of experienced senior people who have experience at the nexus of agriculture, fuels and chemicals and carbon management and sustainability. And we think that, that's a distinguishing feature of us. We don't think every company has those experiences in those what have historically been different areas, which are now coming together in the world of energy growth and energy transition.

So what are we? Well, we're a diversified renewable energy company. What does that mean? It means we start with renewable resources as our raw materials. We have processes that take those renewable resources into drop-in hydrocarbon fuels in a way that's cost competitive with fossil-based alternatives. And the result of all that is you get the same molecules for your diesel truck engine or your jet aircraft engine or the same ethanol that is blended in gasoline in your car. But because of the way it's produced, that product has a life cycle that reduces carbon footprint. And the idea of generating the same energy that works in the same infrastructure and the same engines and fleets, but doing it in a way that manages carbon is something that we think is a differentiator for us. It's something we think is in growing demand, but not enough supply.

And so we divide our business into 4 segments, if I can use my pointer here. So this segment that's called Gevo Fuels up here. This includes our facility that we call Gevo North Dakota. So that's where we have an ethanol facility that makes ethanol, low-carbon ethanol as well as has carbon capture and sequestration, CCS. I'll talk more about that. And this also has our alcohol to jet SAF platform. So we are building a platform to make Synthetic Aviation Fuel or SAF from the business that we put together today, and I'll talk more about that.

This box down here that says Gevo RNG. We have a few sites that are tied together into one business where we take the manure from dairy cows, run it through a digester and then capture the fugitive methane emissions from that manure, clean it and then inject it into the natural gas pipeline system. So same molecule, it's CH4, it's methane. It works in your stove and it works for power and all the rest of the things that methane does. But instead of coming from fossil resources, it comes from a renewable resource, and it reduces carbon footprint because on the front end, we've captured what would otherwise be fugitive methane emissions. And on the back end, we delivered a product that is a nonfossil-based product.

Over here in the upper right corner is Verity. Verity is basically a software tech start-up that's wholly owned by Gevo. It's got its own website, its own team of employees that are software engineers and in some cases, farmers, too. But the idea of Verity is we felt that to do the things we're trying to do on the left side of the page, we needed a software system that has end-to-end tracking. And the reason you need end-to-end tracking for a business like this is because these are complex commodity supply chains when you have a farm producing a bushel of corn or soybeans that then goes to a grain elevator that then goes to a processing plant that then goes to anywhere, Canada, California, somewhere else.

That's a complicated supply chain, and it's a commodity supply chain. You need a software system to track the exact route that, that product took through that supply chain to convince the end customer that it reduced carbon footprint and had other sustainability attributes. So if you want to sell a drop-in product that has sustainability attributes, you have to have something that -- an audit trail that validates it. And that's the intention of Verity is to enable that.

And then down here, this box is called GevoChem. We also have an R&D budget where even while we're building out our SAF platform, the ingredients to make SAF, which we think are profitable by themselves, but then that enables growth in the making SAF in the future. Even while we're doing that, we're already paving the way to make it better because this is a new industry by definition. So it's not fully optimized like the oil and gas industry. We think the second and third generation of our SAF plants can be better each time, and that's what this is intended to do down here.

So what's the common thread? These are sort of 4 different things, but they're all tied together in what we do because they play off each other. Everything we do is about taking renewable carbon, making products that are scalable, that are cost competitive with the fossil-based alternatives and reducing carbon emissions along the way. That's the common thread. This just shows the assets that I talked about and where they are geographically.

This is a really cool picture. This is a real picture, by the way, of the Northern Lights in North Dakota at our Gevo, North Dakota facility. So this is a facility that takes bushels of corn as an input. And like many ethanol facilities across the U.S. and across the world, it grinds the corn and makes several products. One of those products is low-carbon ethanol, which today is mostly blended into your gas tank for your gasoline-powered car. It makes about 67 million gallons per year, and it's exceptionally low carbon. It's some of the lowest carbon fuel available on the marketplace today, and it's dropped in. It doesn't require electrification. And the reason it's so low carbon is because on this site, it's about 500 acres. We have carbon capture. We're one of the few operating CCS industrial operations that's operating today, and I think one of the very few number ones that are attached to an ethanol plant.

It's currently sequestering about 165,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide that originally came from the atmosphere, and it has the capacity to do about 1 million tons per year on this site. So this is a great asset for us today, and it enables us to make synthetic aviation fuel tomorrow because you can convert ethanol into jet fuel, and I'll talk more about that.

This is an important point. So when you do this -- when you make ethanol, this kind of process, you could start with any fermentable sugar, okay? But in the U.S. the great place to start is corn because corn is so abundant, it grows really well in the U.S., and it makes a lot of sugar and it makes a lot of corn oil and it makes a lot of protein. But the corn we use is not the kind of corn that is destined for human consumption, okay? So we're not using corn that goes into sweet corn. We're not using corn that goes into your popcorn, 99% of the corn that's used in the U.S. is what's called field corn. That's corn that's destined to be milled and made into high-protein products, corn oil and then sugar.

Once you have the sugar, you could -- sugar can be sugar, but we all have lots of sugar in our diets already. A big industrial use for sugar is to ferment it and make alcohols. And you can make medical-grade alcohol, you could make spirits and you can make fuel-grade ethanol which is blended into gasoline and then used as a fuel additive, okay? So that's a really important point that we try to get across all the time. This is a renewable circular economy business. In many cases, the same farmers that deliver bushels to a facility like this pick up the protein and use that as animal feed. So it is part of a sustainable circular economy that benefits rural communities.

And by the way, this is a little hard to see, but this chart over here, these green bars, this shows you the last 100 years of how many acres were planted for corn in the U.S. And what's really amazing is it's about the same. It's like between 75 million and 100 million acres was planted for corn 100 years ago and about the same number of acres was planted for corn today. So what's changed? What's changed is we've made billions and billions more bushels of corn from the same acreage. And the reason for that is because of this orange line down here, yields have improved. And the reason yields have improved is because farmers, they're all about doing more with less or more from the same. The way you improve your farm is to have better yields and to preserve your soil and to not have runoff and to take good care of your animals and so on.

So farmers are all about sustainability anyway. They're already incentivized to be sustainable. And that's why this is a great starting point for what we want to do, which is to make drop-in fuels and chemicals that are scalable, but also manage carbon. And historically, that has not been easy to do and the marketplace hasn't had access to that kind of product.

So when you make corn, I mentioned this, what comes from that field corn that I mentioned, basically, by way, it's 3 products equal by way, 1/3, 1/3, 1/3. So for every pound of product that you grind from this bushel, you get 1/3 of a pound of ethanol, which you can convert to jet fuel and diesel fuel and other fuels, Naphtha. 1/3 of high-protein animal feed. These are nutrients that humans do need in our bodies, right? We can't produce all our own proteins and amino acids. So we have to get them from plants and animals. This is where it comes from.

And then the other 1/3 by weight is carbon dioxide. Now this is often overlooked. We view this as a co-product. It's just as valid as these other co-products. And the reason for that is because this carbon dioxide, basically 2 reasons. One is when you ferment sugar into beer and ethanol, it gives you bubbles. And what are the bubbles? They're carbon dioxide.

Well, it turns out that nature -- mother nature is doing all this work to concentrate that carbon dioxide into a very high-purity carbon dioxide stream. And that stream reduces the cost of carbon capture, number one. Number two, if you trace it back, it originated in the Earth's atmosphere. So when the plants grew up through photosynthesis, they were drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. That's what ended up in those bubbles essentially. And so if you have a sink, if you have an underground reservoir or you have other industrial uses for that carbon dioxide, you add value to society and you've managed carbon dioxide footprint, too.

So we think this is great. You get 100% of the nutritional value out of corn or whatever the feedstock is. It could be other crops. It doesn't have to be corn, but the U.S. is corn. You get a drop-in fuel, you get protein and nutrition and you get an ability to manage carbon. That's why we target and it's scalable. Now that's a simple picture because that's sort of like what happens when you look at the inputs and the outputs of a plant like this, an ethanol plant like we have in North Dakota. But what's more complicated is the revenue streams. So when you go from corn to ethanol, you may only have those 3 products that I mentioned, but you have a bunch of different revenue streams that come off that.

So you can sell, obviously, the animal feed and the protein product. You can sell the corn oil. And then you have the carbon removal and the carbon abatement, who will -- who in the marketplace will pay for and value and buy that. That can be detached. The same person that buys animal feed may not be willing and able to pay for the fact that we capture carbon. There are RINs that support this marketplace. There's 45Z tax credits, which would actually go back a long time, but today, they're known as 45Z tax credits. And there's different state and local incentives.

Then when you go in the future, as we want to do, go from ethanol to jet fuel, there's another set of revenue streams that are associated with that. So there are specific credits and incentives and buyers that really want to see more SAF in the world for a bunch of reasons that I'll go into. To be successful at this, it takes a lot of skills that we think that we have.

One thing that we're sort of innovating is how we count and sell our carbon. We treat, like I said, carbon dioxide as a co-product. And the reason we treat that -- the way we balance this and what we're kind of excited about growing is there's basically 2 ways to monetize that carbon value. One way is you have a gallon of ethanol that goes on a railcar and it goes somewhere like British Columbia or Oregon or Washington or another low-carbon fuel standard market where they value low carbon fuels, especially. And in those markets, we would keep the carbon value attached to that gallon. So that someone who buys that gallon knows that it came from a plant that use carbon capture and so many tons of carbon dioxide were captured in that process. And therefore, it's a low-carbon gallon. Now those markets value carbon at somewhere -- anywhere from $50 to $100 per metric ton. It goes up and down because they're trading markets and sometimes they're higher and sometimes they're lower.

But there's another marketplace that we're unlocking, and we think we're uniquely positioned to unlock, which is the Carbon Dioxide Removal or CDR markets. Now there's lots of acronyms and names for this but basically on the right side of this page over here, it essentially means if we sell our fuel in a local market, let's say, that's not a low carbon fuel standard market, Well, then no one has paid for the tons of carbon that were captured. So we can detach that as a virtual certificate as a piece of paper that promises that we did indeed capture carbon. And we can sell that on global voluntary carbon markets. These are brand owners that want to reduce their corporate carbon footprint, but they don't have any ways to do that because they don't do carbon capture.

So they come to suppliers like us and say, "I'll buy these certificates from you, promise me that you actually did it, promise me that the carbon is not going to leak back into the atmosphere, promise me that you didn't double count, right? You're not selling this to multiple counterparties. You count once and only once and so on." And this is actually a $10 billion marketplace in terms of how many CDRs have been sold over the last 2 years. We did our first $1 million of sales of these last quarter, and we think we can get to $3 million to $5 million sales of these by the end of this year. We'll see.

But this is different. This market is a compliance market, if you comply to get the credit. This market is a business-to-business marketing effort. You have to earn your client -- these businesses trust as a supplier. Now only 2% or 2.5% of the transactions that have occurred in the CDR market have actually been delivered. That means that these buyers are purchasing future promises of carbon reduction that haven't been delivered yet. We're delivering our carbon reduction every day. So because we're one of a very few number of plants that's actually doing this.

So we think we have an intrinsic advantage. And the prices, if you go to this website, CDR.fyi, for the type of carbon capture that we do at a biofuels plant is more like $100 to $300 per metric ton. We think that's very significant when our well is sequestering 165,000 metric tons per year. If we can shift more of those tons to the right side of this page, we think we could max out at $30 million or $33 million per year if we fully optimize the way we count and sell our carbon. We'll see how fast and how quickly we can do that and how we optimize it. But we're going to be optimizing between where we point our carbon based on which market wants it the most. So we think that's a great source of growth for us.

Like I said, last quarter, we had our second consecutive quarter of positive EBITDA after making this transformative acquisition earlier this year when we acquired the carbon capture and the ethanol plant. We think we have a path to basically double our current run rate EBITDA effectively to about $40 million per year by simply optimizing how we count and sell our carbon, okay? Not investing capital to change the plant, not building a SAF plant, just optimizing our commercial structure basically. We think we can almost triple that again to this $110 million of EBITDA if we make minor -- if we do debottlenecking in our plant, so maybe increase volumes by 10% or 20% and do minor expansions at the plant as well to get those same volumes. We think that requires not very much capital, not nearly as much capital as we spent to acquire the plant and gets us a lot of return for our dollar. This is all before we make Synthetic Aviation Fuel. So this is just optimizing and doing minor expansions to what we have today.

How fast we can get there and how much of this $110 million we can get to? We're going to figure that out, and we'll have more detail as we go. But we think this is sort of the size of the prize basically, and we're -- this is what gets us excited. We have a strong balance sheet, but we just released that last quarter, so I'll let you take a look at that.

Let me pivot to why we like Synthetic Aviation Fuel. So I talked about what we have today and how it's a platform of growth for us today. But that's the ingredients to make Synthetic Aviation Fuel. If you can make low-carbon ethanol and if you have RNG to support it, if you have Verity to track it, then that's the platform to extend that ethanol into jet fuel and make Synthetic Aviation Fuel. It's pretty obvious, I think, to most people that Synthetic Aviation Fuel is a good way to manage carbon in a sector like aviation, which is hard to electrify.

But probably more fundamentally, just as important, if not more importantly, the demand for jet fuel in the U.S. is increasing. We need about 2.3 billion gallons per year more jet fuel in the next 10 years. That's according to IEA data, the last long-term forecast. Meanwhile, the demand for gasoline is not increasing. So you have a mismatch. The U.S. fossil fuel refinery complex produces about 50%. There's only certain components in a barrel of crude oil. So refineries make about 50% gasoline today and only about 9% jet fuel. Our process really targets the jet fuel because it's a chemical conversion process from ethanol to jet fuel, we can make 90% of our product stream can be jet fuel. So really targeting this demand, but not exacerbating this gasoline demand or lack of demand.

Okay. Well, how much does it cost? Well, like I said, our goal is to be cost competitive with fossil jet fuel. The X-axis here is the price of West Texas crude oil. The Y-axis here is the price of jet fuel and the blue is a scatter plot. So if the price of crude oil goes up, the price of jet fuel goes up and vice versa. This green box here is what we're targeting. So we think we can be in the hunt even in a first-generation plant in terms of the cash cost of production per each gallon. And it can be a much lower carbon jet fuel. So now we do need to cover our capital costs. We have to get a return on capital, okay? So that requires some combination of government incentives, state, local incentives or customers who are willing to pay that additional value of the carbon reduction that's different from fossil jet fuel.

But the point is the thing that's really exciting is we think, number one, we're the cheapest route in a cash cost of production basis to make SAF versus other methods, which are much more expensive. And two, we're in the hunt for a first-generation plant to be competitive. There's a path for this. We're not just trying to force an expensive product into the marketplace. We're trying to create an industry that can actually compete and serve demand. That's what actually we're trying to do. For each, what we call ATJ-30, if we were to deploy our SAF technology at our North Dakota site, we would convert about 50 million gallons of ethanol to about 30 million gallons of jet fuel. And we think if we do that, that would provide $150 million of EBITDA.

So this is the long-term larger growth that's on top of that earlier growth that I was just talking about. Why we really get excited? Because if we do that in North Dakota, we think we'll have a design, okay, that you can deploy repeatedly at many different sites. There's 180 ethanol plants in operation in just the U.S. And each site would bring in jobs, investment to rural communities and give them more options to sell their corn, their sugar, their ethanol into a new marketplace that demands a product. So you're using abundant resources and you're serving an underserved market, which is jet fuel and carbon management. We think we want to be the link that connects those dots.

The current administration supports this. If you look at this last -- one of these executive orders, it talks about how the U.S. needs more biofuel, ethanol and aviation fuel. Well, that's great. We get asked this question all the time is what's the political cycle like? Throughout the political cycle, we tend to get a lot of support because we're about investing in rural communities, and we're about biofuels, ethanol and aviation fuel. And both political parties in the U.S. tend to support that.

So what are we trying to do? What are we focused on right now to get from here to there? We call this Project North Star. The idea is, let's use North Dakota, where we have our low-carbon ethanol and we have our carbon capture as a showcase. We have a bunch of acreage up there. Let's deploy our SAF technology, deploy Verity and have that be a showcase to then go after all those other sites that I showed on the previous page. To do this requires a bunch of skills. You have to be knowledgeable about all the things that are shown in these hexagons here, and we think we have those skills.

So high level, what's next for us? Step one is grow our EBITDA just by optimizing what we have. Step two is deploy our SAF technologies and platform to that existing business and extend that low carbon ethanol to jet fuel to give us another leg of growth. That takes longer time and takes more capital than that first step, but that's the next step. And then copy paste. We want that to be a showcase to do it again. And again, if the U.S. wants to fulfill that additional 2 billion gallons plus jet fuel demand that we need in 10 years, we need to build about 70 of these plants. We don't know how long -- how quickly we could get to 70 or we could build 70, but the point is that there's a target-rich environment.

And with that, maybe I'll stop and take questions.

Thank you, Eric, for the presentation. As mentioned, we will start the Q&A. Your first question for today is a 2-part question. The question is, why do you anticipate alcohol-to-jet 30 to take as long as alcohol-to-jet 60 to build when the ethanol plant and infrastructure is already in place?

We do estimate it will take something like 2 to 3 years construction time to build an ATJ-30 once it's in construction. We're targeting to get to FID sometime in the middle of 2026, maybe the back half of '26. We're not committing to a precise dates yet, but that's -- we're just letting you that, that's kind of a trend.

We're not super aggressive on construction time lines because the U.S. is a country where we haven't built a huge number of large refineries and fuels and petroleum complexes recently that are different or innovative, okay? The U.S. in terms of skilled welders, skilled construction, that kind of thing, we have great people, but not necessarily that many. And so what we've tried to do is have a strategy where we've put a lot of effort and time and dollars into the front end of that process. If you design a really good mousetrap where you can fabricate modules at one location like on the Gulf Coast or in another country where they have really good fab yards, then you reduce risk and cost and time during construction.

So we're putting a lot of that effort in the front end so that we reduce that risk on the back end and also so it's a more repeatable model, not just one plant and then done. That's our overall strategy. We will try to compress those construction time lines as much as we can, but this is a long-term view. We don't think the demand for carbon management is going away. We don't think the demand for jet fuel is going away, and we don't think the supply of ethanol and sugar and corn is going away. So the wins at our back, our strategy on the SAF platform is going to be measure twice, cut once basically. But we're going to go as fast as we can.

Can we expect there to be more ATJ-30 plants planned before ATJ-30 is operating? Or is it more likely Gevo needs to prove ATJ-30 in North Dakota first?

That is possible. We're having business development discussions all the time, not just in the U.S. but globally. So it is possible that we'll see some of these in parallel. We're just not ready to commit to anything yet. What we can commit to is that we're targeting Gevo, North Dakota. We're going to use it as a showcase to do more. But will they need to be in sequence? Could there be some things in parallel? Absolutely. That's what we're going to target. We're just not ready to make promises yet.

Is it completed ATJ-30 necessary to begin selling and developing Gevo's sustainable aviation fuel plant designed to other ethanol manufacturers? And do you foresee a path where modular plant sales to other producers could coincide with the build-out of ATJ-30?

Yes. The short answer is yes. I think I sort of addressed that in the last question. But the short answer is yes, absolutely. We will -- what we feel confident in is that this is in demand. We feel confident we have a good mousetrap. And this is how the ethanol industry scaled up and got big. And that's what we want to do. We're not about producing SAF. We're about scaling up. Gevo historically has already produced SAF. We've already tested in flights in jet engines. We don't need to do that again. What we need is a durable business that's been repeatable and scalable. And to do that, you got -- we want to do exactly what your questioner just asked. That is what we're targeting to do. We'll see how much of this, like I said, can move in parallel rather than in sequence.

What is the estimated time frame to build an ATJ-30 in modules and how long to put them together once they are at the site? If the estimated cost to build is around $500 million, what is the extra money on the DOE loan going towards?

We've estimated 2 to 3 years construction time, okay? So for that part of our growth, right, we've got the short-term growth, optimizing what we have and then the long-term growth, deploying our SAF platform.

For that longer-term growth, we think it probably takes 2, 3 years construction time. 3 years feels like on the conservative end, we feel like we -- it should not take longer than that. But we don't think it can get under 2. We don't think it can be 1 point some years. So we think that, that's a good estimate based on what we know now. We'll make that more precise as we go, and we'll work with our EPC to nail down a schedule.

Yes. So the questioner is asking us, for those of you who may not have seen it, we filed an 8-K some weeks ago in which we have a DOE loan, it's about $1.6 billion, $1.7 billion, conditional commitment, conditional commitment from the DOE to fund a SAF construction project, okay? And originally, they were looking at their scope of that loan was a South Dakota site to build what we call ATJ-60, twice the size of ATJ-30. In that 8-K, the DOE and Gevo said that we are -- they've extended the deadline for the expiration of that conditional commitment period to April 2026 and that they are considering a change of scope for that loan to fund the construction of a smaller ATJ-30 at our North Dakota site. And we think that, that's a great thing to look at for a whole bunch of reasons. We think that it's got a lot of things going forward at that site. And so we're really happy that they're willing to look at that.

Now that may not require that same size loan because it would be a smaller facility, and it's also half built. We don't need to build an ethanol plant, there's already an ethanol plant. So what that means is that the loan will be fit for purpose for that facility, right? We're not going to take out a loan that's multiple times larger than what's required to build, obviously. But one way it could work in terms of the equity that we need is it could be that Gevo can contribute the equity that we own, noncash equity of the value of the ethanol plant and carbon capture to a legal entity, a special purpose vehicle. And if that's valued, then that combined with the debt may give you something that's leveraged appropriately, okay, an appropriate -- a prudent amount of leverage that the lender will accept. And then the cash from the loan may be sufficient to fund the construction. That's a possibility. We're going to explore that. Maybe we don't hit that and Gevo needs to raise a little bit of equity. And we would do that at the project level as our thinking right now.

So that's the high-level idea. But we wouldn't just raise -- I don't really see us raising a loan that's multiple times larger than what's necessary to build. If we're building and it costs $500 million, the loan will be sized for that type of project is my assumption.

Would the $150 million in EBITDA from ATJ-30 be summed to the $100 million expected after debottlenecking for a total of $250 million in EBITDA post ATJ-30 operating?

Yes. The short answer is yes. Those are 2 different things. So on that Page 12 in our IR deck, that is all stuff we think we can do. It's the size of the prize of stuff we think we can do before we build a jet fuel plant. The $150 million of EBITDA that we think is generated by ATJ-30, we believe that, that will be incremental because we believe that each gallon of ethanol plus all the -- or excuse me, jet fuel plus all of its co-products generates about $5 per jet fuel gallon. So it's $150 million if it's a 30 million gallon jet fuel plant. So yes, these are 2 separate things.

And that's why we're so excited because we think we have a durable business now that we can grow by tweaking and optimizing. And that is the platform for an even more exciting but longer-term SAF technology deployment where Gevo really shines. That's something that we think that we do well. And like I said earlier, that's how the ethanol industry got big to begin with as you had repeatable designs, and there were many locations because it's a distributed resource, many co-ops and farmers and so on who said, we'd like to build an ethanol plant and the providers would say, great, we have an engineered design, if you want a big one or a small one, and then you license it or you co-invest. And so that's our strategy. But these are 2 different things.

Can the R&D costs for ATJ-60 ever be recouped? It was my understanding that those costs would come back to Gevo via private equity or outside investors when they invested in the plant.

Take a look -- so some of those costs are expensed on our income statement, but we actually believe are recoverable. And the way they're recoverable is when we do a project, we would seek reimbursement and return on the risk that we took as the developer, okay, before construction.

So let's say, you have a lender and they're going to lend to you to build a construction project. One of the use of proceeds on day 1 is to reimburse the developer and also give them an appropriate return on the risk that they took. And so we do believe that some of that is recoverable even though some of it is expensed. But also importantly, what I would point out is some of our costs are not expensed. So you'll see in our balance sheet construction in progress. What is that? What is that construction in progress? Well, a lot of that is money that we've spent that includes things like long lead equipment for a SAF plant that is recoverable. So we can either reuse that equipment at different locations or we could sell it.

So think about like a hydrolyzer, for example. If we put a down paint on a hydrolyzer, that's not money that we lost, that's really an asset that we have that is recoverable. We've left in our wake over the last several years. So Gevo has over 300 patents. And the thing that I get really excited about is most of what we're focused on today is existing technology. So making ethanol is existing, carbon capture is existing, converting ethanol to jet fuel, the chemistry to do that is it exists at industrial scale. But what's unique, what I think what gets me excited is that investment in ATJ-60, we've left in our wake a trail of patents and know-how, not all of which may be patented, but both.

And so Gevo has over 300 patents. Some of it is unique technology. Other is not unique technology. It's patented around the engineered plant design because it's not sufficient to just have the catalyst to convert chemical A to chemical B. How did you use energy? How did you like design all the pipes and all the pieces of the plant to manage carbon and manage your energy? That's actually key. It's that mousetrap. So we have a good asset in terms of our know-how and our mousetrap of how you engineer an alcohol-to-jet facility, and that's another asset that we built by spending the money on ATJ-60 and ATJ-30.

What kind of operating plant would the Lake Preston site be used for as your CEO said it was a great industrial site? For what exactly?

First of all, it's a good ethanol site. There's good corn basis there. That means the price of corn is not too high because a lot of corn is grown there. There's good access to rail, so you can get products out. And there's good markets there to buy animal feed. So it would be a good place to build an ethanol plant is I'm not saying that we're about to build an ethanol plant right now. I'm just saying in the list of things, that's definitely one. It's a good place to build other biofuels plants, too, whether it's SAF or any other kind of biofuel plant because you're not far from the Minnesota airports where they have a SAF tax credit. You're not that far from Illinois airports where they also have a SAF tax credit. And then you can still reach Canada and the West Coast where they have LCFS credits and so on, too.

So there's a bunch of things we can do there, and we're going to explore putting that site to work. But obviously, we love North Dakota because in North Dakota, it's not just a great site. It's a cash flowing facility that's making the ingredients for SAF, and that's a durable business by itself.

How much of the $52 million in 45Z credits are RNG versus Red trail?

So if you look at that press release, actually, I think the way we phrased it is it was the ethanol 45Z that we sold out, there's a little bit of additional 45Z related to RNG, the so-called biogas 45Z. We'll get a little bit from that, too.

Why is the stock price going down even though you had a decent Q3 earnings, why isn't insider ownership going up?

Well, what I would say is our -- so the largest individual shareholders are CEO, most of the largest individual shareholders are management. Management does get paid because we're a small cap high-growth company. We do pay employees in stock. And so they're incentivized to make the company grow basically. That's kind of how we operate.

Depending on when you ask that question, the stock price has gone up. So our stock price has gone up 100% from 6 months ago. I think that's -- we're pretty pleased with that. Now depending on when you're looking back to, is it yesterday or a week before or 2 weeks before, our stock price may go up and down just like any stock price. But overall, the question is, does it go up over the medium and long term? That's what we're targeting, number one.

And number two, is it up relative to peers in the market. And we think we're not -- we're undeterred. I was saying we felt very confident when we were trading at $0.50 per share a year or 2 ago. We were saying confidently we think that's going to change because of the milestones that we're about to achieve. We did achieve those milestones, and it did change, and we're no longer at $0.50. We're now well above $2, I think, right now as I'm speaking.

So we see a lot of value. I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe in what we're doing and our mission, didn't believe that we're going to grow. Our goal is to grow much higher than where we are now. That's what we're focused on doing but there may be bumps along the way. We are a high-growth company. And so things may -- we're paying attention to the long-term trend, not just the daily weather, if you like.

Can you comment on some of the debottlenecking solutions in North Dakota?

If you think about what would, let's just say, 20% more volume do in North Dakota, well, 20% more on -- currently, it's 165,000 metric tons per year of CO2. So if you increase that by 20%, maybe you can push that to 180,000 or something in that ZIP code, right? And currently, it's 67 million gallons per year of ethanol. If you increase that by 20%, maybe you can get to 75 million gallons or like that kind of ZIP code.

And what do those things do for you? Well, they do quite a lot. If the 45Z tax credit is -- look at the 45Z that we just did this year, $54 million of ethanol, 45Z from 67 million gallons of ethanol production, okay? What that tells you is we're well in excess of $0.50 per gallon per ethanol gallon of 45Z. So if you add 10 million or 15 million gallons, let's just say 10 million gallons, that's several million dollars that goes to the bottom line basically. And if you add 10,000 or 20,000 metric tons per year of CO2, and we can sell that as CDRs, I showed that slide, the average so-called BECCS credit, basically CCS associated with biofuels, at least the last time I checked that website was like $210 per metric ton.

So that's all really exciting. And those are things that are not hard to do. It's a 500-acre site. Ethanol fermentation, one of the beauties of ethanol fermentation is it's not a super complicated process. I mean I don't want to oversimplify it, but it's not the most complicated industrial process actually. You have a big VA and you're fermenting it and you have things like beer wells. That's what it is. It's a process that involves just fermentation. So just by tweaking little things like that, doing little repairs to ensure the quality of earnings and ensure that we don't avoid dips and then also doing debottlenecking and minor expansions, we should be able to get those types of things done for modest amounts of capital.

And I should mention, too, one of the things that our CFO talked about in our earnings call, which I want to make sure people saw is increasingly, this kind of activity should be self-funding for Gevo, if not already. And the reason I say that is if you take a look at our cash flow statement from the third quarter, what you'll see is there's a deduct for the sale of tax credits, that's the 45Z. Well, the reason for that deduct is because we earned the credits, we produce and earn the credits, but we haven't yet converted them to cash yet. We would expect very soon to be converting them to cash at the same cadence now that we're producing them. And therefore, in the very near future, if you look at our cash flow statement, when that deduct goes away, when those 2 things catch up, you'll see that we should actually be getting close to, if not positive, operating cash flow, which would be really exciting for us.

So this year, we got positive EBITDA and significant revenue. We think in the near future, we'll have positive operating cash flow. So pay attention to that, too. That makes it much easier, puts us on a much better financial footing to do these tweaks that I was just talking about.

What margins do you expect for producing SAF?

So I think if you look at the $150 million of EBITDA per year that we put on that slide about the ATJ-30 project, that is $150 million a year of EBITDA on 30 million gallons per year of jet fuel. So it's about $5 per jet fuel gallon. Now don't be deceived. If you think about that number, you think, well, you're just selling really expensive jet fuel. Well, no, that's what the numbers are if you divide one by the other. But you got to remember that along the way, you're making a lot of co-products. So our effective cost is reduced or if you like, our revenue goes up because we get all these different co-products, not only from the animal feed and corn oil along the way, but also the different credits and incentives and the carbon reduction that we're getting from customers. If you add all that up, it's like $5 a gallon if you put it on a jet fuel gallon basis, which is the $150 million that we showed.

As you mentioned, the other reason for that is because it's such an efficient method. It's very efficient to grow corn. It's very efficient to ferment sugar from things like corn into ethanol. And we have good processes. We know the yields, we think, with pretty good certainty of how you convert ethanol into jet fuel. The reason for that is because ethanol, you can make it very clean. It's a very good feedstock to do -- to take a page of the chemical industry playbook. So once you add all these ingredients, it's a very scalable, cost-effective way to make jet fuel from a nonfossil-based resource. And that's why those margins are so good on a jet fuel basis.

How many tons of carbon do you expect to sequester in 2026? And at what cost per ton?

I can't tell you cost per ton, but what I can tell you is we're currently doing 165,000 metric tons per year. We do think that we can improve that through various mechanisms at the site just by improving some things at the site and also, like I said, debottlenecking. So one thing is you make improvements, one thing is you increase throughput, right? And both those things would increase that number of metric tons, like I said.

So in the future, could we get to 180,000 or 200,000 metric tons per year of CO2 being captured if we do all those things? For sure, that's something that's achievable. We'll see how much of that we can get and how quickly. But we did disclose that we hit a milestone of, I think, over 560,000 metric tons have been sequestered by that well so far, which we think is a huge number, and it's part of a well that's been operating since 2022. So it's a great site. It's a great reservoir. The geology is really good. The carbon capture equipment has been working really, really well. Can we make it work even better? Yes, we think we can. And we'll let you know each quarter that we're doing that.

Thank you, Eric, for all your answers today. If you do not get a chance to submit your question, feel free to reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Renmark.

This concludes our presentation for today. But before we go, I'll turn it back over to you, Eric, for final remarks.

Check out our Investor Relations page on our website. We do have several presentations going back a while and other events like this that are saved down there, if you want to take a look. Like I said, our 3Q earnings was Monday. So look at our 3Q earnings release. We think that it shows that we've achieved kind of a step change in our company that sets us up for these 2 legs of growth that I was talking about. And so we're very excited about that.

If you have questions, e-mail our [email protected] e-mail bucket, I answer that. And we will do more events like these as we go forward. We're pretty excited. So please check out our website, and I hope that you will consider being a part of our -- being a shareholder in our company and joining us on our journey.

Once again, this was Gevo, Inc. trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Thank you again to everyone in Seattle and surrounding areas for joining us today. Stay tuned for other presentations in your area. Thank you, and see you next time.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Gevo Incorporated Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. Eric, you may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Gevo's third quarter 2025 results. I'm Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy at Gevo. With me today, we have Patrick Gruber, our Chief Executive Officer; Leke Agiri, our Chief Financial Officer; Chris Ryan, our President and Chief Operating Officer; and Paul Bloom, our Chief Business Officer.

Earlier today, we issued a press release that outlines our third quarter 2025 results and some of the topics we plan to discuss. A copy of the press release is available on our website at www.gevo.com.

Please be advised that our remarks today, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those currently anticipated. Those statements include projections about the timing, development, engineering, financing and construction of our alcohol-to-jet projects. our future carbon credit sales, our Gevo North Dakota and RNG plants and other activities described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are incorporated by reference. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

In addition, we may provide certain non-GAAP financial information on this call. The relevant definitions and GAAP reconciliations may be found in our earnings release, which can be found on our website at www.gevo.com in the Investor Relations section.

Following the prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call is open to the media, and we're providing a simultaneous webcast to the public. A replay of this call and other past events will be available via the company's Investor Relations page at www.gevo.com.

I'd now like to turn the call over to the CEO of Gevo, Patrick Gruber. Pat?

Thanks, Eric. What a change we've had. The acquisition of our ethanol plant, carbon capture plant and Class VI sequestration wells turning out even better than we imagined. All of this is located at Gevo North Dakota, or GND, as we refer to it internally, and it's all operating really well. We've learned that our carbon sequestration well is unusual because, a, it has a Class VI sequestration well that's been operating since June of 2022; b, we are the only ones using the formation of our well, and that simplifies the auditing and such; and c, it's in an unusually good geology.

In fact, a European certification group, Puro.earth, which is owned primarily by NASDAQ, certified our well as a 1,000-year performance well. We understand that we're the only alcohol production site in the world so far with this certification. Also, I must say that North Dakota is an outstanding state in which to do business and grow. It's pro-agriculture and pro-energy business environment. So we fit in really well. Great assets combined with a great business environment, combined with growing markets, I believe, leads to great opportunities for growth and making money. That's what's in front of us.

At Gevo, we have long believed that carbon is an important co-product that if we can monetize the value for carbon, we can unlock economics for growth products like jet fuel. We are pleased to find out that we can, in fact, monetize carbon value through a variety of methods that Paul Bloom, our Chief Business Officer, will explain in a few minutes. In our business model, we view selling carbon as a key initiative.

On a separate and unrelated front, we are learning how to generate and sell production tax credits. These credits are based on the volume of ethanol produced and the carbon intensity score of that ethanol, because we have a very efficient ethanol plant with a carbon capture and sequestration well beneath it, we can achieve very low CI scores utilizing the rules of Section 45Z of the One Big Beautiful Bill. Leke Agiri, our CFO, will give more color on this topic in a few minutes, but I can't hold back. I am just so pleased that we sold all of our credits for 2025 production for a total of $52 million worth of credits. I got to say, we have a lot of learning to do about this, too, lots of auditing, lawyers, insurance people to make these deals as bulletproof as possible.

When we start adding up the potential adjusted EBITDA from selling carbon, generating tax credits, making more ethanol, using more of the well, we can see a picture for GND where we could potentially generate more than $100 million a year of adjusted EBITDA just from that site. Get this. This is all without deploying any large capital projects or building a jet fuel plant. Now the question is how best to go about it. Obviously, we're going to go for the low-hanging fruit first, like incremental expansions of CO2 volume driven by incremental ethanol expansion and by optimizing which markets we place our carbon credit products in. It's all pretty exciting. If you haven't seen our recent investor deck, please go take a look at it. It spells out more clearly what we're thinking.

When we meet with investors and they see what we're doing at GND, they suggest that we should figure out how to use more of the well, produce more ethanol to improve the adjusted EBITDA base. And then, of course, get on with getting the jet plant built. GND provides an outstanding platform from which to grow. It's obvious when people see what we're doing. GND does, in fact, present a great site to build a jet fuel plant. We have ethanol feedstock, great farmers to supply the ethanol plant, carbon sequestration, an industrial complex that's already built. And so now adding a jet fuel plant is incremental. It makes a lot of sense. When we look forward, we think that adding a 30 million gallon jet fuel plant would add an additional adjusted EBITDA uplift of about $150 million to the site. Think of that.

We recently were notified by the Department of Energy that they consider shifting their loan guarantee to Gevo North Dakota from South Dakota. I suspect they see the same things we do. Infrastructure already exists. The plants that are there make money and we can build upon that, and we'll be working with them to sort it all out, taking advantage of what we learned from our ATJ-60 project. I hope to get the financing for the ATJ-30 plant closed sometime mid-2026. Chris Ryan, our President and Chief Operating Officer, will talk about the operations of GND and our RNG facility, then give an update on where we are with the ATJ-30 project, giving color to the growth plan and cost.

Okay. I've talked enough. I'll turn it over to my team, Leke.

Thanks, Pat. We are pleased to have delivered another quarter of improved financial performance. Now here are the numbers. We ended the quarter with $108 million in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash. During the quarter, combined operating revenue, interest and investment income was $43.6 million. Our loss from operations was $3.7 million, and our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was a positive $6.6 million.

Gevo North Dakota generated income from operations of $12.3 million and a positive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $17.8 million. Gevo RNG generated income from operations of $0.5 million and positive non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $2.7 million. Net loss per share attributable to Gevo was $0.03 per share for the third quarter.

Just as a reminder to everyone, last year, our third quarter revenue was approximately $2 million. This year's third quarter revenue was approximately $43 million or an increase of approximately $41 million. Last year, our third quarter adjusted EBITDA was approximately negative $16.7 million. This year, third quarter adjusted EBITDA was approximately $6.6 million or an increase of approximately $23 million.

A key driver for our improved financial performance continues to be Gevo North Dakota, which is now a core earnings engine for us. This site is demonstrating reliable energy production, efficient carbon capture and consistent monetization of clean fuel production credits or Section 45Z tax credits, which are based on production volumes we generate and carbon intensity score. We're also successfully selling voluntary carbon credits to customers who value verified carbon removal.

After the end of the quarter, we completed the sale of our remaining 2025 Section 45Z clean fuel production credit from Gevo North Dakota, bringing our total contracted sale for the year to $52 million of credit. We also received net proceeds of approximately $29 million so far. We expect to bring in the rest of the cash over the next quarter or 2. We just need to get our carbon into the ground first.

We generate production tax credit based on 2 key metrics, our production volumes and our carbon intensity score. Our score reflects how we manage energy usage at our plants, the amount of carbon we sequester and other operational factors as measured under the Section 45Z methodology. In order to deliver the credits to customers and bring the associated cash in, we need to generate the credits first. However, when we produce a gallon of ethanol, the value of the related credit is applied to our cost of goods sold. So this creates a timing difference between what we see on the income statement versus when the cash comes in. One way to think of it is that our cash flow from operations can temporary lag our adjusted EBITDA performance. We view this as a normal aspect of the tax credit monetization cycle. As we move forward, we expect our operating cash flows to normalize and trend towards breakeven or better in the coming quarters.

An additional point I can't forget to mention and it's important, is our tax credit sales continue to be backed by a tax insurance policy, which mitigates much of the residual risk of this credit transfer transaction. Taken together, these steps, positive adjusted EBITDA generation, recurring monetization of 45Z tax credit and a credible pathway to breakeven operating cash flow positions us for steadily improving cash generation and financial flexibility.

Now I will hand it over to Paul. Paul?

Thanks, Leke. One of the most exciting parts of our progress this year is how we're capturing and optimizing the value of our carbon dioxide co-product, which is approximately 165,000 tons per year that we are sequestering at our CCS site in North Dakota. During Q3, roughly 90% of all the carbon benefits associated with our CO2 sequestration remained attached to ethanol gallons and were sold into low-carbon fuel markets. We are seeing strong values in select low-carbon fuel markets and look to take advantage of those where we have active pathways that include CCS. Going forward, we are applying for more pathway approvals in low-carbon fuel markets that include CCS, allowing Gevo optionality to target those markets with the highest returns.

More importantly, we are expanding the portion of our carbon value derived from CCS that we separate from the fuel and sell into the carbon dioxide removal or CDR credit markets. Our recent $26 million 5-year agreement with Biorecro for carbon dioxide removal credits is a prime example of this growth. In addition, earlier this year, we were featured in NASDAQ's corporate sustainability report as one of their suppliers of high-integrity durable carbon dioxide removal credits. This is great recognition, and we believe it shows that major corporations are looking for the high-integrity carbon removal credits that Gevo can provide.

We think the high durability and quality of our carbon dioxide removal credits are critical components of the credit value and market acceptance. We anticipate our CDR sales will continue to grow from $1 million in the second quarter to $3 million to $5 million by the end of 2025. We expect this business to keep growing in years to come, backed by a combination of spot sales and multiyear agreements.

Our CDR credits are certified under the Puro.earth standard, which we believe is becoming one of the leading frameworks for corporate buyers. When you buy our carbon credits, the CO2 has already been verified as being sequestered over a mile underground in the appropriate geological formation where it mineralizes over time and is rated to remain secure for at least 1,000 years.

We also believe our ability to produce and deliver high-integrity credits to the market today is a differentiator for Gevo. According to the reporting platform, CDR.fyi, that focuses on the durable carbon credit removal market, approximately 38.5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide removal credits have been sold, but only 2.5% of these have actually been delivered. We think this puts Gevo in a unique position of being able to produce and deliver credits today, while others are still working to activate their projects in this growing global market that we understand has a total value exceeding $10 billion.

We believe the ability to detach the carbon value from the commodity fuel is unique and powerful because it allows us to serve the market more efficiently. This approach also aligns with our planned synthetic aviation fuel business. For example, the agreement we signed with Future Energy Global, or FEG, in April demonstrates our intentions to offer customers more choices and improve service by selling voluntary carbon credits separately from our commodity jet fuel. Since it will take time for SAF to be available at major airports worldwide, our agreement with FEG will allow airlines and corporate customers to purchase carbon credits from FEG, which have been separated from the physical fuel we produce to offset their emissions through a book and claim approach. And of course, we believe all of this will be better enabled by Verity, our digital carbon tracking and verification platform to deliver the proof customers need while avoiding double counting.

Through measuring, reporting and producing verifiable carbon intensity from farm to flight or fleet, Verity aims to simplify carbon accounting through complex supply chains to track final fuel products and carbon credits with the transparency, trust and truth customers require. It's going to help us, farmers and other biofuel producers turn carbon into measurable and marketable co-product while bringing new transparency to the low-carbon fuel ecosystem. And to that point, Verity has been installed at our Gevo North Dakota facility, and we anticipate it will be fully functional by the end of the year.

In addition, in Q3, Frontier Infrastructure Holdings, LLC announced a strategic partnership with Verity and Gevo to offer North America's first integrated carbon management platform for ethanol producers. Frontier plans to deliver CO2 by rail solutions and permanent CO2 storage in Wyoming, while Verity provides the digital platform for full carbon tracking. Frontier anticipates this unique combination will provide carbon management solutions to ethanol plants that don't have direct access to geological storage or access to proposed CO2 pipelines, while Verity brings our carbon accounting platform to the table to help ethanol producers monetize their carbon dioxide co-product. We like this approach for Gevo as it could unlock new potential ATJ-30 sites that we can explore with more verified low-carbon ethanol producers.

And with that, I'll hand it over to Chris. Chris?

Thanks, Paul. At this time of the year, the thing that takes up a lot of our attention and operations is corn harvest. At Gevo North Dakota, we're happy to have a great relationship with the farmers up there who supply us with the 23 million bushels per year corn we need to keep the plant running. This year, those farmers have done a great job turning out a record harvest in North Dakota in spite of the early frost that occurred in the western part of the state.

This season is a good reminder that while weather can have a negative impact on some farmers, overall, the ag industry continues to get more crop out of the same amount of land, which creates a need for new uses such as SAF, which I'll talk about in a minute. Farmers in North Dakota are nearing the end of harvest. And at Gevo North Dakota, we're nearly full of our 3 million bushel capacity with our cash bids currently around $0.40 to $0.60 per bushel under the Chicago Board price depending upon delivery month. This is important for our investors to understand.

The point is when thinking about making products like SAF from alcohol to jet, we have a lot of low-cost, low-carbon, easy-to-handle feedstock at scale that begins with our relationship with the farmers. Related to that, a few weeks ago, we had our second community event where we had nearly 100 farmers and community members spend a couple of hours with us at Gevo while we talked about our improvements at the North Dakota site and our vision for the future. The audience was very engaged and supportive, which makes our work up there much more meaningful.

Moving beyond the farmers to our Gevo North Dakota operations, I'd like to acknowledge once again the great job our team is doing in maintaining, improving and operating the assets there. The improvements include fundamental things such as new truck scales critical for receiving corn and selling feed, improving roads to ensure safety for those farmers and several energy efficiency improvements.

The operations team successfully completed a safe turnaround of the plant in 5 days in September and came back online quickly. For Q3, they ground over 5 million bushels of corn while producing and selling over 16 million gallons of fuel ethanol, 46,000 tons of high-protein animal feed, nearly 5 million pounds of corn oil, all while sequestering 42,000 tons of carbon dioxide, which generates the carbon dioxide removal credits as Paul mentioned. That brings us to over 550,000 metric tons of CO2 that's been sequestered at the site since the sequestration operation began in June 2022. That's proof that we can capture carbon reliably each and every day we operate, which is well over 350 days a year. And remember that the captured CO2, it was originally pulled from the air through photosynthesis by plant, then released during our fermentation process in nearly pure form for us to sequester underground.

In addition to the operations team, we have a team of engineers at Gevo engaged in engineering a number of improvements at the site, along with engineering the ATJ-30 plant, which is designed to make SAF. The improvements include expanding the ethanol plant, both incremental and step change expansions, expanding corn storage and receiving, expanding our carbon sequestration and utilization, improving energy efficiency. We expect that incremental improvements will lead to substantial increases in adjusted EBITDA at North Dakota and the step change projects we have in mind could make it even bigger.

The ATJ-30 project and expected adjusted EBITDA would be even more growth on top of it all. On the ATJ-30 project, design and engineering work are progressing well. We're leveraging our patents and know-how from previous project design work to shorten our design time, simplify construction, increase efficiencies and manage carbon. We currently estimate the installed capital cost to be around $500 million, not including financing-related costs.

I'm happy to report that we've partnered with the state of North Dakota on a couple of our improvements, thanks to the North Dakota Department of Ag for their generous grants of over $3 million to help us improve energy efficiency of the plant and expand infrastructure required for the ATJ-30 project. Our long-term vision for the future of jet fuel plants is straightforward, build ATJ-30 right here at Gevo North Dakota, prove it out and then copy edit and paste that same blueprint across other strategic locations in the U.S. and globally.

Today, we want the site to showcase farming and carbon management done right. In the future, we want AT-J30 to showcase alcohol to jet done right, a model that can be replicated efficiently using abundant domestic feedstocks and proven carbon management systems. Behind all this progress is a talented team of operators, engineers and community partners who make it happen every day. And of course, we couldn't do it without the support of our farmer partners and the state of North Dakota, which continues to be a terrific place to do business.

Back to you, Pat.

Thanks, Chris, Paul and Leke. We have advanced. We've been derisking our plans to get the jet fuel production. We've known that to achieve the best economics and carbon scores for jet fuel at ethanol and the ATJ process need to be integrated and that we need a carbon sequestration to achieve our carbon footprint goals. At Lake Preston, we would have had to build all 3 greenfields, albeit the sequestration would have been done in cooperation with the Summit pipeline.

Well, today, we have an outstanding ethanol plant and sequestration, great, derisked and we make money on those assets to boot. And we get to learn how to monetize the carbon with real carbon products. Now we should maximize the adjusted EBITDA from those assets and get on with the ATJ plant. The pieces are coming together.

Let's go ahead and open it up for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Derrick Whitfield with Texas Capital.

Congrats on all of your progress over this last quarter.

Derrick, yes, thank you. It's been pretty cool.

Referencing Slide 12, it's clear Geva North Dakota represents significant upside to your EBITDA projections. Maybe speaking to this slide, could you elaborate on the incremental capital and steps required to optimize your operation and a reasonable time line to achieve $110 million of EBITDA?

Yes. So it's incremental capital -- incremental capital is like in that $15 million-ish plus or minus a few million range. That's what we think it is. It could change. And this is about debottlenecking the ethanol plant to its -- get it produce maximally with what we have there, also optimize the energy use, the capture of more carbon dioxide, all those kind of normal things you can do. Remember, there's leverage every time we do something like that because as you produce more ethanol, you get more CO2. When we capture more CO2, we can optimize energy, capture more CO2, et cetera.

And when Chris is referring to a step change, that would be adding additional ethanol capacity per se, like a whole another plant. We're going to look at that, too. I just don't have a timeline for that. So what you see on Slide 12 in our investor presentation and what -- for everybody else, what Derrick is referring to is that we have a net EBITDA of something like $40 million on the left side -- adjusted EBITDA on the left side of the slide, it's $40 million. On the right side, it's plus $100 million. That's say, over the next 18 months to 24 months, we can get up there to $110 million. How fast we do it? I don't know. It depends on how the world is working for us.

We're well on the way. If anyone is paying attention, they should see this. We're well on the way to moving towards that $40 million. This is all about just doing what we're doing, have a full year at it and getting better at it, capturing more value from the carbon. We expect our CI scores to go down in the future. So that makes more for the 45Z tax credit. We have -- Paul's team is really learning how to maximize value from the carbon by selling it as a bundle with a gallon, the carbon value with a bundle as a gallon in low carbon fuel markets or separating the carbon and selling it separately and maximizing that value. As they learn how to do that, I expect that they will continue to increase. But that's what I'm most keen on is watching those numbers around the carbon value per ton. So we made a good move by buying this plant. There's no question.

Certainly, a great acquisition for you guys. And as my follow-up, I wanted to touch on the DOE loan extension that you guys announced a few weeks ago. Could you elaborate on kind of how that extension and the scope -- change of scope that you guys are pursuing increases the likelihood of DOE financing?

I would say -- well, I'll comment first. I'm going to hand it over to Leke to give a little more color. But from my point of view, whenever you have a change of administrations like this, the fact that we survived straight away was good. I mean that's a good thing. It says we're kind of in their zone of things that are interesting and attractive. They have taken a long time to get leadership in place. They've been -- and I'm talking about not at the Secretary level, but with the Secretary. And so it took a while for people to get into place and musical chairs a little bit. They're getting their act together, they're looking at it. They see realistically what we've done, and I'm going to reiterate this.

When you compare the site that we have at Lake Preston, thing is greenfield to taking that site and moving north to North Dakota, where we have an ethanol plant that operates and makes money, has a sequestration underneath the plant, it makes money. It is a different game to play in terms of how one thinks about the possibilities of financing.

Now remember, they were committed on -- the conditional commitment is an actual commitment to do the financing if we do all the prerequisites and get the rest of the funding in place, et cetera. We were surprised that they suggested -- they suggested shifting it up to North Dakota because we think it's a good idea, too. So it was kind of a meeting of the mind thing. So we're very pleased about that, but it's just the very beginning, and we got to go work through it.

So I think if they liked it before at Lake Preston, they're going to like it a heck of a lot better up in North Dakota because we all make more money and it doesn't require as much external financing. The project is much smaller, right, because we only have to build an ATJ increment, plus we might have to do some energy. Does that help you?

It does.

Our next question comes from Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright.

Great to see the execution continue to come through. With respect to the EBITDA drivers for next year, can we -- maybe just give a little bit color on whether it's primarily going to come from the sequestration capacity expansion or some of these debottlenecking efforts you may be implementing? Just a sense of where the drivers are and how we should think about growth in cash flows for next year?

Yes. So on Slide 12 in our presentation on the left hand of that slide is what I think a picture of what is closer to what 2026 should look like is something like that and give or take still. We're working on it, and we'll finalize something after the first year is what we really think. But that's kind of the picture. And remember, we're ramping up. And so this is kind of a curve that's going upward. And so how fast does it go upward? How much faster can it go upward? We know for a fact that there's going to be improvements of carbon score in 2026 built into the Big Beautiful Bill. So we know we're going to make more money at that front.

And then on -- I think on the carbon side, and I'm going to let Paul comment on it in the next year to give a picture of that because I think that's the one I'm keeping my eye on mostly. I want to see that grow. It's incremental already we're projecting as to what we should be able to do from where we are today and on an upward trajectory. The ethanol itself is going to be ethanol. The RNG is going to be -- we planned super conservatively on RNG. And this is simply because we're realistic on this market. It is just a tough market with in general, but our plant operates really well. So we aren't these big -- we aren't padding anything or being super optimistic about that, although it generates value for us. So it's good. And hopefully, if the market turns, great, it will be a huge upside for us. We are not planning that optimistically.

But Paul, I think this question of what's the growth look like? I'm going to rephrase yours, Amit. Paul, give us some color on what you think the dollars per ton going forward? How does it look? What's that build look like? What's in front of us? How does that pan out because we're doing something different than everybody else here.

Yes. Thanks, Pat. So just a little more color on the carbon business, right? As we talked about during this quarter, we're moving more. You see 90% of our carbon value today being sold in fuels. But with like the Biorecro deal, we're selling much more into a separated carbon dioxide removal market, right, these credits. And that's exciting for us because those can be like the Biorecro deal, longer-term deals in the market where we're bringing in more ratable revenue. We're not as subject to the ups and downs in the volatility that you see in low carbon fuel markets, even in the low carbon fuel credit prices. So that's going to continue to grow. That's -- even with the Biorecro deal, right, we start growing into $5 million just a year down the road with that type of a deal. And then we're going to look to do more of those, right?

So you see this a big piece, and this is how long term, we think this can start adding in this $30 million type range over the next 2 years between the compliance markets and the voluntary markets as we balance that as we see where either of those markets go. But we've got a lot of flexibility. That's what we like. And that's why we're continuing to do both, right? We're putting on more pathways in the compliance and the regulatory fuel markets where we can go after low carbon fuel with that CCS value attached or we can separate that out in the carbon dioxide removal markets where we have that flexibility to maximize our returns.

And then I think the way to look at Slide 12 is on the right side of that slide is a little further out, and I don't have a time frame on it per se because we could do it faster or slower, depends on how projects get done, but that includes an incremental expansion of the ethanol plant, taking it up to like 75 million gallons a year and that produce more ethanol, more CO2. So you can imagine how the numbers increase because of that because we have leverage. right? We're making more ethanol. We make more CO2. We generate more credits, generate more production tax credit, et cetera. That's why you see those numbers.

So it's -- that's what our picture looks like. And as we work through stuff, and this is all with the low capital version, it's kind of exciting. It's a good place to be. And ATJ is completely on top of all of that. That would be a different spend in a different bucket, a different project.

Right. No, it makes sense, Pat. So it seems like expanding the ethanol capacity to 75 million gallons per year is pretty natural, I guess, in terms of how you are executing and all the other infrastructure you have over there to be able to monetize that. What I'm trying to get at is if you were to have to make a call between ATJ-30 and much larger expansion of the ethanol capacity, would you lean more towards the ATJ-30 with or without DOE funding?

Well, the ATJ-30 plan right now, the way it pencils in with our contracts to be at an uplift of about $150 million a year of EBITDA. Now, turning back to ethanol. Ethanol, the 45Z credits are -- they end at the end of, what, 2029. So if you're looking at long-term plans of building new plants, what's going to be in the money? Well, ATJ plant, a jet plant isn't dependent upon the long-run economics of a 45Z tax credit. Remember, our site, if we're lucky, we can take a queue too. And so we're pretty much indifferent between those 2 at the moment, the way the world is structured. Remember, a queue runs out for 12 years.

So we're in good shape on that kind of a front. And so we don't take -- it's not crucial, we'd love to have it extended. Love to. But you know what, it will be what it is. It's going to compete economically. Paul will be successful and his team will be successful selling carbon. So it will be what it is. Ethanol, if we can get it built really fast and do like to say, duplicate of what we currently have of capacity, how fast can we get it built, how long will the credits last really.

You don't want to be in a business of just doing ethanol. You do not want to be in a plain old ethanol business. That's not a good business. It's too dang volatile. This is why Paul was emphasizing turning carbon into a product and selling it gets us into a ratable business. The Biorecro deal was a multiyear contract. Think of that a multiyear contract selling carbon really. That's what we just did, and we're going to do more of that. That changes the game of what's possible and gets us out of this volatility over the long run.

So that's how we're thinking about it. Getting to 75 million gallons is the natural expansion of what we should do in debottlenecking. There'll be other things we can do to optimize energy, lower the CI score further. We're already a very, very low CI score, and it will go lower as we improve. Well, after 75 million gallons, now we got to build a brand-new plant, and that's in the -- to do that capacity, that's in the multiple dollars per gallon, to call it, rounding it to [ $2.50 ] a gallon for new capacity once you're doing a full-sized plant, say, 50 million gallons to 100 million gallons. It's in that kind of a range ballpark.

So does it make sense? Under what circumstance does it make sense? It depends. And so we'll sort that out later, but that's not our focus. We're going to evaluate it and make sure we understand it so we can jump all over it to make it happen if we need to, if the right market conditions are there. But I'll tell you, first things first. Get the low-hanging fruit, get the 75 million gallons, get the credits, generate more credits, generate more revenue, get better and better at selling the carbon. Remember, we have an advantage. We have a sequestration site directly underneath our plant. We're the only ones in the world with that. We don't have all the complexities that everybody else has of pipelines and sharing and all this kind of stuff. Ours is relatively straightforward. And still, it's a huge amount of work to get it audited, insured and all the rest to generate these viable credits.

So we need to get good at this. So we're going to do that, walk in before we run, expand incrementally, use our capital wisely, save our powder, we'll debottleneck, save our powder with the DOE, work with them, get that plant financed and the economics are good. And we will also treat then a full build-out of a new ethanol plant as an opportunity to be evaluated in the market conditions as we see them and working with partners who want to do it. That's how we think about it. So use what we got, maximize what we got, expand ATJ and then making sure we're not losing sight of these other opportunities to grow because we could have them, they might be very much real.

Got it. Just last one on the Verity offering. How much more development work needs to be done before you can get more aggressive towards commercializing that offering?

Paul, go ahead and take that one again.

Yes. So I think we're getting to that point right now, Amit. So this is what I was talking about getting this implemented at Gevo North Dakota is a critical step for us. I mean we've already got it implemented with other customers, but having it running in our own operation, we'll be able to show even other Verity potential customers say, "Hey, come look at it, right? Stop by our plant, see how we're using it, see how it simplifies your life, how it makes everything better, total up all your carbon for voluntary markets, for compliance markets, for tax credits, right?" It's really a simplification tool. And so we think that we're really nearing that point, right, where we can now scale this, just like Chris was talking about ATJ-30 to do the copy, edit, paste. I mean this is where we can start to do the copy, edit, paste for Verity really more broadly with biofuel producers. So we're in a really good spot.

Yes, interesting. I think this is going to be a really interesting catalyst.

And here's for everyone's perspective, there's everyone and their brothers going, "Hi, we know how to count carbon. We know how to measure CI, all this." No, you actually don't. It's actually kind of complicated. And you got to keep track of heck of a lot of stuff. There's simple -- on the Internet, you can find, everyone does their ChatGPT version. Sorry, to get a product that someone buys and transfers money, actual cash on the barrelhead to pay you for something, that takes a whole lot more diligence to make sure it's right and have multiple parties auditing it. In our case, you heard, like you talk about getting even insured. How does that work in getting that system operating well, working well.

And then with Verity, that offers a whole new level of assurance and gets it tracking it back to farm by farm, field by field, integrating the plant in its energy and giving even a stronger score that can be verified and audited. This is the important part, auditing throughout the whole supply chain. That's why we can get paid now. That's why we will get paid in the future and why Verity is important because we can take that technology and use it as a service and get paid with other plants. That's why it's important and why it's interesting. We're doing an end-to-end solution, other people aren't. They're just doing pieces and parts and using their equivalent of Internet says, we're not doing that.

Our next question comes from Craig Irwin with ROTH Capital Partners.

Pat, can you maybe update us on the conversations with potential customers that could be using your well in Richardton to sequester their carbon. I guess that would be tolling customers or customers where you provide the service for them. I mean where do you stand with those potential incremental additions to the overall profitability?

Yes. So I'm going to restate your question. So we have this big site. Our capacity is 1 million tons per year. We're currently only using about 16%, 17% of that well. We should use more of it. And so Craig is right, we should use more of it. Paul, what's the plan?

Yes. So Craig, a couple of things. One, as we expand our footprint there and make more fuel, we'll have more CO2 to sequester. So that's one, step one, right? So that can -- we love that because we don't have to go anywhere else. We've already got the capacity. The second part is think about a complex. When we're thinking about Gevo North Dakota, we're also thinking about what energy sources we need, all the different stuff that we have to put in place to really build out the ATJ-30 plant, but hey, it could be other partners as well. So we are looking and have ongoing discussions today with other companies that would maybe want to co-locate with us and take advantage of some of that sequestration well.

So we could be storing CO2 for others and obviously getting fees for that, helping them sell their carbon credits, all those type of things. And so we're pretty excited about that. And then just like this deal where Frontier is looking at taking CO2 by rail to North Dakota, there's always options like that, I think we talked about on one of our earlier calls around looking at how can we take more CO2 in kind of virtual pipeline style. Those are things that we're contemplating today. We don't have any concrete plans, but all of that coupled helps to use that capacity that we've already invested in. So it's really about how do we harvest that value from the investment that we already made with this great purchase at Gevo North Dakota because of that extra pore space that to use it ourselves, use it for third parties, absolutely.

Yes. So amplifying what Paul said, this thing about the virtual pipeline, what that means is taking CO2 by rail. That's how CO2 is transported, has been transported forever. And we could do that. The deal with Frontier contemplates that and tracking and tracing it the deal -- we had a rail terminal, for example, we can offload CO2 and put it down the hole for others. That also accomplishes yet another thing. I think that in a few years' time, call it, in the 5-year time frame, the Bakken is going to need more CO2. And great, maybe there'll be a market for enhanced oil recovery CO2. So I think the world at large in that area is going to be interested in CO2 collection, sourcing, treating CO2 as a product, great. People want us to put it down a hole, awesome. We can get paid for that, cool, get more credits for that, great or sell it to somebody else.

So it's a paradigm shift in that CO2 is a product should be valued, should be collected and utilized. So we have to put those plans together, but that's part of what we're working on and figuring out. That kind of incremental expansion is not included in our Slide 12 that we referred to earlier. It's not part of that. That would be on top of it. That's gravy on top of what you see there.

Understood. Understood. So then actually, I wanted to go back to a little bit of the content on your Slide 12 -- the CI -- the incremental CI improvement that you guys are tracking for over the next number of quarters, how should we go about projecting that or forecasting that from our side? Because it ends up having a fairly material impact on the overall level of profitability. And is this something that we should parse the capital plan and the different pieces of your capital plan that are likely to be completed on a finite time horizon? Or what should we do to kind of understand and maybe be a little bit ahead of the curve as we see the CI score improvements over the next couple of years?

I think, Leke, you can help with this one, but there's basically the Big Beautiful Bill, the CI score drops automatically next year. That's a large part of it. And so go ahead and give that some color, Leke, and then we'll come back to it.

Thanks, Pat. So high level, I think Pat already sort of touched on it. In the Big Beautiful Bill, the no ILOC that reduces our CI score by a tangible amount, which effectively increases our 45Z generation by another $0.10 per gallon. And then the last bit of the puzzle, which for us, we're working on is, are there other decarbonization measures that we can introduce to our facility to effectively be able to get another $0.10 per gallon increase in credit generation. So the $52 million tax credits that we sold this year from Gevo North Dakota, I think folks can easily do the math based on our ownership of the asset for 11 months out of 12 months. That number rounds up to about, call it, $0.80 per gallon of credit generation.

So next year, we are working actively with the no ILOC and the other decarbonization strategies, we're hoping to be closer to $1 per gallon. And keep in mind, production tax credit is also subject to inflation. And those annual inflation, for example, this year, that's released by the IRS was around 6% and some change. Maybe inflation is not going to be that high next year, but you have to factor that into your math as well. So next year, we're going to have a tangible increase in that [ 4 to 5 ] regeneration from where we are today. Does that help?

Yes. That definitely helps. That definitely helps. Well, that's also going to help your cash flow. So congratulations on the progress.

It's an interesting game, isn't it, Craig? I mean it's like the world, we did good. Our timing was good, and we're learning how to sell this carbon being having a real carbon product to figure out a real tangible thing where it's actual tons. And then what does it mean in terms of CI score, how do you monetize tax credits. One of the things that is different from what we're doing from what I think everyone else is doing, we're selling them directly. Leke's team has done an outstanding job of interfacing directly with the purchasers of these carbon credits. We're not going to a broker where the broker has to go figure it out later.

Our stuff is done from -- based on real CI scores audited by multiple parties, stuff that's based on carbon that's gone down a hole. And then Leke has been able to strike really good deals, getting good value. When he says -- remember, it's a 67 million gallon plant, and he's talking about $1 a gallon, the maximum value you can get is about $1 a gallon from the 45 Z. So we are one of the lowest CI score plants under the 45Z Big Beautiful Bill. And it looks like we're in a really good position. That's an awesome thing.

And this is before we've done anything around decarbonization of the energy at the plant. It's just that it's a very efficient plant. It is not taking into account agricultural practices like so many people talk about, it's not taking that into account. It's just well run, a great sequestration plant. We're good -- our team is good at capturing carbon, putting it down a hole.

So maybe I can ask another question, right? Red Trail, what did they do right on the commissioning of their well? There's another well that was supposed to be testing, maybe commissioned. It's another Class VI well for, I guess, the third guy that's supposed to be on, but they've been late. And they're not eager to confirm that there's a ribbon cutting on Wednesday, right? You guys have brought up your well, generated credits consistently off it and obviously had pretty clean execution. What did Gevo really do -- what did Red Trail really do right, the team at Gevo now that allowed you to execute consistently?

Yes. Chris, would you want to go ahead and explain this? Yes, go ahead explain the fascinating story.

Well, okay, let me tell you that it starts with the former CEO of Red Trail, a guy by the name of Gerald Bachmeier, who really led that. And he -- earlier in his career, he did oil and was involved in drilling. So he -- I would argue he knew how to pick the right contractors to do the work. And they really focused on doing good quality execution because the guys that ran that plant, including Gerald, were boots on the ground, get or done guys that know how to get things done and know how to get things done well. And so that's really the nation that really led to doing that well. So...

So what you got here is, remember, up in that area, you got farmers and -- remember, Red Trail was a co-op, big giant co-op, 900-plus members. But corn guys are oil guys and vice versa up there. And so it's a very -- it's actually a wonderful place to have a plant like this who you're trying to work with the petrochemical industry. And the guys are big farmers anyway. And so everybody cooperates. And so they have a lot of expertise about how to drill wells. That's what Gerald was about and knowing how to do it. And he definitely had his own way of going about it that was different than what was being sold to others. That I've been told over and over again, and I believe it to be true. And so that's why I think we didn't have the problems that other people have seen.

Understood. Well, we don't have to talk about those problems. I will say congratulations for your success.

Of course.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Peter Gastreich with Water Tower Research.

Congratulations on your results. The partnership that you've discussed with Frontier is certainly very interesting. It looks like it presents a lot of opportunities for you. The Summit pipeline has obviously been very, very quiet. Just curious, if we look at Frontier entering this market, are they coming in as a potential competitor here to Summit? Or should we think of Frontier more as being complementary and maybe focusing on the ethanol plants that are not on that pipeline route? Like how should we think about this entry into the market?

Paul, go ahead and take that on, please.

Peter, no, great question. I think it's -- if you look at what we had in -- Frontier really had in the announcement, they talk a lot about how many plants are kind of stranded. They don't have access to geological sequestration. They don't have access to pipelines today. So I think that's really the first and foremost market because, like Pat said, CO2 is transported by rail all the time. So this gives those plants that optionality. And basically, so now you think about you either have the right geology, you may have access to a pipeline or if you don't, now you've got a rail opportunity to go to a sequestration site like what they have in Wyoming and we have in North Dakota.

Okay. Got it. Just a second question about overseas markets. Could you talk a bit more about the agreement that you've ventured with Haush in Europe and the ethanol to jet facilities. With the SAF feedstock restrictions in Europe, what's the strategy there? And also just curious broadly your traction in overseas markets and where you see the best prospects there?

Paul, go ahead and take that one again.

Yes, sure. Haush is an interesting company that we really have enjoyed working with. And they've got a good focus. They're a hydrogen company fundamentally. And so as we're trying to find the right combination of sites and feedstocks, we think we've got a good partner. When we think about the feedstock, right, there are limitations. So we do need to think about ReFuelEU doesn't allow corn ethanol, crop-based fuels to qualify. So we are looking at sources -- carbohydrate sources still for ethanol, obviously, but they come from waste and residue type feedstocks that will qualify for those markets.

So that's kind of where we're focused. Those exist. We have a whole team that's taking a look at that. And then the question really comes down to what are the economics and the netbacks from Europe versus North America. But like Chris said, we really see ATJ-30 as a global business. So even not just Europe, this is like where can we find the right carbohydrate feedstocks, ethanol is ubiquitous. And so it's really about how do we have a plan and then have the right partners in those geographies that we can execute.

Congrats again to the them.

That concludes today's question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the call back to Patrick Gruber for closing remarks.

Yes. One of the interesting things, if I would encourage people to take a look at the growth of the jet fuel demand out to the future. It's quite interesting in that it's continuing to increase here in the U.S. and around the world. Refining capacity, however, is not increasing and not here in the U.S. In fact, it's decreasing. There's only a finite amount of jet fuel in a barrel. This means that there's going to be a shortage of jet fuel here in the U.S., a shortage -- incremental shortage, but it adds up to big numbers of about 2.4 billion gallons a year by about 2024, we have to do something different, bring it in, import it or make it through alternative sources. You'll find that if anyone does start searching and looking at this, you'll find that the world predicts that everything is going to be fulfilled with SAF.

And SAF, of course, is jet fuel plus its carbon, but think of it as just jet fuel. And so the question is, will all that get built really and you look at these projections, and it's already behind schedule everywhere in the world. That means jet fuel price is likely to go up and likely the U.S. will have to import more jet fuel. With this administration, they're not big on importing products, and we can make them domestically. Remember our premise, we can -- because we get netbacks of value from the coproduct of carbon because we get netbacks from protein and the oil, the corn oil, we can deliver cost competitive jet fuel to the marketplace, cost competitive with petrol, pretty fascinating. 2.4 billion gallons, remember, is more like 70 plants needed in the U.S. over the next decade.

Well, that's a target-rich environment. That's what we're looking at here. That's what makes it interesting and why we don't lose track of those ATJ plants. We can use more ethanol, we can use more corn and it makes huge job growth and improves energy security. It's a good overall practical story of doing cost competitive energy delivered to the marketplace as an alternative. And do I think that we'll wind up building 70 plants? No, that's not. The ethanol industry did it when they blew -- when they went big, when ethanol did their boom between, what, 2007, 2012, they did more than that. So it's possible to do. But for us, realistically, no. I'll just take a bite of that though, that would be great. And then we can do the same thing around the world. That's what's in front of us. We've got a great platform, Gevo North Dakota. This acquisition turned out better than we ever expected. We have cash flow coming. It's good to see. We can expand it. And then we have this huge opportunity and platform along with all of our intellectual property and designs around the jet.

One of the last comment around ATJ that I'll mention because I think it's relevant to the questions that we get in the marketplace is that in technology ready in a sense, every single step that we're planning on deploying at our -- at ATJ-30, every one of them is proven commercially already in this world, technology ready level as 9 for all the steps. That's different than anyone else's ATJ technology.

Thank you all for joining us. I appreciate it. Thanks for all your support. I'm proud of my team, proud of what we've done. Thank you.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's Virtual Non-Deal Roadshow. My name is Julia Perron, a virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in San Francisco and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Gevo, Inc., trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Presenting today is Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. And with that, I will hand it over to Eric.

Thanks to the Renmark team for setting up this virtual fireside chat. We've been doing a number of these types of things since we had our 2Q results come out, which were really transformative for us. Actually, the acquisition we did earlier this year that closed at the end of January was transformative for our company and the second quarter of this year was the first time that we had a full three months of those results, and we plan to grow quite a bit from there. That's a big change from where we were a year ago. So we're a company that has a vision for the future of synthetic aviation fuel and the ingredients to make that future a reality are something that we've really leaped forward and made profitable in the past year. So that's what I'd like to talk about.

As Julia mentioned, our ticker is GEVO, we trade on the NASDAQ. Check out our IR website for this presentation and a couple of others, too. I want to just mention briefly, there will be some forward-looking statements in this presentation. Please check out our risk factors in our public filings, our 10-Qs and our 10-Ks. And there's also non-GAAP reconciliations in the back of this presentation on our website as well as in our 2Q earnings release.

We're a company that takes renewable resources, uses existing technologies to convert them into fuels and chemicals that are the same as the fossil-derived alternatives, but they come from renewable resources, and they can reduce carbon footprint. But they have the same performance, same molecule, the engine doesn't know the difference. It's one way to reduce carbon footprint across the value chain. The other way is to electrify things.

The first thing you need to accomplish this is a team with a unique set of experiences across different industries because historically, agriculture and biomass has been one industry and hydrocarbon fuels has been related to fossil fuels, and so it's been a different industry. But we have a lot of crossover experience and a lot of experience generally, and that's really necessary.

So our team comes from companies like Cargill and ADM, and they've been doing bio-based fuel and chemicals their whole careers. You need to know about -- to do -- to be successful what we do, you need to know about fermentation. So if anybody brews beer in their garage, you know something about fermentation. You also need to know about agriculture, but you also need to know about catalytic chemistry. You need to take a page out of the petrochemical industry and think about how do you convert one chemical to another and make drop-in products, and we have all that under one roof, which is pretty unique.

So what do we do? We're a diversified renewable energy company. What does that mean? It means we're geared towards making cost-competitive hydrocarbon fuels, think about gasoline, diesel for a truck, jet fuel for an aircraft and chemicals to reduce carbon footprint across the whole lifecycle. So our belief is that you can reduce costs to reduce carbon footprint by making things that are scalable, that are abundant that are low cost to convert the biomass to these fuels and chemicals, and that don't require expensive changeovers in fleets.

It's especially difficult to change heavy-duty vehicles to electric, and it's difficult to change aircraft to electric. But we make products that are the same molecules that co-mingle with fossil fuels. But because of what they're derived, it reduces the carbon intensity of the whole system. And we basically segment our business in these 4 components that you're seeing here. Here, I'm going to get my pointer. So this Gevo fuel box up here, that's where we have a profitable platform to make ethanol and low-carbon animal feed co-products as well as carbon capture and sequestration that's operating today. I'll talk more about that.

We also have a synthetic aviation fuel platform. That's essentially the engineered designs to take ethanol and make jet fuel. Now historically, Gevo, we as a company, we've made jet fuel from alcohols. In fact, we were one of the first companies to make it. Airlines have used our alcohol-to-jet fuel. It's been certified, and it's flown on a number of aircraft. So we've already done this at pilot scale historically. What we're doing today is trying to make it big and repeatable because we think now we want to have a durable business and make world-scale plants that then you can make many of them. And the way to do that is the first thing you need is the ingredients. The ingredients in our case, are alcohols and carbon capture. So that's what we're making here. We've also got 500 acres up there to deploy alcohol-to-jet. I'll talk more about that in a minute.

The other operating business that we have is this one down here, Gevo RNG. We have 3 dairy farm partners with thousands of cows. We take their manure and instead of allowing the methane to be fugitive greenhouse gas emissions, we capture that methane, clean it up and make a pipeline quality and then inject it into the local gas distribution pipeline, and that's a profitable business actually. It can make anywhere from $5 million to $15 million a year of EBITDA. This one is a profitable business, too, by the way, I'll talk more about that.

We also have a wholly owned subsidiary called Verity. Verity is basically a software start-up that Gevo has stood up. It's sort of not really in stealth mode, but it's -- we haven't released a lot of information about it, but it's been years in the making and essentially, we have a team of people who are software engineers and who grew up on a farm or own a farm. So they know about software engineering and they know about farms and agriculture.

And we're deploying software to this very complicated agriculture commodity supply chain because there are millions of fields and farmers, there's thousands of grain elevators; there's dozens, if not hundreds, of processing plants that make everything from soybean oil to biodiesel and renewable diesel. And if we want the end customer, the brand owners, the Amazons of the world and the Google of the world, if they want to pay for carbon offsets and carbon reduction, they need to know with an immutable token, okay, we use DLT technology, the same technology that underlies things like Bitcoin.

They want to know that, that product that was used in that truck or engine at the end of the day came from a field that used less fertilizer, used cover crops, complied with Canada's Clean Fuel Regulation, all that stuff. And so to do that, spreadsheets are not adequate. So we build berry for ourselves because we know that we'll need it, but now we have several customers that want it to. So we think that's a highly scalable software business that we're looking forward to talking more about.

And then the bottom right here, what we call GevoChem. That's where we have our R&D effort because making alcohols today at scale is cheap and scalable. Converting alcohols to hydrocarbons has been done at scale and can be cost-effective with fossil fuels. But there's -- we believe in continuous improvement. So the fossil fuel industry is mature, making bio-based molecules that are dropping to fossil fuels is not mature. We can keep improving it even after we deploy the first generation of plants.

So we have partnerships with really world-class companies like LG Chem and Axens to keep improving those technologies. The goal is to drive cost down because if we want to change the world, people need to be excited about using the product. If we want people to be excited about using the product, it's got to be the same product that gives you the same energy density and performance as fossil fuels but is derived from a lower carbon source. That's what we believe.

So that's the common thread among these kind of four different activities is we're starting with renewable carbon that's growing at the earth’s surface and then have a cost-competitive route to convert that into drop-in fuels and chemicals that are comparable to petrochemicals. I think I already reviewed this, but we have employees all over the world actually, including some employees in India. And the reason for that is because if you want to leverage an asset like this one, where we have ethanol and carbon capture to make jet fuel, you need a good mousetrap.

Like I said, the catalytic chemistry to convert ethanol and alcohols into hydrocarbons exists, but the engineered design is something that needs to be engineered. And we've taken 2 years and almost $200 million to engineer a really good mousetrap, actually a couple of different ones. So the technology exists, but the engineered design is something that we're working on, and this is where we have these plants. This is a picture of a facility we've used in the past. I mentioned in the past, Gevo has made jet fuel and other hydrocarbons from alcohols. This is a facility here in Silsbee, Texas that we've used to make that.

The reason I emphasize that is because we ask all the time, well, how much SAF are you making today? How much jet fuel are you making today? We did that in the past. We've already made it. We've already certified it and proven it. What we're trying to do is we're now in Phase 2, which is can you make a large, profitable, durable business and then make it repeatable, so we can make large amounts of SAF. That's what we're trying to do.

Right now, what we have is we've idled out our pilot facility that we used to use to make jet fuel and SAF. Now we have a world-scale ethanol and carbon capture facility and renewable natural gas facility that I mentioned to make the ingredients for SAF. The next step that we want to do is use this 3D engineered plant design to convert that ethanol to synthetic aviation fuel or jet fuel. This is a really lovely picture of the North Dakota site that I mentioned. It's making low-carbon ethanol today, 67 million gallons per year.

We also have under that site -- ethanol is a great source for carbon dioxide because the bubbles in beer and champagne, if you brew stuff in a digester, you're taking sugar from crops or from biomass and microbes then basically eat the sugar and give you alcohol, okay, clean alcohol, so you can do chemistry. But the bubbles are carbon dioxide actually, very high purity, like 99% pure carbon dioxide and so nature -- mother nature is kind of doing a bunch of work for us to take that carbon dioxide that originally came out of the air, okay, when plants do photosynthesis, that's what they're doing. They're taking carbon dioxide out of the air. And then fermentation gives us back that high-purity carbon dioxide.

That's one of the costliest things when you're doing carbon capture is how do you get a high purity stream of carbon dioxide. It's a very dilute gas. Here, we're leveraging nature, so the bubbles give us that gas. But also -- so we have a good source, but we also have a good sink. So about a mile under this facility under these 500 acres, we have pore space rights for about 1 million tons per year of carbon capture. Currently, we're using about 165,000 metric tons per year of that, that comes off of fermenter.

So a lot of companies talk about doing carbon capture. We're doing it every day that we're operating. We're putting carbon dioxide that was in the atmosphere. We're putting it a mile underground where it's ready to stay, have a permanence of over 1,000 years. It's a 500-acre site, like I mentioned. So that gives us room to expand both the existing ethanol and carbon capture, and also bolt-on ethanol to jet. The raw material for this manufacturing process is not the kind of corn you eat. By the way, when you do fermentation, you can use any source of sugar. There's lots of different crops that you can use for this and biomass. But in the U.S., it's corn.

It's not sweet corn or popcorn or white corn or the kind of corn that steps in for human consumption. It's field corn. This is corn that's milled. The protein that we need in our bodies is extracted and sold as high-protein animal feed and ultimately ends up in our body that way. We also sell corn oil. It's the sugar from this corn that's used to make -- to ferment into ethanol and carbon dioxide. And then ultimately, we want to convert that ethanol to jet fuel. If you look at how much corn was -- how many acres were harvested for corn, it's about 75 million. 100 years ago, it was about the same. It was about 75 million acres. That's because farmers have dramatically increased their yields.

This is a great industry that we want to partner with the U.S. and global ag industry because in that industry, doing more from less means more money in farmers' pocketbooks, and it also means a lower carbon footprint. So it's synergistic with everything we do. What comes out of corn? Well, by way, it's about one-third, one-third, one-third ethanol fuel, high-protein animal feed and carbon dioxide. And so for us, carbon dioxide is a co-product. But the nutrients, the ethanol is coming from the sugar, remember, the nutrients, the amino acids, the protein, that goes on back into the food chain.

When you look at the revenue streams, though, it's a little more complicated. So when you go from corn to ethanol, we get all these co-product revenue streams, okay? We make the corn oil, we make animal feed. We also get RINs, we get 45Z or clean fuel production tax credits, and there are state-level incentive and credits, too. There are low carbon fuel standard markets in places like California, Oregon, Washington, where low carbon fuels get a premium because they have a cap-and-trade system.

If we extend that ethanol to jet fuel, there's more co-product revenue streams. We'll make a little bit of renewable diesel and Naptha. And again, you get synthetic aviation fuel credits, state-level incentives. To be successful at this requires the skills that we have. You have to know not only about agriculture, but about biochemistry, about the chemical industry and about the regulatory industry. Now all these co-product streams that I just talked about, they stack. So we can capture all of them. But there is one choice that we have to make that doesn't stack, which is every quarter, we choose where to point our ethanol gallons.

We put them on a railcar, and they go to places like Oregon, Washington, British Columbia or regionally or Canada. And depending on where we point our gallons, we have 2 markets we can access. The first is if we go to a state or province that has a low carbon fuel standard, we can get about $50 to $200 per metric ton of the carbon that we're capturing at a premium to our ethanol, okay? So in other words, the carbon value is attached to the gallon.

On the other hand, if we sell the gallons in a non-LCFS market, let's say, like in North Dakota, we can save a little bit on transportation cost, but also no one then has paid for the carbon reduction, the tons of carbon that are going down the hole. So in that case, we can detach that carbon abatement and sell it on what are called carbon dioxide removal or CDR markets. This website down here is a really cool website. If you click on that, it's tracking this market, and it's actually a $10 billion market. $10 billion of CDRs have been transacted mostly in the past couple of years. It's actually really remarkable. These are some of the companies that are looking to buy these credits.

Now what makes this really interesting to us is on the one hand, we are -- carbon dioxide is a co-product, so we will deliver it to the highest value market. These state regulatory markets are compliance markets. If you comply, you get the credit. The credits go up and down, maybe $50 to $200 per ton. These are voluntary markets. This is a global voluntary market where brand owners want to reduce their carbon footprint and they're willing to purchase essentially carbon offsets from companies like ourselves. And here, the pricing is more like $100 to $300 per metric ton a day. So over time, we will deliver our carbon and our ethanol to the highest demand market, and we can optimize that way.

We also think that in the very, very long run, this kind of market is a durable, long-lasting market because the fuel that we make, we can just sell as fuel. And if people just want to buy fuel, whether it's ethanol or jet fuel, they can pay the same price as any other fuel because it's the same molecule. And the markets that care about carbon reduction, we can then go on to a global marketplace and without double counting with high permanence, high confidence, sell that to these brand owners. And if they're the ones that are willing and able to pay for carbon reduction, then that's the best place to deliver that carbon value.

So we [indiscernible] a presentation like this a couple of weeks ago, not long after our 2Q results came out. And an important thing we wanted to point out here is, as we exited the second quarter, we had about $20 million per year of run rate EBITDA. We think we can double that to $40 million per year just by optimizing our commercial structure from what we're doing today. So just by optimizing the value of our production tax credits, how we're marketing our voluntary carbon sales and RNG and ethanol, we think we can double that to $40 million per year.

And we think we can almost triple that again to this $110 million a year number by doing debottlenecking at our site by doing minor expansions, think like 10%, 15% type of expansions of our volume of ethanol and carbon dioxide and by fully utilizing our 1 million tons per year of CCS in North Dakota. So what's important about this is that we think we can capture all this growth in addition to and before we deploy ethanol to jet. So even before we -- and this is something that's new that wasn't the case for our company a year ago.

We now think that before we deploy large amounts of capital to build ethanol to jet projects, just by optimizing what we have and maybe doing minor expansions, we can and utilizing everything we have. This is the amount of growth that we can actually get to. And so that's something new that we're really excited about. We have a good balance sheet, $127 million of cash and restricted cash. This $100 million of debt is secured at North Dakota and was used to finance our acquisition. I talked about kind of where Gevo came from, what we're trying to do, why we want to make drop-in cost-competitive fuels and chemicals that come from biomass and where we are today and how we're going to grow.

Now I want to talk about in the future, looking ahead, what really differentiates us and what we see is how we get really big, how we're trying to get really big and really serve a new industry, which is alcohol-to-jet and why we're so excited about it. This is the basic reason. Demand for U.S. jet fuel is going up. We need about 2.3 billion gallons per year more jet fuel in the next 10 years. But other fuels, the demand is not going up. It's stagnant or maybe even declining. This is just EIA projections. The reason for this is as people -- as population goes up, demand goes up, but that's offset by fuel efficiency, by electrification and by urbanization.

Well, as people move into cities and drive a little less, that doesn't make them fly less. In fact, they fly more as GDP goes up, and it's difficult to electrify aircraft. Now the U.S. fossil fuel complex produces about 9% jet fuel, but 50% gasoline. So there's a bit of a mismatch here. The alcohol-to-jet process, what we're focused on makes 90% jet fuel in its product stream. So we can really target the jet fuel without exacerbating gasoline, which is not growing as much as jet fuel. And we can make it from an abundant renewable resource. We're not making it from the corn if you believe, remember, we're making it from the sugar and the ethanol, which we have plenty of sugar and plenty of ethanol.

Now how much does it cost you? Well, on the X-axis, we have the price of crude oil, okay, fossil crude oil and dollars per barrel. And on the Y-axis is the price of jet fuel and dollars per gallon. And the blue is just a scatter plot. Our first-generation alcohol-to-jet is in here. It can be competitive on a cash cost of production basis with fossil jet fuel for serial #1. And the reason for that is because the business system is so close to the farm gate and you get all the co-product revenue streams that I mentioned earlier. That's basically why.

Now this does require capital. And to serve that capital, we have to make an investment and to get a return on that investment, we need a [premium]. Our view is that things like the clean fuel production tax credit are great. That's a great way to spur this industry, but we don't need it forever, and we don't believe in companies that depend on tax credits forever. That's why in that previous slide, I talked about this, we're developing the voluntary carbon markets even as we also take advantage of clean fuel production tax credits to get the return on the capital. Once this is set up, our view is that oil and gas is a mature industry, this can get even -- this is a pretty good starting place to be cash cost production competitive on day 1. And it's cheaper than the other ways of making synthetic aviation fuel, which are the other green boxes here.

Each ATJ-30, as we call it, that's a plant design where we take 50 million gallons of ethanol and use it to make 30 million gallons of jet fuel. That's what we want to deploy in North Dakota. Each one adds about $150 million of EBITDA to the ethanol site. So like I said earlier, our -- and we have a couple of plant designs. Another one is what we call ATJ-60. That's where you start with 100 million gallons of ethanol and you make 60 million gallons of jet fuel. This would use Gevo's technology. We have about 300 -- we have over 300 patents and we've also issued a number of patents over the last 5 years as we've engineered these plant designs.

We've spent almost $200 million about that in about 2 years to engineer the plant design because it's not the technology, but it's the design of how you use energy in this plant and how it's integrated with ethanol that really matters to get a low greenhouse gas footprint. So how many of these can we deploy? Well, the goal is to deploy serial #1 in South and North Dakota, like I said, not to make jet fuel. Gevo has already made jet fuel. The goal is to make something big that's a durable business, okay? That's our goal. And then to repeat it.

Well, how many times can we repeat it? This shows the 180 operating ethanol plants in the U.S. to meet future jet fuel demand growth in the U.S., the U.S. would have to build about 70 of those ATJ-30s that I mentioned. Will we build 70 in what time frame? We don't know. But even a fraction of that would be transformative to our company, and we think would make a new industry. So we want to be there. We want to be the company that's providing and licensing and investing in converting ethanol to jet fuel. And the way the ethanol industry got big was with a couple of standard ethanol designs.

We want to have those set those standards and provide those designs, both by using it in our own projects and then also licensing it to others. That's how we think, we as a company get big and we make the industry big. We get a lot of questions about political risk essentially. Here's what I would say. Both parties have supported agriculture and biofuels. This was -- The White House's most recent executive order. It says we need more biofuel, ethanol and aviation fuel. That's exactly what we make. Biden and the Inflation Reduction Act essentially extended previous biofuel tax credits. Trump and the Big Beautiful Bill didn't cancel those tax credits, actually extended them until 2030.

And even after they -- the 45Z clean fuel production credit expires, we would then claim the 45Q, the carbon capture credit if it's not extended. So we have support from -- our business system plays to both sort of side of the political aisle and through the election cycle, essentially because of this picture. It's good for U.S. energy and it's good for the planet. So what's our playbook? Our playbook is start with North Dakota, where we have the 500 acres, where we have the ingredients to do low carbon ethanol to jet. We've got the low-carbon ethanol. We've got carbon capture that we own and deploy our ATJ-30 there, probably sometime in 2026 will be the idea. Then use that as a showcase to go to the rest of the ethanol industry and say, "Hey, let us build more of these for you, let us partner with you, let us license this or co-invest with you to take your ethanol and make jet fuel out of it. And North Dakota will be the showcase.”

We will also deploy things like Verity that I mentioned, that's being deployed at North Dakota, too. So in summary, what's our strategy today? It's very different than a year ago. We've kind of transformed as a company. Today, the goal is grow our EBITDA by optimizing what we have, which are the ingredients to do synthetic aviation fuel. Step 2, deploy our synthetic aviation fuel plant designs at our own sites. We have a site in South Dakota, but also our site in North Dakota and then copy paste. Can we do that 70x or could we do it some number of times around the U.S. to meet jet fuel demand? That's our overall strategy, and it's been -- we're quite a different company than we were 12 months ago. So with that, I'll pause and maybe take any questions.

Thank you, Eric, for the presentation. As mentioned, we will start the Q&A. Your first question for today is, on a previous call, you mentioned a plan of up to 70 plants. Can you tell us anything more about this?

Yes. I think I covered that. But what I would say is if you go to our IR website, there's another slide presentation called Refueling America, and it's got lots of data and charts from US EIA and USDA and so on, on both the demand for jet fuel and the supply of plant sugar and ethanol. And if you look at that, it's pretty compelling. I'd love to hear what people think, but I think I pretty much covered that. You need 70 of the plants of our size to make about 2.3 billion gallons of jet fuel and the U.S. needs about 2.3 billion gallons more jet fuel in the next 10 years. Where is that going to come from? We haven't built a new refinery in the U.S. in about a quarter century.

Given that [indiscernible] jet only had $37 million cash on hand at the end of Q2 and burns approximately $29 million each quarter, they seem to be nearing bankruptcy. Has Gevo management considered what opportunities may be available to capitalize on that bankruptcy if it occurs?

I think what I would say is we're very focused on our own strategy and our own technology. We're not deploying a new technology that's unique to Gevo, although we do have our own technologies that are unique to Gevo. It's really the plant design to take existing technology. We're trying to optimize it and make it big. So Gevo years ago made alcohol jet flew on aircraft. We're in a different phase.

The next phase is, can you make the -- you need the ingredients to do it at large scale. And those ingredients are large amounts of ethanol and carbon capture and a big 500-acre site and the engineered plant designs. So we're really focused on what we're doing. What we're doing is not new technology, it's making existing technologies better and bigger. And we're pretty laser-focused on ourselves.

How is Gevo taking advantage of currently low corn prices in conjunction with the historically bountiful harvest? And is Gevo able to or planning to purchase or store significantly more corn this season than originally planned?

U.S. farmers have done a really good job. And in some ways, they're a little bit victims of their own success because farming is all about doing more with less. And American Agriculture has done a great job of increasing yields. Increasing yields means can you use less fertilizer, can you disturb the soil less to preserve it, use the same acres, not expand your acres and then make more and better products. And U.S. farmers have done a great job of that. The USDA, I think the recent projections were that there's like 1 billion bushels of corn that's being produced this year that needs a use.

So we're really excited about providing more uses for U.S. corn and ethanol and plant sugars. And I would say, zooming into the -- I think the question, do we buy corn when we can and when it's cheap? Yes, we do. Do we store it in North Dakota? Yes, we do. And we're looking at ways to do that even better. But the farmers up there in North Dakota, they have a great relationship with the staff that are at our site. Many of them owned the facility before we acquired it, so they were former owners, but they also -- they buy the animal feed, they supply the corn. It's a really great circular economy story actually, agriculture and making animal feed and making ethanol. But yes, are we looking to buy corn where it's cheap? Of course, just like any plant like ours.

Is there a good likelihood that Gevo will be able to qualify for 100% equity ownership of ATJ-30, this would be ideal considering the ROI on ATJ-30 compared to ATJ-60?

We're working on it. One way it could work is, let's say, if you take our previous -- if you take our ATJ-60 plant, we talked about how much that would cost in kind of high-level terms. In North Dakota, it's half the size and it's half built. In other words, it's going to be 30 million gallons of jet fuel instead of 60 million, so it's half the size. And it's half built in the sense that the ethanol part of the facility is already operating and generating cash flow. And so you just need to build the ethanol to jet piece. So you can imagine it's like 1/4 of the size, okay? So a few to several hundred million dollars type ballpark is kind of what we signaled, although we haven't committed to a CapEx number. We'll see exactly how much it costs.

Now the question is, could we finance that without contributing cash equity of Gevo? Well, I’ve said earlier that we spent a couple of years and something like $200 million or more million on the engineered plant design, that front-end engineering designing, that takes something, okay? It's important. It's like designing a new electric car. You don't invent the battery in the windshield, but you engineer a new design. And this is a huge chemical facility, okay? Like I said, it's a durable business. So [one], 200 modules, okay, would go into this plant design. So that took some effort.

So now if you imagine Gevo takes the ethanol plant that's operating, the carbon capture plant that's operating and our engineered plant design and contributed that as noncash equity into the project, you could imagine that we could raise the debt, right, and be half levered and you'd have enough cash from the debt to then fund construction. Then Gevo could own 100% equity without raising cash equity. I say that because it's possible, we're working on it. We haven't laid out -- we haven't committed to what our plans are. But would we like to do something like that? Yes, we would.

What are the exact actionable tasks that need to be completed to get the DOE loan? What is the time line on each of those actionable tasks?

We'll have more updates as we're able to share them. But what I can say right now is we're working with the DOE. They've been great partners. They want -- they actually do want to see these types of projects, and they want to see this industry get kicked off because they know that the U.S. needs more jet fuel. They like that it puts money in American farmers' pockets. And they like that we're capturing carbon dioxide as a co-product because that has many uses. Right now, we're putting it down a hole because that's the best -- the highest demand marketplace. There's other uses for carbon dioxide like enhanced oil recovery, but others want to see that carbon sequester and so that's what we'll do with it.

As far as your question, we're -- like I said, we've been working with the DOE. We do need to see progress on the Summit Carbon Solutions pipeline. That's a carbon capture pipeline that was supposed to get underway being built, and it was going to provide carbon capture for the South Dakota location. That pipeline has faced delays, and so we need more clarity on that. So this is one of the strategic advantages to the acquisition in North Dakota because now in North Dakota, we own our own carbon capture. We don't need a pipeline. So that helps us in multiple ways. One is we can build alcohol-to-jet up there with carbon capture. And two, we can rail carbon dioxide from other locations up to that site in principle because it's a good sink. So that's why the acquisition in North Dakota was so strategic for us.

If the $1 billion DOE loan doesn't work, what is Gevo's alternative for financing the development of the plant?

So it's actually a $1.6 billion conditional commitment in the DOE. And there are other options for us to finance that plant. There are other options we could consider in terms of working with the DOE, but that's about all I can say for now.

What would be the time delay for plant construction if Gevo had to get financing other than the DOE?

It's too soon for me to answer that. I think we'll have more updates about our DOE loan in due course. By the way, for those of you who are new to our story, these questions are about our South Dakota location where we have a conditional commitment for $1.6 billion to build a greenfield alcohol-to-jet facility, not to be confused with the North Dakota location, which is a brownfield site where we have the existing ethanol and carbon capture, and we also have a location to deploy ATJ there too.

What is the approximate time frame for doubling EBITDA to $40 per year?

Yes, $40 million per year. We didn't put a time frame on the slides for a reason because we want to be confident, right? We just reported our first full quarter of owning these assets. We -- I think we were -- this was the first ethanol plant. It's actually 1 of only 3 ethanol plants in the world that has carbon -- operating carbon capture. It was the first ethanol plant with carbon capture to list carbon credits on a public registry, okay? These are registries that verify your carbon credits for sale. And I think we were the first ethanol company to monetize the 45Z this year.

And I think we were the first ethanol plant with carbon capture to sell voluntary carbon credits. We said we sold $1 million worth. We think we're going to get to $37 million worth by the end of this year is what we said in 2Q. How long until we get to $40 million? It's not going to take years for sure. It should be -- think of quarters because it doesn't require capital. We're talking about optimizing how we sell the carbon, optimizing how we monetize the clean fuel production tax credit. It's without capital, without changing the nut and bolt at the site. So that's how you should think about it in terms of timing. But our goal is to get it as soon as possible.

When will ATJ-30 be ready?

So ATJ-30, we haven't committed to a date certain. We're working on it. We are utilizing the front-end engineering design work that we did in ATJ-60 as well as some other plant designs. We had done some preliminary work on ATJ-30, and now that's kind of fully underway. You should think of it as happening sometime in 2026, but we haven't committed to a notice to proceed date.

How soon will we see development in Verity?

So we've already been developing Verity. We just haven't been super public about it. We did get first revenue at Verity, like we said we were going to at the end of last year. And we've deployed Verity to a couple of customers now, most especially our own facility in North Dakota is where we're now spending a lot of time deploying Verity so that, that could be the showcase. We think that if you -- so that software can serve grain elevators. There was a big announcement with Landus. If you go look it up with Verity, they think they can quadruple the premiums they pay their farmers because it helps them comply with these sustainability programs that are very complicated. And it's hard to track where grain comes from because it's all commingled.

But we serve grain elevators, ethanol plants, soy crush plants and biofuel plants. Just within ethanol, just within the clean fuel production tax credit alone, we think there's $1.5 billion to $3 billion of value that we can help our customers unlock by using Verity's track and trace. If Verity can get a small piece of that in revenue as a Software-as-a-Service fee, that could be transformative for us. So we're very excited about Verity, but we're just not ready to break it out as its own segment yet. Maybe next year, we will.

Could Verity eventually spin off or be listed separately as an SAS-focused carbon verification company?

That's a decision for our Board, but we're a company whose goal is to maximize value for our shareholders and our stakeholders. And -- if you think about it, Verity has a different risk return profile than other parts of the company. So if you're doing R&D, that's got one risk return profile. If you're doing our renewable natural gas, that's like an operating asset. The goal there is operational excellence.

And if you're doing sustainable aviation fuel, the idea there is you need hundreds of millions of dollars of capital to build a facility over years. Verity is a little different, right? It's a software tech start-up basically. So it could make sense from that perspective for it to be somehow separate from Gevo. How does that look exactly? Verity needs to grow up and get big enough before we figure that out. But yes, we absolutely will do what makes sense to maximize value for Gevo.

Are any major airlines currently using your sustainable aviation fuel? If not, why aren't they using it?

So many airlines actually have used our fuel, have signed contracts to buy our fuel in the future when we intend to produce large quantities. I think Gevo was the first, I'll call the jet company to sign a long-term offtake contract with airlines like Delta Air Lines. So many of the world's leading airlines actually have signed offtake agreements with us. Like I said, Gevo has already made in the past sustainable aviation fuel. We idled our pilot facility because now it needs to be big. It needs to be a big, durable business that's repeatable. So the phase we're in now is you need to make a lot of ethanol profitably and have carbon capture and a good site to deploy alcohol-to-jet. That's the phase we're in now. And we can grow just there. The next phase will be to produce large amounts of jet fuel. We don't just want to make jet fuel. We've already done that. The goal is to make large and make it a durable, repeatable business. So yes, lots of airlines have worked with Gevo. That occurred years ago and recently, too.

Great to see you starting to get revenues from the commercialization of carbon removal credits. Any insight into how this division will grow over the next few years?

Yes, yes. So in our 2Q earnings release, we said that we did $1 million of sales from that. Remember, we're operating that every day. Every single day that we produce ethanol, the bubbles off the fermenter are going a mile underground basically and storing that atmosphere carbon dioxide. And so these types of revenues enhance our business immediately, right? We said in our 2Q that we would try to get to kind of $3 million to $7 million of sales per year. And that if we maxed out, we could maybe get to $30 million per year at some point. So that's the goal.

In that industry, that carbon dioxide removal industry, I mentioned this is a $10 billion transactions that occurred mostly in the past 2 years. Only 2% of those CDRs have been delivered to those customers, the Microsofts and the Googles of the world. We're delivering -- we're in that 2%. We're delivering CDRs every day that we operate. So this is a B2B sales effort. Once our sales team and the Customer Sustainability Officer have gotten to know each other, we've won their trust, we view that as a repeatable global sales effort, basically, selling what we're already doing. So that's -- those are some numbers behind that.

Thank you, Eric, for all your answers today. If you do not get a chance to submit your questions, feel free to reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Renmark. This concludes our presentation for today. But before we go, I will turn it back over to you, Eric, for final remarks.

I hope it's come across that we're a little bit of a unique company because we're making drop-in products that don't require electrification of things like aircraft, but we're making from things like biomass that reduce carbon footprint. Folks that want to buy energy can just buy jet fuel and ethanol for what we think is a cost-competitive cost of production, cash cost of production and then we can deliver the carbon reduction to markets that want to pay for it, whether that's places like California and Oregon and Washington or whether it's companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon and NASDAQ and the companies that are in the CDR market. So that's the type of company we are.

We're a company that's enjoyed support from -- through the political cycle, frankly, because we support domestic energy production and domestic producers. And that's something that appeals to basically everyone. So we're currently profitable. We're trying to grow that profitability and then extend even further by deploying the technologies that we think are unique to us. Check out our website. We have several presentations that we've saved and talks like this that we've saved on there in our Investor Relations portal and send an e-mail to our IR bucket if you have more questions. Thank you.

Once again, this is Gevo, Inc. trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Thank you again to everyone in San Francisco and surrounding areas for joining us today. Stay tuned for other presentations in your area. Thank you, and see you next time.

Hello, and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's virtual Non-Deal Roadshow. My name is Noella Alexander-Young, virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in New York and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Gevo, Inc. trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO.

Presenting today is Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy; and Leke Agiri, Chief Financial Officer. With that being said, I will now hand the floor over to Leke.

Hello, everybody. My name is Leke Agiri. I'm Chief Financial Officer for Gevo. In my time here at Gevo, I've worked in a lot of finance functions. Prior to Gevo, I spent a couple of years with Bank of America structuring tax equity and firm debt. And prior to that, most of my career is in oil and gas. I've worked in core finance functions and origination of capital as with the Mozambique LNG. So a pleasure to be on this platform. Looking forward to addressing your questions as we step through the materials.

I'll pass it to you, Eric, for your introductions.

For those who don't know me, I'm Eric Frey, VP of Finance and Strategy here at Gevo. I'm in charge of our Investor Relations efforts, and I also do some special products on corporate finance with Leke. I've been in Gevo since 2022. And before that, I spent about 8 years at one of the large investment banks doing M&A and capital markets in the fuel sector and biofuels and renewable natural gas. So a pleasure to be here.

I'm going to start with a brief legal disclaimer, and then we'll do an overview of our company for those who maybe aren't already familiar with our story. Then I'll turn it over to Leke to talk about our second quarter financial results and what they mean and how they establish a new baseline for us relative to where we were last year. And then finally, we'll talk about the growth that's in front of us and what are the market trends that we think position ourselves for that growth and the ingredients that we have in place to go and pursue it.

So let me start with this quick disclaimer. Please be advised that our remarks today, including answers to any questions, contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those currently anticipated. Those statements include projections about our activities described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are incorporated by reference. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we may provide certain non-GAAP financial information on this call. The relevant definitions and GAAP reconciliations may be found in our most recent earnings release, which can be found on our website at www.gevo.com in the Investor Relations section.

So let me go to an overview of Gevo. For those who may not already know our story, we're a diversified energy business with a couple of common brands. So we focus on providing scalable, cost-effective drop-in fuels and chemicals that also reduce carbon intensity or abate carbon. On the left side of this screen, you'll see the value chain that pretty much most of our activities have something to do with. That value chain is one that starts with rural communities producing crops, cereals, wheat, rice, corn in the U.S., a lot of corn, and making a number of products from that.

Nutrients for livestock and ultimately for our bodies; sugar, which, of course, we can consume or ferment into alcohols. You can make medical-grade alcohol, you can make fuel-grade ethanol that's blended in gasoline for vehicles, for energy, for the transportation sector. And that is something that is a little bit unique at Gevo is extending alcohols through catalytic chemistry into hydrocarbon fuels. So making things like diesel and jet fuel for difficult to electrify sectors.

And why do we care about that value chain? It ties back to what's on the right side of this page, because we think that this is a way to make things that are scalable, that are cost effective and that enable us to market new attributes, things like carbon abatement. So that's what we do overall. Let me just look at each of these 4 squares here that describe what we do a little bit more specifically. So this box here that's labeled Gevo Fuels, here that includes Gevo North Dakota. That's where we have low-carbon ethanol production as well as about 165,000 metric tons per year of carbon capture and sequestration.

We also have an ATJ-30 project. That's a synthetic aviation fuel project to convert ethanol into jet fuel, which is in the design and engineering phase that we would intend to bolt on in North Dakota. And we also have an ATJ-60 project. That's a project twice that size in South Dakota. Right now, that's a greenfield project in the financing stage. This box here that's labeled Verity, that represents Gevo's wholly-owned subsidiary called Verity. Verity is a software platform for track and trace.

This industry over here is great because it's a commodity industry. That means that things can go to different parts of a complex supply chain. But if you want to enable the marketing of new attributes like carbon reduction, those end customers and brand owners need a digital audit trail. And so we knew that we needed this for ourselves and our own products, and we're also making Verity available for others. So we've deployed this software now at other industry partners, at some customers, and we're focused on deploying it at Gevo, North Dakota as well.

This box that says GevoRNG, that's where we make renewable natural gas from dairy manure. So we have 3 dairy farms that we partner with in Iowa, where we take dairy cow manure, we capture the fugitive methane emissions from that, upgrade it to pipeline quality and inject it into the local gas pipeline. So again, we're taking something that's abundant and scalable and converting it into a fossil fuel drop-in equivalent, but with a different sustainability profile because of the way it's made.

And then this last box here that says GevoChem, another one of our activities is research and development. So even as we're developing the first generation of synthetic aviation fuel plants, we're doing research to improve that process because we believe in continuous improvement. We think that's how we make things scalable and efficient. And so we have great partners like LG Chem and Axens who are helping us develop that second generation of ways to convert ethanol into drop-in fuels and products. So each of these 4 boxes entails a sort of different business activities, but they're all linked in terms of touching this value chain over here. And the reason we pursue them is because we think they deliver the things over here.

Let me go to the next slide. I'll briefly touch on this because this is just a snapshot of where we are. I already sort of talked about what we do. Of course, we have North and South Dakota that I mentioned, where we have existing production and a greenfield site in Minnesota. There's a demo facility that I didn't mention where Gevo has made ethanol, isobutanol and has used that facility to make synthetic aviation fuel.

We've made synthetic aviation fuel to spec. It's flown on aircraft. The question is, how do we use the ingredients we have to scale it up and make larger volumes out of it. That's in the future. But in the Minnesota demo facility, we've done that in the past. And then in Iowa, I mentioned we have RNG.

Let me skip ahead and talk about the market backdrop that's supporting our business activities. We talked about what we're doing today. These are the ingredients to make synthetic aviation fuel scalably and cost effectively. These are things that provide value today, things like ethanol, animal feed, renewable natural gas, carbon capture and sequestration. But why are those things important? They're important because, well, they're important for what they do today, but they're also important because they set the stage to deliver our engineered synthetic aviation fuel solutions, the ATJ-30 and ATJ-60 designs that I mentioned earlier.

One of the things I want to mention about this is this type of approach is -- enjoys support through the election cycle and it gives us broad policy support. This is an executive order that was issued back in January from the current U.S. administration, which talks about how the U.S. needs more biofuels, ethanol and aviation fuel. Well, we're in the business of making biofuels, ethanol and aviation fuel. So we have support from the current administration, which we think -- which passed the Big Beautiful Bill. That bill extended a production tax credit that's associated with the fuels that we produce.

The previous administration under the Inflation Reduction Act also extended that production tax credit. And that tax credit really goes back to something called the blenders tax credit, which goes back many years. And so our view is that the merit of what we're doing because it's cost-effective and scalable as well as can enable us to market attributes that a global marketplace demands, things like carbon reduction and make it from domestic U.S. inputs through rural communities. Because of that, we enjoy -- we believe we enjoy policy support through the political cycle, and that's shown here.

The other reason that we're excited about these ingredients is because it allows us to have the ingredients to make synthetic aviation fuel scalably and cost effectively, okay? So we have the inputs like ethanol, we have the engineered plant designs through our ATJ-30 and ATJ-60 projects. But what gets us really excited is the U.S. needs more jet fuel. So by 2035, the U.S. needs more than 2.3 billion gallons per year of jet fuel. That's compared to about 25 billion gallons per year being consumed today.

If you look at a number of different fuels, they may have a different profile. They may be getting to peak demand or flat in spite of population growth, things like gasoline because of some electrification and also because as population gets more urban, people may not drive as many miles per person. But it's not the case with flying. People are still flying. Aircraft are not being electrified and urbanization doesn't make people fly less. They might drive less, but they're not going to fly less.

Conventional fuel refineries make about 9% jet fuel in their product slate today. Whereas the alcohol-to-jet synthetic aviation fuel process that we're focused on, that allows us to target more than 90% jet fuel in the product stream. And so we think that, that's a really good solution, particularly when -- or a good complement, I should say, to the existing jet fuel industry, particularly when the inputs are something that we're good at doing in the U.S. and in other countries.

We're good at growing cereal crops. We're good at making lots of sugar and ethanol. We don't need as much sugar as we have. It'd be good to convert that into something like jet fuel where we do need it. So those are the macro drivers that we think will support further growth from the baseline of where we are. The baseline of where we are is, as I mentioned, the ethanol and carbon capture and RNG.

Leke, I think I'll switch you over to him to talk about our second quarter results and what they mean for us and how they give us a new baseline from which to pursue that growth.

Thank you, Eric. So that was a very thorough and very exciting overview of our asset base and more importantly, the fundamentals that's driving our operations and our growth strategy. So it's really exciting from that perspective. But before we talk about growth and what the future is, we just wanted to also just reiterate the exciting quarter that we just had. So second quarter, our performance, hopefully, you guys have seen and processed those information accordingly. We did generate, obviously, net income, which is very exciting. But there are a lot of added layers of information that are just as important to highlight. It is a tangible baseline step-up for Gevo.

The acquisition of Gevo North Dakota assets earlier this year has been a fundamental key driver in terms of our performance throughout this year effectively. So on the revenue side, it's not coming as a surprise. You're seeing a tremendous amount of increase quarter-over-quarter when you compare our revenues for last year versus what we did just in the first quarter alone of 2025, we've actually surpassed that threshold. So the second quarter performance was even higher just based on our operational performance.

And then when you pivot to really discussions around EBITDA, what we are effectively seeing is a run rate of about $20 million a year, even though we had a onetime clean fuel production tax credit that was actually booked on our financial statements during our second quarter. Even when you were to adjust for that onetime event, and you make an assumption around a run rate of CFPC tax credits that we are going to be receiving going forward, we should be seeing EBITDA of about $20 million a year.

When you make that comparison to effectively Gevo's performance last year, so the fiscal year of 2024, that's a tangible uplift of about $78 million. This is a very, very distinguishing point because I think that helps calibrate really the difference in the historical performance of the historical asset base of Gevo versus what we can actually deliver with the current existing group of assets that we have. So it's really exciting -- and effectively, what does EBITDA enable Gevo to do is to be able to effectively fund some of -- a lot of this cash cost of operations. Hopefully, generate cash flows from operations. And effectively, discussions around profitability or net income also will be something that we look forward to having as we go forward.

Moving on to the next slide. Our balance sheet is just as strong as our P&L performance as well. We are -- our combined cash and restricted cash position is close to $130 million. And effectively, when you couple our ability to generate EBITDA and cash from our operations going forward with our cash positions, there should -- we don't anticipate any liquidity crunch or a need for us to be seeking to raise capital for going concern reasons.

So Gevo is -- we are in a very strong position to not only address our operations, but to go after some of those growth strategies or execute growth strategies that Eric was discussing earlier on. As we look forward to the future, thinking about what do we do next, how do we grow Gevo, we -- with the current operations that we have, so we have the RNG facility and then we have our ethanol and CCS assets in Gevo North Dakota, it's really exciting for us to have the ability to actually do things organically to actually grow our operational performance as well.

What do I mean by that? Well, we do have the ability to do some debottlenecking measures at our facility in Gevo North Dakota. We have the ability for us to expand our current storage. We have the ability for us to optimize our carbon sequestration assets that we actually do have in North Dakota as well. All of those are going to contribute to expanding our margins. It's going to contribute to expanding our EBITDA. Those are really exciting projects for us because those are going to have one-on-one correlation to how we grow our EBITDA in the shorter term, right? And those do not require third-party capital. These are projects that we can fund from operations.

So we're really -- we are very excited about the prospect of us growing our EBITDA organically from that perspective. Another organic EBITDA growth that's within our compliance is the ability for us to effectively sell more CDRs. We've demonstrated our ability to sell CDRs in the second quarter. But if I may just reiterate, we have a pipeline to effectively selling more CDRs by the end of this year. We're projecting to sell CDRs between $3 billion and $5 billion. And we expect that number to grow over the years. The market for CDRs is tangibly large.

Gevo, I think with the assets that we have, we could generate credibility with our buyers to be able to effectively take a very strong position in monetizing those CDRs for our facility. And of course, the long-term growth strategy for us is synthetic aviation fuel. As Eric had mentioned earlier, we've got a number of projects in the portfolio, but the most mature projects that we have in our portfolio is, what we call, ATJ-60, the project in Lake Preston and ATJ-30 at our Gevo North Dakota facility. Those are really exciting projects for a number of unique characteristics that both projects do have.

Speaking about ATJ-30 first. This is a bolt-on hydrocarbon facility that's going to be appended to our existing ethanol facility at our North Dakota facility. This is a very low-cost, low execution risk facility. And what do I mean by that? The fact that we've got existing feedstock supply for that alcohol-to-jet facility, it's a smaller sized facility. We've got sequestration on site. From a completion risk perspective, this project, folks would recognize has a lot of things in place to actually enable the project and enables the ability to complete the project. So there isn't effectively the concept of project and project risk.

A lot of financiers are excited about the project configuration of ATJ-30 and when you couple with the fact that North Dakota is strategically located very close to where the product deliveries are going to be. So the product, yes, so take aviation fuel, obviously can be sold into U.S. markets, but then we've got Canada also within the project proximity. So ATJ-30, it's just really exciting. I think there is that natural unique attractiveness that the project presents to really all the project stakeholders, and we're really excited about the ability for us to move very fast to complete the engineering, hopefully be in a position where we could actually take FID over the next 12 months.

Now let's talk about ATJ-60. ATJ-60 is what we've been working on for with the Department of Energy. We did receive the conditional commitment for $1.63 billion last year, October. This project is twice the size of ATJ-30. It's an exciting project as the engineering has effectively been completed. We are at a place with the LPO where we're working through finalizing the loan with the Department of Energy. So the project is a late-stage development project. It's got all the necessary characteristics to deliver SAF within a time line, hopefully, that will be around the same time that ATJ-30 is going to be online.

What's unique about all of our ATJ projects is the technology that we are actually deploying. And that technology and effectively our know-how as well is something that does not necessarily has to be something that Gevo just utilizes for just our assets. We believe that based on the number of ethanol facilities in this country, we are working to identify sites that it makes sense for us to effectively license our technology or provide expertise to those ethanol facilities to be able to also effectively have a SAF facility appended to their facilities as well.

This is very exciting because for the goals of actually increasing the supply of SAF to be achieved over the next 5 to 10 years, there has to be tremendous amount of developers in this space. And Gevo, I think we're one of the trailblazers in this space that can actually help enable the ability for ethanol producers to be able to produce SAF.

With that, I think I will turn it back to Eric, if you want to talk about next steps.

Yes. Thanks, Leke. So just to conclude in terms of our -- we talked about who we are, we talked about our second quarter results and how are they transformative for our baseline -- to increase the baseline of where we are now versus where we are a year ago. What hasn't changed is how we're setting ourselves up for exponential growth in our view, by serving synthetic aviation fuel sector through our SAF platform. And as Leke just went through, we have 2 projects that are our sort of flagship projects that are intended to demonstrate the business system.

But just as importantly, we have a portfolio of more than 300 patent assets around different alcohols, alcohol-to-jet and related alcohol-to-hydrocarbon technologies. We have Verity, and we have the know-how of the engineered design that gets you from ethanol to jet in a couple of different ways, one at the 30 million gallon per year size scale and one at the 60 million gallon per year size scale.

And our view is that those are assets that we can deliver to a certain fraction of the 180 ethanol plants in the U.S. and a certain fraction of greenfield and brownfield locations globally as the synthetic aviation fuel industry scales because our view is that the business system that we talked about at the beginning, that value chain that we talked about is the cornerstone for a scalable, cost-effective buildup of synthetic aviation fuel to complement fossil jet fuel and serve these growing global markets that also want to buy the carbon abatement attributes as well. So that's what gets us really excited. That's what's changed as of the second quarter. And with that, maybe, Noella, we should go to questions if we have some questions.

Thank you, both, for the presentation. We will now begin the Q&A. Your first question is, why not an ATJ-60 at Gevo North site? Please explain in more detail.

ATJ-60 is effectively the nomenclature that we're making 60 million gallons of SAF effectively. The existed Gevo North Dakota facility, the configuration that we have, we have an ethanol facility that's producing 67 million gallons of ethanol. The feedstock that you need effectively to make 60 million gallons of SAF is closer to 100 million gallons of ethanol. So for that reason, it makes sense if we're looking for the fastest SAF molecule to the market. It makes sense to configure the first alcohol-to-jet facility at our North Dakota facility to match the size of the ethanol facility that currently exists.

So effectively, from the feedstock ratio, it makes sense for us to design a smaller alcohol-to-jet facility for Gevo North Dakota facilities. However, there is a strong amount of production of corn in North Dakota or the vicinity around the facility, we can expand our ethanol production to be larger than what it is today, and that's part of the debottlenecking projects that we have in front of us. That presents an opportunity for us to develop a concept of building more alcohol-to-jet facilities after the first ATJ-30 facility is installed at that facility. So we are not locking our future to just one facility at Gevo North Dakota. Our goal is to be able to have multiple facilities at that site over time.

Do you see profitability continuing into Q3 and going forward into 2026? If so, how?

We've not given any sort of future guidance yet. But what I can reiterate is we are actively pursuing every opportunity for us to deliver continued success of the prior results that we delivered in Q2. And what do I mean by that? I think the slides that we talked about our Q2 performance from an EBITDA perspective even when you unwind the onetime clean fuel production tax credits that we booked in Q2, and we actually use the projected tax credits that we would actually be monetizing over the course of the quarters through 2029, effectively, you're going to start seeing us generating EBITDA going forward around that $20 million a year.

All the strategic projects that we're working on or our ability to actually increase our revenues with the sale of CDRs as an example, our drive internally to figure out how we expand EBITDA, we talked about the debottlenecking, we are also looking at abilities for us to effectively fiscal discipline. So how do we reduce our operating expenses? When all of those things come together, I expect Gevo's financial performance should only continue to be really in a good spot going forward. But we don't have any guidance in terms of -- exactly in terms of what those numbers are going to look like. And those are things that we hope that Q3 will be able to provide to the market and continue just to build on the success that we had from Q2.

Is aviation biofuel being delivered now? And if not, why? And when is it expected? Or has Gevo's goal changed?

I'll start, and Eric, if you could chime in as well, please. I think first, I'll say, Gevo's goal has not changed. Gevo's -- our philosophy has remained the same. We continue to work on executing our goals. And part of that -- part of all the efforts that we've been working on, I think, through this year and the news from last year is we're now starting to see the impact of it in our financial statements. The acquisition of Gevo North Dakota is strategic for us to achieve our goals. The building of the RNG facility is strategic to achieve our goals. Those are all going to accumulate to the timing of us actually turning on our alcohol-to-jet facility.

And right now, we are tracking with a construction time line of about 3 years after the issuance of financial investment decision that would take us to 2029-ish, maybe 2028 time frame of us actually being able to have an alcohol-to-jet facility to be online. That is very exciting. I think for a large-scale ATJ or SAF facility to be coming online during that time, we think is success. But we're evaluating every possible way for us to be able to accelerate that time line. Gevo, as also Eric mentioned, we have produced SAF historically on a very small scale. So we've produced SAF and we've sold SAF. But the goal is to be able to do this on a large scale. And that is something that we're very excited to be solving at this time.

Yes. I would just emphasize, like I said, so Gevo has produced SAF. We were the first company to produce alcohol-to-jet synthetic aviation fuel that's [indiscernible] aircraft. The goal is to scale it up. The first step for scaling it up is you need the ingredients, which are low-carbon ethanol, carbon capture and maybe RNG as well as a way to track it. And so those are the ingredients we have today and that we're deploying today. You also need a good mousetrap, so to speak.

So the technologies, the catalytic chemistry to convert ethanol to ethylene and then ethylene into these other fuels and chemicals, those exist. Those have been done at industrial scale. But what's new to Gevo is to engineer all those pieces in one facility that gets you an efficient low-carbon result that has good operability and that uses the best-in-class technologies. And that is something that we have spent years designing. And our goal is that ATJ-30 and ATJ-60, those are our showcase locations where we'll deploy all of our technologies and all of our know-how.

We want to use that as a platform to then make available those engineered designs, that mousetrap that we've made, the better mousetrap to the U.S. and globally. So like I said, there's 180 ethanol plants. Some of those, not all of them, but a number of them are going to want to convert their ethanol or some of their ethanol to jet fuel. We have 2 designs now, a big one and a small one, essentially. And we have a really big one actually, ATJ-150. So the goal for us is to use that. That's how the industry can get big. That's how the ethanol industry got big with standardized designs that were copied and pasted at many locations. And that's what we're setting ourselves up to do. In the meantime, we're making ethanol, doing carbon capture and making RNG.

And just one more thing to add is, as we are looking to accelerate the commercialization of SAF, one of the key ingredients for us or what's very important for us is to be cost effective. I just want to make sure that we're bringing that back to the top of the conversation. A lot of the pathways to get to SAF, they are not going to be as competitive when it comes to cost as our pathway. So as we configure our delivery, that is always top of mind for us.

Any change to full year 2025 revenue/EBITDA outlook following Q2 results? If no formal guidance, what operational KPIs should retail investors watch each quarter?

Yes. And I touched on it on the -- with my last response, I think guidance on operational financial metrics, that's booming. And so stay tuned for that. But I think the illustration that we showed in terms of how you account for onetime tax credit implication and then when you project out what we've reflected in terms of the tax credit monetization that we'll be receiving on a quarterly basis, that can give you an indication as to how we're tracking on an annualized basis for EBITDA, which is $20 million.

What's relevant with that discussion as well is when you benchmark that performance versus what we did in 2024, it's a tremendous amount of step change. So from a KPI perspective, we would be effectively sharing more information on EBITDA, but I think the information we just discussed moments ago probably suffices for the discussions until we come out with formal guidance.

How does policy affect Gevo? And what is the risk to changing policy?

Our project has been supported across -- now across administrations. The current administration, their priorities, our projects, our initiatives aligns with the goals. We provide support to agriculture sector. We are enabling energy security. We are creating jobs. The product jurisdiction has very strong fundamentals in enabling the projects that we're looking to do. So from that perspective, we don't see a lot of risk, a lot of regulatory risk or legislative risk for our projects. So we're very excited about where we said here at Gevo. And what I would say as well is, as we look to the future, irrespective of how we think administrations can change, we do think this project characteristics that we're describing for all of our projects is going to stand with all administration.

What are the demand drivers that make what Gevo does a good business to be in? How large are these markets? And what does Gevo offer that others don't?

We touched on it. So the U.S. ethanol market is obviously a huge market. Natural gas and RNG is a huge market. But let's talk about the ones that maybe people are less familiar with. If you think about jet fuel, the U.S. consumes 25 billion gallons a year of jet fuel, and we need something like 2.3 billion gallons per year more jet fuel by 2035. And that's just the U.S. The same is basically true of most of the globe. And so at $3 per gallon or something like that of jet fuel, it depends on the price of oil, but $3 per gallon, some of that of jet fuel, you can see that there's several billion dollars of additional market demand just in the growth.

Now come over to carbon dioxide removals, different market, but can be tied to the same product. In fact, it can be tied to our existing products. It doesn't even have to be synthetic aviation fuel just yet. Because we do carbon capture, we also have the ability to monetize something called carbon dioxide removals or CDRs we talked about in our earnings release. On a cumulative basis, that's now a $10 billion market. So we think that we recently sold about $1 million worth of CDRs. That's a virtual marketplace where there's no transportation cost.

It's really about a promise that you're selling it to a customer like the large tech companies and large financial companies that want to reduce their carbon footprint, but don't have a lot of options to do it, except virtually. You can do that with low transportation cost, but it's a promise and it has to be auditable. And because we have existing operations, our promise is a very high-quality one. Anyone can come to the site and see carbon dioxide being captured.

Carbon dioxide has a lot of uses. It has industrial uses, as refrigerants and dry ice, enhanced oil recovery. You can also -- once you've captured it, you can also sequester it. And that's another global marketplace that we can serve. So that's another marketplace that we're very excited about. And synthetic aviation fuel, if you look at most demand forecasts for that, the cornerstone of meeting synthetic aviation fuel demand because many airlines wish to see more synthetic aviation fuel and there's blending requirements and things like that globally, the cornerstone of that, in our view, has to be alcohol-to-jet because other ways of making synthetic aviation fuel are feedstock, they're good, they work, but they're feedstock limited. Our way of doing it is the next leg where you make it from sugar, and we have a lot of sugar.

Yes. And well, thanks, Eric. And if I may add to that, I think what's unique about Gevo, there are a lot of SAF developers or just developers out there. Gevo is well capitalized to actually go after our goals. With the asset base that we have -- we talked about, what we can do was within our reach for us to actually grow organically. I think that also uniquely puts us as a different type of developer and the developer that has the expertise, the skill set and the dry powder to be able to achieve the growth that we were after. So that will be one of those key points that I think sets Gevo apart in addition to just our assets or our SAF operations.

Thank you, Leke and Eric, for all of your responses today. That concludes our presentation for today. But before we go, I will turn back the floor to Eric for final remarks.

We'll provide a recording of this on our website. If you go ahead and check out, if you haven't already, our Investor Relations portal on our -- at www.gevo.com. If you navigate to past events and presentations, you'll see a number of presentations as well as past events like this one and our earnings call from Q2 that we talked about for more information about our 2Q results that Leke helped summarize. So we'll have more firesides like these and more content that we'll be getting out since a lot is changing and a lot has changed, but we hope this has been helpful to those who tuned in.

And once again, this was Gevo, Inc. trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Thank you to everyone in New York and surrounding areas for joining us today. Please stay tuned for other presentations in your area.

Hello, everyone. My name is Peter Gastreich, and I'm Senior Energy Transition and Sustainable Investing sector analyst at Water Tower Research. For our fireside chat today, I'm very pleased to welcome management from Gevo, Inc., NASDAQ ticker GEVO following the very strong Q2 results and major milestones they announced. We will dig into the market dynamics for U.S. jet fuel and Gevo's competitive position, and we'll cover carbon strategy in a subsequent fireside chat.

But before we give our guests from Gevo an opportunity to introduce themselves, I'll just run through a few housekeeping notes here. As a reminder, this is an open access forum for all investors and analysts. We'll follow our [indiscernible] conversations with a Q&A session, and you can post your questions to the online platform. This conversation is being recorded as well. You'll be able to access this event using the same link for the original registration should you choose to pass it along to someone.

I'd also encourage you to look at our website for disclosures and other research on Gevo as well as other companies in the energy transition and sustainable investing sector. You can find that at www.watertowerresearch.com. Lastly, I'd like to point out that the company's safe harbor statements can be found on its website.

Now with that out of the way, I'm very delighted to introduce Dr. Paul Bloom and Dr. Eric Frey. Dr. Bloom is Gevo's Chief Business Officer; and Dr. Frey is Gevo's VP of Finance and Strategy. Gentlemen, welcome to our WTR fireside chat today.

Thanks, Peter. Great to be here.

Good to be here.

So Paul and Eric, could you please just give us a professional background, including your history and roles at Gevo?

Sure. I can get a started, Peter. So I've been with Gevo for a little over 4 years. I actually started at the company as the Chief Innovation and Carbon Officer, a little bit of an odd title, but carbon and carbon abatement, as you know, as we're focused on producing really cost-effective fuels, chemicals and carbon abatement is front and center. So that's really where I spent a lot of time over the past few years until taking on the overall business role for Gevo just this past year.

So it's great to be in this time when we're starting to generate really good results. But this is something that I've been doing for a long time. I spent over 20 years in the industry, focused on renewable chemicals, renewable fuels and sustainable materials really with Archer Daniels Midland Company in a variety of both R&D and then commercial roles in -- with ADM.

Eric?

Yes. I'm a VP of Finance and Strategy here at Gevo. I've been with the company since the middle of 2022, so a few years now. And before that, I was at one of the big banks for several years doing mergers and acquisitions and capital markets for biofuel companies, renewable natural gas companies similar to Gevo as well as fossil fuel, energy, refining, midstream, oilfield services type companies. So I've been in and around energy and fuel space for a while in a finance role. And here at Gevo, I head up Investor Relations and do corporate finance.

Okay. Thanks a lot. So before we dig our heels into our discussion on jet fuel markets, can we maybe just start with sort of a high-level, maybe bird's eye view of Gevo's operations and strategy and why investors need to be paying attention?

Yes. So I can give a quick synopsis for those of you who may not already be familiar with Gevo. We focus on making cost-effective, scalable and drop-in sustainable fuels and chemicals. So that includes today, current operations, our low-carbon ethanol plus feed and carbon dioxide co-products. We make renewable natural gas from dairy cow manure. And both in our past and in our future, we have made and intend to make synthetic aviation fuel or SAF.

So our overall strategy is to have profitable carbon abating operations today that leverage what rural communities are capable of producing for markets where their product -- these products are increasingly in demand while also develop using those as the ingredients for a SAF platform that we believe will be scalable in the U.S. and globally. And the reason we care about that is because by 2030, the U.S. will need more than 2 billion gallons per year, more jet fuel than today.

Just to give you a sense, there's about 20 billion gallons per year of jet fuel that's consumed today. That right there is an $8 billion market opportunity. And the world also needs billions of gallons more SAF and millions of tons more carbon dioxide abatement. There's about 180 operating ethanol plants in the U.S. alone where we think we can deploy our technologies and the business system to extend corn, extend plant sugars and ethanol into these global markets where that's in demand.

And so we see kind of a refueling of the U.S. ethanol industry in the future, and we're trying to position ourselves to be a leader in that -- in the future as we also have sustaining operations in those product areas that I just mentioned today. We actually released a new presentation on our IR website. You should go check it out called Refueling America, but it's got a background, some stats on future U.S. jet fuel demand and the feedstock to do alcohol to jet, which is our focus area for making SAF. So that's what we do kind of in a nutshell.

Okay. So Paul, when you reflect on Gevo, what gets you most excited about the company?

Yes. So obviously, front and center, we had a great quarter, right, with great results and a number of firsts. So I think this is one of the things as we have these firsts, it's all about delivering results. And so maybe just the top 3 here, we had our first clean fuel production tax credit sales, which I think were some of the first in the industry really.

We had our team set to go, ready to execute on that, and we delivered, right? And so that's a big deal because that's going to start generating over $10 million every quarter going forward, we anticipate. So -- and more to come, right? So that's a great start for us in that space. The other first was we got our carbon credit business really started with our first sales of over $1 million into the carbon dioxide removal credit space.

This is a new exciting market for us as we develop our new co-product, carbon dioxide, and we have a lot of options of what we can do in the future, but we really are focused on this -- building this business today. And we also got featured in NASDAQ's sustainability report for our ability to deliver these carbon dioxide removal credits as [indiscernible] to them to help them really make good progress on their environmental goals.

And so that's great to be recognized for that as a quality producer who can deliver in the market today. Very excited, and we expect that business is going to grow to at least $3 million to $5 million by the end of the year. And then where it goes after that, it could be somewhere upwards of $30 million while only using about 2/3 of our capacity for that type of business. So a lot of promise, a lot of work to do.

And the last first that we had, it was the first time where Verity was actually featured by a customer as helping them deliver results both to their customers and financially for their benefit. We were featured by Landus, one of the leading co-ops in the United States for our ability to use Verity to help them and their farmers access new markets that are really reliant on high-quality data, and that's what Verity can deliver, right?

So we really leverage that carbon accounting business for their needs. And it's a great call out that the Verity platform is actually working for our customers. Maybe more than that, just to reflect on the first quarter or the last quarter that we were really delivering solid results. It's about how do we get more returns and cash out of our existing assets while we're going to continue to build our ATJ30 platform.

Eric talked about that in the brief overview at the beginning. This is really important, right, because we need to basically be able to prove that we have the right to win in this business. We hit it strong, right, coming out of the blocks with really good results, solid results. We need to continue that. And I'm very confident that that's going to continue to give us this right to win that's going to be a confidence builder for our customers and for the market as we think about Gevo going forward.

We couldn't do any of this without an amazing team. And while we think about how transformational the acquisition of Red Trail Energy was for Gevo, and now we've been able to unlock extra value by plugging in all of our expertise, that's great. But we also got some of the best people in the industry along with that acquisition. So really proud to call all of the folks that came to be Gevo colleagues now with the Red Trail asset acquisition. Great set of colleagues, just a super team that we've got going forward.

Yes. I think, Paul, one word says it all right there, and that's transformational truly with Gevo. And you did mention also the Q2 results and something that was very well received just last week. And so maybe on that note, Eric, could you please maybe give us a bit of a quick rehash of those recent results?

Yes. Just to put -- as Paul said and as you said, Peter, the second quarter was transformational for Gevo as a result of a step change in our revenue and our EBITDA because of our acquisition and the things that we're adding to that acquisition. So just to put some numbers behind that very quickly, you'll see this spelled out in quite a lot of detail in our 2Q earnings release on our website, which I encourage everybody to look at. But high level, we posted positive net income.

We had adjusted EBITDA across the company, across all operations of $17 million. And we expect going forward that run rate, we would generate about [indiscernible] and book about $10 million of clean fuel production credit. That's what we earn by being a producer quarterly versus the '22 that we booked last quarter. That was a little bit of a catch-up because we didn't book some of that in the first quarter. And so run rate, that $17 million becomes about $5 million a quarter for us just if we just repeat the same performance in terms of production and operations last quarter.

So in other words, $20 million annually of EBITDA is kind of where we are. And that's before you tack on additional growth through some of the things that Paul mentioned and the additional longer term, more capital-intensive growth through extending ethanol to jet fuel, which requires more infrastructure. But we're well positioned to do both those things. So that's kind of where we are. I think that's an important base from which to then say, okay, where do we go from here to 2030.

I noticed on your most recent slide presentation on your IR website. You had a slide in there that talks about why America needs more jet fuel. Could you talk about that? Why can't we just drill more oil and get the jet fuel from existing refineries?

Eric, do you want to take that one to start with? You've been doing most of the research on this.

I'll start off. So of course, you can drill more oil. But the U.S. hasn't built a new large-scale refinery in about a quarter century. And we haven't produced more fossil fuels in about a quarter century for that reason. The U.S. fossil fuel industry is very good at what they do in terms of making safe energy that goes in anybody's car. But it's not their task to make sure that the U.S. produces its own supply of domestic jet fuel. They can import or export jet fuel and other products.

Also, there's only so much jet fuel in a barrel of fossil crude oil, but the product slate of a typical refinery in the U.S. today is about 9%. So 9% of all the fuels that are made are jet fuel. With alcohol to jet, you can target 90% of your product slate being jet fuel. There's other modes you could run it in, but you can get over 90% jet fuel and then the remainder is naphtha and renewable diesel.

In addition, there's an abundant feedstock supply in the U.S. where we're really good at making corn. We're really good at making plant sugar, and we're really good at making ethanol. There are other places in the world that make similar products, but the U.S. is one of the biggest producers and exporters of those things. That's the ingredient to then convert ethanol to jet and make synthetic aviation fuel.

And you can do that in a distributed way across the U.S. Midwest. so that it's not just concentrated on the Gulf Coast. The Gulf Coast is a great place for fossil fuel refineries, but one hurricane, one cold weather event and all of a sudden, the U.S. energy production plummets as a result of that. The U.S. corn and ethanol industry is spread out. It's spread out where stuff has grown and where animals are raised for the animal feed that you produce to in terms of the co-products. And so it's more resilient to those types of extreme events.

It takes advantage of the supply of feedstock that the U.S. is really good and efficient at making in a scalable way. And it gives you access. It gives that corn and that ethanol a new global market to make a drop in jet fuel for an industry that is in increasing demand. And that demand for jet fuel is not going to be electrified away because you can't -- it's difficult to electrify aircraft. And it also doesn't go away as populations get more urbanized.

So as populations get more organized, you may drive less, but people don't fly less. They want to fly more as GDP per capita goes up. And so it makes sense from all those perspectives. You got to -- you can't just drill more oil, you have to have more production capacity and alcohol to jet is a great way to increase that capacity in places like the U.S.

Yes. And maybe I'll just pile on there a little bit, Eric, right? So just -- Eric talked a lot about the macro environment there, right, and what's happening overall. I think where Gevo really has a unique ability to help is we talk a lot about SAF today, and we can target SAF. So we can -- our alcohol the Jet 30 plant, the 30 million gallon plant that we're working on in North Dakota today will make over 90% of aviation fuel.

But if we wanted to, we could make that into renewable diesel or we could make it into gasoline. And Gevo has the technology, right, to fill the gaps. And I think this is really important for us as we think about how does Gevo fulfill those energy needs while always putting protein and oil and now carbon dioxide into the market and always satisfying those co-products.

But we really have the ability to fill those gaps and use -- because we've got a drop in replacement strategy, I think it dovetails nicely to continue to say, hey, we don't know what the needs are going to be in the future, but we've got the solutions.

And a very important question here as well is what does this mean for farmers and rural America?

Yes, that's a great question, Peter. And if you saw the recent USDA report that just came out last week, this is going to be probably the best year ever for corn farmers, right, delivering year-on-year yield improvements, which is not new, right? This is something that's been going on since the 1920s. So we're -- we actually anticipate that this is going to be the case even going forward. But farmers' ability to supply the market is outpacing the demand.

So just for this year, for example, farmers will probably deliver enough corn where we need new uses for about 1 billion bushels of corn. Well, that 1 billion bushels of corn could turn into about 1.7 billion gallons of aviation fuel, right? So it's a big number. And this is where you have to remember, you also get all the protein, all the corn oil, right?

You get all these co-products. So we're not just providing fuel, but we're feeding the world. And when you think about that, this is why we really like this growth story between corn, U.S. corn specifically and SAF because if you continue to extrapolate out these year-on-year yield improvements on existing acres, by 2040, we anticipate that we could be producing -- we could make another 5 billion gallons of SAF on an annual basis just from the yield improvements on corn on existing acres, right?

This is all about farmers doing more with less, right? They're doing this more sustainably. They're basically using regenerative agriculture techniques. And while at the same time, they're increasing their yields, they're enriching the carbon in the soil, which makes it healthier, which in turn gives them higher yields, right? It's a continuous improvement cycle that we really like.

So I think it's not just about SAF, it's about how do we leverage this supply and demand for energy and for our agricultural products to continue to drive growth in rural America, create new jobs. and really provide the energy solutions that we need, as Eric articulated, right, as we see these gaps developing where we need more aviation fuel.

Well, the SAF and basically the agriculture markets and corn, we can supply that, right? And we can actually start supplying it to the extent that, look, the U.S. should be in a great position to supply the rest of the world with SAF and protein, right? So this is a good growth story to put the U.S. in a leadership position a long time to come.

Okay. And Paul, I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier about co-products. So you mentioned that carbon dioxide is a co-product in the process. Can you expand a little bit on that idea?

Yes. Let me start a little bit with just co-products in general because these are really important for Gevo just overall, right? Co-products are -- we always put -- think about this as like it's not one thing. It's always food, feed, fuels and industrials. We're always making all of these products all at the same time. We can't help it.

So the important thing is we always put feed and food first, right? So it's -- when you think about what Gevo is producing in any of our operations, we make about an equal amount of fuel, protein and carbon dioxide any time that we're operating. And that makes sure that all of the protein that we're making ends up in the animal feed market, which ultimately ends up as food on our plates at some point in the overall cycle.

But because we make those equal amounts, right, we know where the fuel is headed. We just talked about that for SAF. We know where protein ends up on our -- in our food and on our plates. What about carbon dioxide, right? We don't think about that one a lot. And the carbon dioxide that we're making is actually produced in our fermentation process.

And if you've ever done any home brewing, you may -- like when you're actually doing the brewing process after you add yeast, you see the little bubbles kind of coming out and then it really starts roaring when the alcohol is being produced. That's the same place where we get our carbon dioxide. We just have the capability to capture that at our plant today and concentrate that.

And then we can basically store that. We can capture, store it and then inject it in deep wells with the right geological formation, and that's where we create our carbon dioxide removal credits from today. So that's really what we're focused on today. But carbon dioxide is a commodity product that people use. We use it in the food and beverage industry for things like carbonating our beverages. We use it in the food and beverage industry for refrigerants.

It's dry ice. That's where it comes from. It comes from CO2. And then we also use it to make things and household items like fire extinguishers. It's actually the extinguishing agent in some fire extinguishers. But it's also used in the chemical and petroleum industry, either as a feedstock for things like enhanced oil recovery. So here's another example, right, that today, while we're storing that carbon dioxide and creating carbon dioxide removal credits in the future, as we expand our footprint in North Dakota, we have opportunities to not only store carbon dioxide, but we have opportunities to sell carbon dioxide as a co-product that has all these great uses today. So we're excited about that just as we build our markets.

Okay. Thanks, Paul. We're going to get over to the audience Q&A in just a moment. Maybe I'll just get one more question in here about Verity. So you have your Verity subsidiary. Can you talk a bit about how Verity fits into everything we've been talking about here?

Absolutely. So we've been working on Verity now for a few years. And Verity, just to refresh everybody's memory, is really the digital carbon accounting and traceability platform that we originally designed for Gevo's needs. When you think about SAF, we need to trace all of the carbon attributes from the field to the seat on the aircraft. That's really how we think about it. And we could do this with a bunch of spreadsheets, but that would be complicated and lead to a lot of mistakes.

So we built a digital platform that basically runs on distributed ledger technology, which is a pair of the blockchain. And we wanted to make sure that we could track from all the benefits in the bushels. So think about what farmers are doing to reduce their inputs, use less fertilizer, store more carbon in the soil while they're enhancing the health of their soil. So we can total up all of those and put those in a bushel and then we can make bushels talk to gallons, right?

And at the production plant level, we can -- we just talked about carbon capture. So we can total up the carbon capture, any renewable energy that we're using in the production process, all the efficiency gains that we have from that process. So Verity really wraps all of that together, and that's what gives our customers the confidence that we can provide verifiable results that are -- have an easy audit trail and make sure we never double count anything. That's the whole thing.

When you think about it, for carbon abatement customers, they need to know what they're getting what they're paying for. At the end of the day, SAF, we always talk about SAF. It's aviation fuel. It looks just like a gallon of jet A from petroleum. The only difference is how did we get there? Where did they come from? So since that is really the same, we need to have this trail of proof that Verity can help provide.

So after we got this set up for ourselves, we said, this is something that not only we need, but we've figured everything has a carbon footprint, everything needs this traceability, and that's where we opened it up for other customers, signed up a number of ethanol clients and now moving into helping soybean processors and farmers and co-ops like Landis. So we're really excited about the growth potential that we think that, that has.

Okay. With that, we've got time for a couple of questions here. So let's get into the audience Q&A. Just a reminder that analysts, investors, you can post your questions online, and you should find a Q&A button at the bottom of the screen. As I mentioned, we have time for just a couple here. But for any that we don't get to, we will compile those and make sure those get over to the team at Gevo.

So the first question here is following on from the conversation earlier, given the backdrop you outlined for U.S. jet fuel and SAF, what makes Gevo a competitive supplier of jet fuel into this market? What are the plans for scaling up?

Yes. So I think the first thing there is we talked a lot about the efficiency in the system, right? The first thing that you have to think about to be a competitive supplier is can you be cost competitive? And we've got a lot of materials, and you can find it on our website. But from a cash cost perspective, so exclude the capital, capital is expensive today. When you think about the cash cost of production, we think -- and we can be very competitive with petroleum jet today, right?

So this is a great story. If we didn't have that, this probably wouldn't be as much of a winner. And this is really where we like now think about the efficiency gains that we just talked about on corn, the higher yields, the extra protein that you get, the ability to sell the other co-products like carbon dioxide or store those and create carbon dioxide removal credits. It's the whole picture that we've got going forward that makes this a really compelling story for us.

But first and foremost, we have to be cost competitive, right? And that's where that fundamental economics. And what's helping us to be cost effective here is really we've got a modularization design package for our ATJ30. So this is -- we're standardizing our alcohol-to-jet process that we'll be putting in North Dakota. This really helps us because now we can get to a bite-sized design package that we think we can deploy not only in the U.S. but globally and get that basically the economy of scale from doing it at this 30 million gallon level.

We think that's pretty good, right? We think we can get all that and then the integration and design that Gevo brings to the table really can make some efficiency gains, again, to hit these cost competitive numbers.

And just to put a couple of numbers behind that, just high level, I'm just going to pick the ATJ 60 design. We put numbers like this out there before. But high level, if you need less than 40 million bushels of corn in your process to make ethanol and then to convert ethanol to 65 million gallons of hydrocarbons, most of which more than 90% of which would be jet fuel. If you look at that process, if corn is costing you, let's just use a round number, $4 a bushel, you do that math, that means that it costs -- the feedstock cost, which is your biggest cost in the operation was about $2.50 per gallon of jet fuel.

That's pretty good. That's competitive with the price of fossil jet fuel. It's even better sometimes depending on the price of oil with fossil jet fuel. Now you got to add the operating cost and you got to add the capital cost and the return on that capital because this is a new industry. But if -- once the plant is operating, fundamentally, it is a cheap and efficient process. And if you can scale this industry up, you can bring the capital cost down dramatically.

It's hard to change the cost of the fundamental feedstock, but you can bring down capital costs as you go up the learning curve and scale up the industry. Our view is that this is a cost-effective, scalable complement to the existing jet fuel complex.

And you have to remember, too, I mean, Eric makes a great point. This is where we're getting started, right? So first plant is being built, the next one gets better. The next one gets better than that. And on top of it, Gevo is continuing to innovate. So we're bringing new technology to the forefront here, things like ETO, so our ethanol-to-olefins technology, which we're now working on with LG Chem on the chemicals front, and we're working with Axens on the fuel side.

So as you know, we're using Axens' technology, their Jetanol process today, but we're developing the second-generation process for tomorrow. I wish we were ready to go. It's not. We still have a little time to go, but it offers big improvements and lowers the capital cost, lowers the operating cost. So even though cash costs can be competitive today with the current technology, this is where we think it can be better in the future.

Right now, we expect up to 30% reductions in capital and up to 30% reductions in our operating costs based on this new ETO technology. Obviously, we want to get this done as fast as possible, but this is where we think the future is pretty bright. And again, we've got a starting point today and even lower costs in the future.

So we focused mostly here on the strategy and opportunities in the U.S. So this question asked, what are Gevo's plans for SAF projects in overseas markets?

Great question. I think this comes back to this modularization design that I mentioned before. So since we're standardizing on this, I'll call it the Jet 30, the 30 million gallon, it's equivalent to about 90,000 tons of SAF. It turns out that this is a great size that we can basically build out through kind of a copy, edit, paste deployment style. So think about us building a franchise of alcohol to jet plants. U.S., Europe, Asia, South America, all fair game, right? So the nice thing about using a standard design is and modularization is they're shippable globally.

You can basically set it up like a [indiscernible] and you're in business, right? Now there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the simple thought process behind the copy, edit, paste style that we're thinking about for growth. There are also other things that we have to do depending on where we're operating from feedstocks, but this is what we like about the alcohol to jet.

There's ethanol available basically on a global basis. right? So then it's all about the business system. We have the tools like Verity. We have the capabilities and the expertise to put the business system together that we can really pull all of this in and make a complete system for us, for our customers to deliver these energy needs. Eric mentioned a lot of the growth behind what aviation fuel is needed here in the U.S. But obviously, this is a global business, right?

We have global airlines, global customers who want to have fuel delivered globally. So we think that this build-out and the path we're on to deliver the packaged ATJ30 plants is really one that's going to deliver on a global basis.

Okay. We'll have to wrap it up there in terms of the Q&A. But Paul and Eric, I really enjoyed this discussion today. But before we close, is there anything we might have missed that you can think of or would you like to provide any concluding remarks for investors here?

Sure, Peter. Look, I mean, obviously, this is just -- we had a great quarter to start and more to come. But I mean, it's really about delivering continuous results going forward. We're going to continue to focus on our existing businesses and again, delivering more returns for our shareholders out of those existing businesses that we have, growing those, finding the right projects. And while we're focused on delivering our growth in the SAF projects, the ATJ 30 platform that we've got.

So we've got a lot of other exciting things that we're doing to unlock and harvest value from other investments that Gevo has already made. We'll save those for next time, but more to come. So exciting future ahead.

Great. Excellent. So thanks very much, Paul and Eric, and also thanks to our audience for tuning in and asking some great questions today. I just want to remind everybody that you can access this online as well as our other fireside chats and research on Gevo ticker GEVO at www.watertowerresesearch. Also, the views expressed in this fireside chat may not necessarily reflect the views of Water Tower Research and are provided for informational purposes only.

This fireside chat may not be distributed or reproduced without the written consent of Water Tower Research and should not be considered research recommendations. WTR is an IR firm, not a licensed broker, broker-dealer, market maker, investment banker, underwriter or investment adviser. Additional disclaimers can be found on our website. So thank you again to our guests, Dr. Paul Bloom and Dr. Eric Frey of Gevo, Inc. We look forward to following developments of your company very closely, and it's been an exciting year and look forward to more to come.

So we'll have some future conversations with you and others on the team at Gevo. So thank you very much, and have a great day.

Thanks, Peter.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Gevo, Inc. Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker for today, Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. Eric, you may begin.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. to discuss Gevo's second quarter 2025 results. I'm Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy at Gevo. With me today, we have Patrick Gruber, our Chief Executive Officer; Leke Agiri, our Chief Financial Officer; Chris Ryan, our President and Chief Operating Officer; and Paul Bloom, our Chief Business Officer.

Earlier today, we issued a press release that outlines our second quarter 2025 results and some of the topics we plan to discuss A copy of the press release is available on our website at www.gevo.com. Please be advised that our remarks today, including answers to your questions, contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to be materially different from those currently anticipated. Those statements include projections about the timing, development, engineering, financing and construction of our alcohol-to-jet projects, our future carbon credit sales, our Gevo North Dakota and RNG plants and other activities described in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are incorporated by reference.

We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements. In addition, we may provide certain non-GAAP financial information on this call. The relevant definitions and GAAP reconciliations may be found in our earnings release, which can be found on our website at www.gevo.com in the Investor Relations section. Following the prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. I'd like to remind everyone that this conference call is open to the media, and we're providing a simultaneous webcast to the public. A replay of this call and other past events will be available via the company's Investor Relations page at www.gevo.com.

I'd now like to turn the call over to the CEO of Gevo, Patrick Gruber. Pat?

Thanks, Eric. We had a really nice quarter. It's great to have turned the corner on adjusted EBITDA. Our financial results this quarter and for the first 6 months of the year are consistent with our expectations for the year. But you know what, we achieved them faster than we anticipated. It surprised us, making good progress. The key achievements in addition to being adjusted EBITDA positive and incrementally net profitable include successfully selling voluntary carbon credits generated at our North Dakota site with carbon capture sequestration, also the selling of tax credits, the excellent ethanol and RNG operations, all of this while never losing sight on our long-term objectives of successfully financing and deploying renewable resource-based jet fuel plants. .

Our existing operations have provided us with a step up in adjusted EBITDA, while at the same time, providing the ingredients to deploy those jet fuel plants. Putting things into context. One, it's clear to all that it takes time to finance and build some synthetic aviation fuel, the jet fuel, the SAF plants. Let me make a few observations on this point. Making jet fuel in the U.S. from abundant cost-effective raw materials that are growing domestically makes a lot of sense. There's a finite amount of jet fuel on a barrel of oil, jet fuel demand is increasing. In U.S. alone, jet fuel demand is expected to increase an additional 2.3 billion gallons per year over the next 10 years, according to projections from the U.S. EIA, that the Energy Information Agency.

However, the U.S. is not building new refineries. In fact, we are shutting them down and converting them for other products. So where will the future jet fuel come from? Imports? Well, that doesn't make a lot of sense to serve our domestic energy needs. We view the renewable jet from corn starch carbohydrates, in other words, the sugars can be achieved at a cost of production similar to petroleum-based jet fuel, once fully scaled up and operating and it can deliver the added market-driven attribute of low or even negative net carbon footprint.

With our business system, it is possible to achieve both a low carbon footprint and a low cost. This opportunity is absolutely huge in our view, we continue to pursue it. Two, we are very focused on our alcohol-to-jet 30 million-gallon plant design, targeting its first deployment to our North Dakota site. Our North Dakota site is particularly attractive because of the great ethanol and protein operation there as well as the carbon capture assets. We're in the midst of translating our ATJ 60, that's a 60 million-gallon plant designed to the ATJ 30 design.

With the knowledge we have gained by engineering the heck out of these plants, -- we believe that we can make great reductions in project deployment costs, both technical and financial, a 30 million-gallon -- ATG plant, we need about 50 million gallons of ethanol a feedstock. This is a practical size where the economies of scale work. Smaller plants in this would be expected to be severely disadvantaged in cost price. Our ATG 60 project targeted for Lake Preston is plugging along upbeat slowly. We've been working with the DOE and our customers, and we are waiting to see what happens with the carbon to access pipeline. It will take us natural course. We are done with the engineering on it and have shifted resources to the ATJ 30 plant.

The overall strategy for Gevo is to use our current base of assets to improve profitability, increase carbon credit sales and tax credit sales while deploying ETG plants. We see improved operations and associated profitability as giving us solid footing to launch ATJ projects and achieve our long-run goal. ATJ continues to be the major path for growth. and selling carbon abatement as a core product is key.

I'll turn it over to Leke Agiri, our Chief Financial Officer, who will take us through the latest financial results. Leke?

Thank you, Pat. We did indeed have an excellent second quarter. Now here are all the numbers. We ended the quarter with $127 million in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash. During the second quarter, combined operating revenue -- interest and investment income was $44.7 million. Our income from operations was $5.8 million, and our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA was $17.3 million. Gevo North Dakota office generated income from operations of $17.1 million and non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $24.2 million.

Gevo RNG generated income from operations of $1.5 million and non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $2.6 million. And finally, net income per share attributed to Gevo was $0.01 per share for the second quarter. Here is some more color -- our second quarter results include a onetime catch-up recognition of the clean fuel production credits over the last 2 quarters. Since amongst other things, we closed the sale of $22 million of our CFBC credit in the second quarter. Going forward, our results will reflect the CFBC credits that we generated in the period being reported.

Our first quarter results did not include 1 month of Gevo North Dakota operations since we bought the facility at the end of January. It did not include any carbon dioxide removal credit sales and it did not recognize generation of any proceeds from the sale of the clean fuel production tax credit. So as a result, we think our combined first and second quarter results more closely represent where we are. For the 6 months ended June 30, 2025, our net income grew by $20 million, and our non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA grew by $32 million compared to the same period last year.

We see this as recurring, step change growth, which we expect will continue to grow from there. We are thrilled with our second quarter performance, both operationally and financially. We believe our businesses are well positioned for sustained success and strategic for the execution of our growth plans.

Now I will hand it over to Paul.

Thanks, Leke. During the second quarter, we started our carbon business and sold over $1 million worth of carbon dioxide removal credits or CDRs. In addition, we were recently featured in NASDAQ's 2024 Sustainability Report for our supply of high-integrity carbon removal credits from Gevo North Dakota. We believe this new co-product business could add a significant stream of new stable revenue for us as we are able to immediately supply a growing global marketplace with high integrity credits. We anticipate growing CDR credit sales to $3 million to $5 million by the end of this year and estimate long-term sales of this new co-product could exceed $30 million per year from our current production volumes, which could be significantly expanded in the future.

We think the optionality to sell carbon separately from the fuel provides us with a unique advantage. As our business expands, we like having the ability to balance returns by separating and shifting carbon attributes from volatile low carbon fuel markets to selling CDRs to potentially more stable, higher value markets. For some additional background, Bio-based carbondioxide is a co-product of ethanol fermentation that can be efficiently captured for the use in industrial applications, carbonated beverages, petroleum processing, or permanently stored in the appropriate geological formations to generate carbon dioxide removal credits. The high integrity CDR credits we are currently selling are known as Corps or CO2 removal credits. These credits are certified by Pure Earth and can be purchased by customers and retired immediately to offset the effect of emissions. The Gevo North Dakota facility has the appropriate geological formation and operational Class 6 well for carbon capture and sequestration with a total estimated sequestration capacity of up to 1 million metric tons of CO2 per year.

Our facility was also the first pure Earth certified CO2 storage facility in the United States. Our credits are certified by Pure Earth under its strict standards for 1,000-plus terminates and other key quality parameters required by customers. Our research tells us that in total, the market place for carbon dioxide removal credits have exceeded $10 billion in the past few years, reflecting nearly 40 million tons of CO2 renewals. We look forward to increasing our participation in this market as it continues to expand. We also began our business of selling clean fuel production tax credits.

Clean Fuel production credits or CFPCs, are also known as the 45Z tax credit. We expect to generate cash from the production sale and transfer of these credits to third-party taxpayers. On June 30 of this year, we entered into our first tax credit transfer agreement for $22 million worth of credits to a third party. We are one of the first companies to monetize these credits and we anticipate finalizing additional tax credit transfer agreements with third-party taxpayers this year to sell out our anticipated volume of credits for the balance of 2025. Based on our production of low-carbon ethanol and RNG, we expect our clean fuel production credits to benefit our net income and adjusted EBITDA by more than $10 million per quarter going forward.

For clarity, these sales do not show up on the revenue line, but due to the applicable accounting standards, instead show up as a reduction to our cost of goods sold line on the income statement. I'll conclude with some brief remarks on our technology platforms, which are driving innovation for our expected growth. First, Verity is our wholly owned subsidiary that is developing a software platform for traceability, compliance reporting and the monetization of carbon intensity across the agriculture and renewable fuels business system.

Verity is earning revenue now and is in growth on. In July, Landis, a $2.4 billion agricultural solutions company spanning 34 states that connects thousands of farmers announced the partnership with Verity to track and trace their 2025 soybean crop for premium market opportunities and a first of its time carbon intensity supply chain program for ethanol production. These supply chains are complex, involving extensive data and have significant compliance requirements. Verity aims to help farmers and partners like Landis easily obtain high-quality, verifiable results, and our innovative solutions are starting to pay dividends for Gevo and our customers.

Next, we continue to make good progress in developing Gevo's proprietary ethanol to olefins technology with our development partners, LG Chem and Axon. Gevo's ETO technology targets the lowest capital and operating cost to convert ethanol into olefins that can be used for renewable fuels and chemicals, including SaaS and biopropylene. As of today, Gevo has approximately 80 active global patent assets in our ETO intellectual property portfolio.

Finally, our long-term growth is supported by a strong intellectual property portfolio, including our SaaS platform, Eto technology, isobutanol portfolio and carbon tracking solutions. We hold over 400 patent assets globally, many granted recently as we've refined our ATJ therapy and ATJ 60 designs, and we continue to secure new patents as our innovations progress.

Let's now go to Chris to talk about operations. Chris?

Thanks, Paul. Let me review some key operating results for the second quarter. Our team at Gevo North Dakota continues to keep the plant running well and the production numbers through second quarter support that point. In the second quarter, we ground 5.7 million bushels of corn to produce 17 million gallons of low-carbon fuel-grade ethanol and that's around 3 gallons per bushel yield, which is good. That also equates to about a 67 million-gallon per year run rate on ethanol. We produced 52,000 tons of high-protein animal feed and over 5 million pounds of distillers corn oil, which is about 1 pound of oil per bushel of corn ground.

In our carbon capture and storage business, we sequestered over 40,000 metric tons of CO2 in the second quarter. That CO2 being sequester is a small fraction of the capacity of the reservoir that we sit on top of in North Dakota. We have a lot of extra capacity at Sequester CO2, and we're actively talking to third parties to do that. All these numbers equate to approximately equal amounts by weight of ethanol, high-protein feed and CO2 with some corn oil on top. This is a good diversification for our business. At our RNG business in Northwest Iowa, where we have partnered with 3 dairy farms, we produced about 92,000 million [indiscernible] of renewable natural gas during the second quarter, and we continue to optimize that [indiscernible] process to push production higher.

This year has been a great year for growing corn. This year's harvest in the United States is projected to be another record year and that's great for us. But the farmers really need to see some new uses for corn. That brings me to our synthetic aviation fuel or SaaS platform. We've been building our SaaS platform because we see a substantial and expanding market ahead. One where we believe Gevo is strongly positioned to lead. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration data U.S. jet fuel demand is projected to rise by more than 2 billion gallons per year over the next decade. We have a great opportunity to help meet that demand with domestic production using agriculture and rural communities as the backbone to do that.

At Gevo, we've developed a template for doing that using ethanol as the feedstock to produce SaaS or jet fuel in a modular plant. It would only take a few dozen of our ATJ facilities to process roughly 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol into more than 2 billion gallons of competitively priced domestically produced jet fuel, channeling billions of dollars in investment into rural agricultural communities and creating a new use for corn, which the agricultural industry really needs.

It's worth noting that traditional fossil-based jet fuel makes up only about 9% of the output from traditional U.S. refineries whereas the ATJ process that we've designed can produce more than 90% jet fuel from its production stream. To capture this opportunity, we've created 3 standardized plant designs -- we call them ATJ 30, ATJ 60 and ATJ 150, all convert low-carbon ethanol into SaaS. Gevo North Dakota stands out as a promising ATJ 30 location, thanks to our existing carbon capture and storage infrastructure and reservoir access to low-cost, low-carbon ethanol and the large acreage we have at our site.

We have leveraged our ATJ design from South Dakota and our engineers are busy editing it for the ATJ 30 design to be deployed at our site in North Dakota. For ATJ 60, the project in South Dakota, we remain in active discussions with the U.S. Department of Energy's loan programs office to advance the $1.63 billion loan guarantee for our South Dakota project, and we're pacing our development spend to align with the financing time line.

In the future, once our ATJ process is operational, we intend to expand the business by leveraging our SaaS platform and proprietary systems through multiple business models including joint ventures, licensing and build-own-operate. With about 180 existing brownfield ethanol plants in the United States, plus additional greenfield sites domestically and worldwide, we see significant potential for scaling.

With that, I'll hand it over to Pat.

Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Paul, Leke. You guys did a good job of hitting the highlights. Let's go ahead and open it up for questions. Operator? .

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Dushyant Ailani with Jefferies,

This is Whitney [indiscernible] on for Dushyant. Impressive results this quarter, especially on the early monetization of CDR and CFBC credits. So on the CFBC monetization, like while ethanol-related CFBCs have been monetized, biogas credits haven't yet -- so what's holding back that monetization piece? And when do you expect to see such activity?

We already did include it in here. Leke, why don't you give a little more explanation. And CFBC for ethanol is we haven't seen other ones from ethanol before. Go ahead, Leke.

Yes. So the 45Z and [indiscernible] production tax credit for ethanol production was what we've monetized in the sale of the $22 million sale to a private parties that was announced. The transaction was consummated with also making use of the relevant, call it, the insurance policy to make sure residual risks or actually be managed on behalf of Gevo and also on the buyer part -- what we do expect, especially now that the big beautiful bill has passed and effectively, hopefully rendered the discussions around retroactive change in tax law issues -- we believe those -- that issue is actually officially sort of addressed with the passing of the bill.

Expectation is ethanol facilities that actually qualify for 45 or CFBC, the market should hit up and you're going to start seeing some of that sales. But we are one of the first parties to actually get a chance to actually execute the transaction. And as we articulated, we are also in the process of monetizing the rest of our greenfield production tax credit for this year. What we should also highlight is we have a pathway as part of the execution of actually selling our current tax credit for 2025. We have a pathway that we've identified to also be able to place our credits for 2026.

Okay. And then can we expect a similar cadence for the RNG business?

That is exactly right. In fact, the deal construct, the transaction structure for our ethanol facility is very similar for LNG facility. So the rest of the tax credits that we are going to monetize for the rest of the year is for our ethanol [indiscernible] and our RNG facility. And same case for 2026 going forward.

Our next question comes from Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright

Congrats on a really positive quarter. I think a lot of people are surprised at how the financials are showing up now. With respect to the CFBC, the 45Z credit [indiscernible], the $10 million benefit per quarter, is that sort of a base case? What kind of variance should we expect on that at least for the next few quarters as far as you have visibility?

Leke, why don't you go ahead and answer that?

Sure. Short answer to your question is that over $10 million or that's what $10 million number is actually stressed. As you guys are probably familiar the monetization of any production tax credit is tied to the actual production of the facility. We believe there's no going concern in which we don't have any going concerns. We could actually do better than $10 million of tax credit generation per quarter. So it's not -- I think it's a slightly conservative view what we've disclosed. We actually think to do better than $10 million of credit generation every quarter. And that number is a combination of 45 generation from our ethanol facility and our RNG facility. .

And then the last thing for you guys -- for you analysts, do me a favor and make sure that you heard the point about this goes to a credit against cost of goods sold, not the revenue line. Don't be doing your modeling by showing these credits as revenue item or not. That's not how the accounting treatment works. It's a credit towards the cost of goods sold.

Understood. Yes, I got that. And then the path to $30 million in CDR sales path. Can you share -- is that going to be driven by just better capacity utilization for the sequestration business? Or are there other avenues that get you from the $3 million to $5 million this year and then towards the $30 million in the future?

Yes, I'm going to let Paul answer this. And go ahead, Paul. Go ahead, answer.

Sure. So when we think about this going forward, we're just getting started, obviously, in the CDR market. And the bulk of our carbon capture and sequestration, the CCS value is going into low carbon fuel markets today, so we'll be shifting that as we see the market develop into the CDR sales. And then long term, right, as we get there, meaning the next 2 years or so, we're going to be trying to grow that as much as we can. But it's really about on a journey to put our carbon value as much carbon value in our SaaS really.

And -- the whole thing is predicated by the high quality in this market, and that's where we think -- if you look at the overall market, we talked a little bit about how it's growing. It's grown to 40 million metric tons, over $10 billion in sales. If you just do the quick math on that, that puts you at about 250 a metric ton for average carbon removal credits. But we know that there's a wide range of where that value is -- so the way that you -- we believe that you go after this value is to have the highest quality credits, the highest quality information. That's really where Puro standards come in, and we're using the leading crediting platform for engineered carbon removals and putting those in the market, obviously. So that's kind of our path as we go forward here, shifting from more low carbon fuel markets into something that we think can provide more returns and less volatility in CDRs.

The way to think of it is that we have -- we produce what, 165,000 tons, 167,000 tonnes or something like that of carbon dioxide. The projections and discussion of revenue from CDRs is related to that. We have 1 million tons of capacity. That's not contemplated in the numbers that Paul throughout.

Right. Great. Understood. No, that was helpful. And then now that there's clarity on the 45Z credits, et cetera, and the regulatory environment is very favorable. Can we expect some maybe faster movement on the ATJ 30 or ATJ 60 projects? Any color on that, Patrick, would help, I guess, investors just get a sense of how that part of the business may shape up in the next 12 to 18 months. .

I'll see a comment first, and I'll hand over to Chris. But it comes down to that this had been this last I don't know, the last 8 months or so have been really kind of uncertain. Everyone -- everybody is kind of, oh, what's going to happen? It's all bad, everything is bad. Well, you know what, it hasn't been for us, obviously. We did pretty darn well. And I think that's good for the administration. They're supportive of the kind of things that we're doing, but we're doing ATJ that's focused on being cost competitive with Petro. Understand that point. there is nobody else like that, that I'm aware of, nobody. And yet we can still eliminate the carbon footprint.

The thing is we've got to finish the engineering for the AT3 and then get it financed. That's the -- that will be the rate-limiting steps. The ATJ 60 project, as we mentioned, we're going to work it through with the DOE. It's a big capital number. We still got to know what happens with the Summit pipeline. We've talked about that in the past. We're not going to build it before we have clarity. We're not going to try to finance it before we have clarity around that, what happens on the pipeline because why would we ever build a plant that's economically disadvantaged that be stupid. So we're not going to do that. Chris, do you want to add anything? Talk about the [indiscernible].

Yes, thanks, Pat. The good thing is we started with the ATJ 60 design that we made for Lake Preston -- and we took that and basically copy at it, paste it into the North Dakota site. So right now, our engineers are working on editing at -- so the good news is that goes a lot faster than if we didn't have that ATJ 60 design. So the good thing is, it is going faster -- the reality is, it takes time to do that editing and then actually build a plant of this size. It takes a few years. Yes, we're looking for every opportunity we can to speed things up and cut costs.

[Operator Instructions]

Our next question comes from Peter Gastreich with Water Tower Research.

Peter Gastreich here from Water Tower. So congratulations on your results and executing your strategy ahead of expectations. It's really great to see the impact of North Dakota and a very nice EBITDA figure coming through. Just a couple of questions from me. The first one is a question about North Dakota expansion options, the next steps. I understand your project economics for ATK were not designed to be dependent on 45Z, but I'd just like to get kind of asked whether the outcome of 45 and the big beautiful bill, whether that affects how you think about capital allocation in North Dakota and your options there? -- for example, expanding low-carbon ethanol capacity versus pursuing ATJ 30 or other projects up there.

Well, the obvious thing is that, that tax credit expires in 2029 or at the end of 2029. And so for a DJ plant to become operational in that time frame, it only have a very limited time to capture value from it. There may be opportunities from the big beautiful bill for the accelerated depreciation credits and things like that, that we have -- we're still working through. So it could be that there's other benefits -- but from the specific thing you're asking about with the 450 section for ATG, it's not -- that's not going to matter. And that's always been our position.

I think that on with ethanol, it definitely influences how we think about things. I mean, we're going to want to take advantage of that and as much as we can optimize as much as we possibly can. So we've got a whole range of projects like that. Chris, do you want to comment further?

Yes. I mean that site in North Dakota is a great site for doing a lot of projects and potential expansion because you got the CCS there, and we have 500 acres of land. And we've got plenty of eager farmers ready to supply more corn. So you put all that together and we -- there are opportunities that we're looking at that but they're shorter-term opportunities that could take advantage of the 45Z. So it's too early to really talk about those, but we're looking at all potential opportunities.

We got that, like I mentioned, 1 million tons of capacity down there per year. we got to use it and take advantage of it and figure it out. So we'll be all over this. And I think that as far as the jet fuel goes, on the big beautiful bill, I surely would have liked to have seen jet fuel extended beyond 2029 that have been more helpful. I'm not -- I actually -- I'm glad that it got 2 years rather than none. That's helpful for us as a business for sure. And we're a company who's reinvesting that money in expansion of biofuel opportunities here in the U.S., doing advanced biofuel opportunities moving into hydrocarbons, setting up infrastructure for CO2. Remember, CO2 is going to be needed in North Dakota for enhanced oil recovery within a few years. That's -- so we need infrastructure for CO2. So great. We're a part of that gain and it's going to be pretty darn interesting going forward. It's a great site. We got -- we did a good job. Our team did a good job, and the people of our Gevo North Dakota team have done a great job. It's been fun to watch, I got to say.

Okay. Sorry, just next question, one more question, please, about Verity. So including the new soybean tracking partnership that you just mentioned from last month, how many customers do you now have for Verity? And also just if you're able to share any broad color on your recent discussions with prospects there. What are your prospects of seeing some more announcements this year on very customers? .

Paul, why don't you take that question?

Sure. We're really excited about the Verity growth here, and it's great to have the tool working out with the customer like Landis. Right now, we've got a handful of ethanol plants, 5 ethanol customers today that we've got agreements with on Verity. We think this is going to grow sizably because what Verity is really doing is simplifying that carbon accounting system that you need for tax credits for voluntary carbon credits, so we think it's got a nice growth portfolio or perspective going forward. But what we're going to be doing next is really making sure that we can demonstrate everything that Verity does at our Gevo North Dakota side. So this will be really helpful for us. As you can see, we've got a lot of complexity in the business moving between voluntary credits, compliance credits, tax credits, and so nothing better than to use Verity to demonstrate how we can simplify our lives, which is what Verity really does for the customer. So really excited about the growth potential and making it all real in North Dakota for us.

I want to add something on these this tax credit gain of getting the stuff verified, like as I said, we weren't aware of anyone doing a 45Z like we've done, and it's wrapped with an insurance product. the amount of work that, that took was quite impressive, and it's a skill. Now we have it, we're going to use it. And then there's the question of -- on the CDRs. CDRs I'm going to reiterate this. are think of a voluntary credits, the actual carbon removal credits that people will buy. This is a market that's already been growing. These are legit. We have like the gold standard type credits, CO2 going down a whole measured by a meter. We can measure tons going down a hole. That's a big deal. That's why I could get the pursuit for corks. We're the only ones in the country first ever to get that kind of certification.

That sort of thing should matter. It's legit removal of carbon and people are willing to pay for it on a voluntary basis. That's the kind of co-product we want to see in the future and grow it. And Paul's team is all over this. It's a big deal.

Our next question comes from Derrick Whitfield with Texas Capital.

Congrats as well on a strong quarter and update. With respect to the CDR market, thanks for the detail included in the release. I wanted to see if you could maybe help characterize the depth and durability of the market and separately, could you speak to the contract structure and if these were sold to a single counterparty or multiple?

The answer -- yes, so go ahead all go ahead and address it where you can because I know you'll be restricted a little bit on the details of the contracts, but the rest of it go for it.

Yes. Look, I mean this is a new and developing market. So we're learning this and getting into it, and we're pretty excited that we've already made a lot of progress here. And -- and so as you think about these markets, we're finding out that there are some that are traditional kind of more spot sales. And then there are multiyear type agreements. And this is where we're headed with a lot of the new business that we're planning to put on where customers, once they find out what high quality that you've got and the high integrity credits that you're providing, there's a lot of work that goes into that and a lot of diligence.

So finding a high-quality credit supplier to make sure that they bought down the risk and they can really show what they're doing for their products. It's a big deal, and we can do that. And so this is where we're headed with more longer-term contracts. But I would say the spot market for the CDRs is getting interesting. If you go back and remember the numbers that I said with 40 million metric tons of credits that have been sold so far in the CDR market, only about a little over 2% of that has actually been delivered. So the thing that we're watching closely is that as other projects may have been sold out, they may be projects that aren't really working today. They haven't started to deliver.

Now a lot of these projects probably will start to deliver but we're already delivering. So we think that there's going to be an interesting spot market developing, and we're here to be able to supply those credits as needed.

Great. Thanks for the detail on that. For my follow-up, I wanted to focus on Gevo North Dakota. With the optionality your team has with ethanol sales wanted to ask if you could speak to how you're thinking about marketing and optimizing revenue from the low carbon ethanol between the voluntary market in California, Oregon and Canada.

That's a great question. What I think you should do guys is have a [indiscernible] team between Chris and Paul.

Yes. Actually, Pat, I think, Paul, this is a great question stemming from the last one. So go ahead, Paul.

Yes. Thanks, Chris. So as we sell a lot of our CCS value today is to look our [indiscernible] markets, you have to have a pathway. So we are in the progress of making -- putting in pathways. We've already got pathways that include CCS and don't include CCS, we have optionality. Do we put that into that low carbon fuel market? Or do we separate that CCS value and put in CDR market? That's really the optionality that we're talking about. So as we look at these markets, we have some timing that we have to balance. But as we see carbon prices, carbon credit prices increase in certain low carbon fuel markets, we want to be able to take advantage of those. And so we work with our marketing partner to do that, to go after those so we can deliver the returns both on the fuel, but then also start to put a book on for those -- the CDR value that's separated. .

And as we look at that price, we're looking at what's going to give us the best return between the netbacks of including that CCS value in the fuel or stripping that off and selling it into the CDR market. So it's a little bit of a balancing act. But today, it's more heavily focused on the LCS markets, the low carbon fuel markets. And as we build those sales of CDRs, we plan to put on a healthy mix or maybe even put on more CDRs. If we can get lower volatility with higher returns in that market. It's just a lot of optionality. We'll see how it develops.

Great. And maybe one last, if I could. With respect to your CCS side, could you speak to the market opportunity you guys see to accommodate third-party volumes and the amount of capacity you feel comfortable offering up to the market?

Yes, we can comment on it. Who wants to take that one, Chris or Paul?

Paul, you can go ahead. Let me just add that when we talk about the capacity about 1 million tons per year up there, we're talking about one well, and there's no limit on we're not limited to one well let's put it that way. But Paul, go ahead.

Yes, sure, so that -- this is an interesting one because we're also thinking about, hey, what do we do in the future? How do we see us expanding the more ethanol we produce, the more CO2 we would produce. So as you're permitting ethanol, you make a pound of ethanol, you make a pound of CO2. That's kind of it's a 1:1 kind of ratio there. And so we want to make sure we've got plenty for us. And then as we look at projects, can we bring in CO2 from third parties? Sure. I mean we've talked about things like a virtual pipeline using CO2 by rail. .

And we've talked about are there other opportunities to put partner sites on our rate where we sit and it's sequester CO2. As we see the need for more clean power where things like data centers and other growth opportunities, we think we've got a great site. And so it's really a question of which of those projects are going to give us the best returns, while making sure that we've got plenty of available capacity for our own needs.

Yes. And so one of the things I like about Jive North Dakota is we have a huge amount of land that we own and 500-plus acres. It's a great operation. There's great corn resource up in that area. The good workforce, no farmer community. These people are good. The -- it's the business environment in North Dakota, the energy people and agricultural people are the same people, and they all get it and they get that this is all in twine and it's important. They're an energy producing state in their food producing state and for export out of North Dakota. It's a great place to be. It's really attractive site. I wish we had, had it sooner, and I'm really glad that we have it now. .

And for us, this marketplace that Paul's team is establishing the CDRs, [indiscernible] and the rest. That's really, really important because that's -- selling coal products is a key part of the economic equation. And it's really -- it's going to matter in the long run as we -- you don't want to -- because if we look our way out to the future, you do not want to be dependent upon government for anything on credits because you can go with the whims. You don't want that. You want them to establish the legit marketplace. Well, we've got legitimate stuff.

Verity comes into play here and is a big deal for helping to certify the whole value chain and the sourcing of the raw materials and all the rest. So we have a leg up on other folks, we believe. And the site that we have is an unusual site. We're the only ones there. It's ours in our whole. And that makes the diligent way, way easier and for intense as it was boy, I'm glad it wasn't any more complicated than that. So we think that we have an advantage here, a window and a premium product of carbon abatement to offer. And it's going to be very interesting to see how my team goes and exploits that. It's a different way of thinking about things, and it's going to be fun.

And I think as far as the ATJ30 goes, and this is a question that Amit had ask, but related but where can go yes, we're going to go as fast as we can. We got to get our act together, too. And this is about getting the engineering done. Chris mentioned it. We'll get it done for ATJ30, it's to be a much lower capital cost should be a bite-size capital cost. And so how much of a big-sized capital cost can that be? I think it can be really right-sized. Is it by size enough for Gevo [indiscernible] . That, I don't know yet. And that's pretty interesting. And -- so it's a different game to play up there. And it doesn't take anything away from the ATG 60 plant in Lake Preston. That 1 still has got to run its course and figure out the rest of the detail of what's going on between the DOE and customers and Summit.

But I like where we're at, and here's something really, really, really important for people to understand. We've got a huge suite of technology. Paul mentioned this, huge. This is not simply just go buy an ATJ process off the shelf late. Lots of people have unit operations. Doing it on an integrated basis, you got to know how to operate plants. That's what my team brings. We know how to build plants. We operate plans. We're the first, remember, to do ATJ. First, we're the ones who got it certified and got it qualified. We still sell it in the marketplace. People forget that. We're still active in it. small-scale, but demo plant scale. But this goes back to what we are all about here at Gevo. That's kind of chemistries. We have a long history with it. Is going to play out into the future with our alcohol -- with our to process. We think we can do cost savings out to the future. It's a pretty exciting time.

This engineering and knowledge that we have learned from the ATJ 60 is being translated to ATJ30 and it's going to be -- create a winner, we believe. It also is creating a platform that we could cut and paste other places. That's a pretty exciting model and we're looking forward to getting on with it. Sorry for that little bit of a soapbox, but [indiscernible].

All very good, Pat. Stores really coming together. I'm happy for you guys. Great quarter update.

Thank you.

I'm showing no further questions at this time. I would now like to turn it back to Pat Gruber for closing remarks.

Well, I already [indiscernible] box. You heard them in the main point. It is an outstanding quarter. It did happen faster than we expected. We thought this would happen. We're a usual company in that we're a developer with a huge amount of technology, but we actually are incrementally positive profitability, albeit a little tiny bit at $0.01 per share. but that's positive. And our EBITDA, we expect it to grow further on reproducible EBITDA. So it's good. It's going to be really good. We're -- we've got a great foundation we're building and it gives us the latitude to play the optionality that's in front of us. .

Thank you all for joining us. Appreciate it.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

Hello, and good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to today's virtual Non-deal Roadshow. My name is Julia Perron, a virtual event moderator here at Renmark Financial Communications. On behalf of our team, we'd like to thank everyone in Houston and surrounding areas for joining us today for the presentation of Gevo, Inc. trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO.

Presenting today is Eric Frey, VP of Finance and Strategy; and Leke Agiri, Chief Financial Officer, will be joining us for the fireside chat and Q&A session. The presentation will last approximately 20 to 25 minutes and will be followed by a formal Q&A session, which you participate in using the chat box on the top of head corner of your screen.

And with that, I will hand it over to Eric.

Great. Thank you, Julia. As Julia mentioned, I'm Eric Frey, VP of Finance and Strategy here at Gevo. That's stock ticker GEVO trading on the NASDAQ. I just want to remind everyone that you can find a lot more information on our Investor Relations portal on our website at www.gevo.com. We have past quarter presentations, virtual fireside chats like this under the Past Events heading down there. So we've saved those recordings, so you could find a lot more information. And of course, you can look at our SEC filings as well.

Also before we get started, I just want to remind you of our forward-looking statements. We may make forward-looking statements, and there can be no guarantee that actual results will match forward-looking expectations. Take a look at our risk factors as well that are listed in our SEC filings like our 10-K.

Before we have our virtual fireside chat with our CFO, which is the purpose of this virtual presentation, I just wanted to give -- for those of you who are not already familiar with our story, an overview of where we sit in the industry and it is we do and what we're looking to achieve in just a couple of minutes, and then we'll have a chat with our CFO.

So Gevo is a developer -- a leading developer of cost-effective renewable hydrocarbons and chemicals that are drop into existing infrastructure. There's a number of companies out there and industries that are looking to reduce carbon emissions. Our goal, as we sit in this industry, is to, one, make them cost effective. So cheap and affordable and scalable. Number two, that we make a drop-in product. So we make liquid and similar molecules and fuels that are fungible with fossil fuels today so that you don't have to convert a truck for a jet engine to electric. And you can use these fuels and mix it with fossil fuels and get a lower carbon emission in result.

We also use proven commercial technologies like fermentation. In the U.S., we have an enormous ethanol industry, which is based on fermentation of plant sugars. And then to that point, where do we focus on in terms of feedstock, we focus on plant sugars using existing technologies. We tweak those technologies, though, in a way that's novel. We put together those existing technologies that are scalable in a way that gives you this low-carbon result with a drop in fuel, and we have hundreds of patents for that -- those proprietary facility designs. So that's how Gevo is attempting to address the market.

This is an overview of our asset footprint. What do we have? I'll just point out -- I went to the wrong slide here. There we are. I'm so sorry. Hopefully, we'll stay on this slide.

Sorry, Eric. Which slide are you on currently? I think we have a bit of a disconnect between you and the slides. So if you could just tell me on the slides for you.

Oh, sure. It should be Slide 4 that says Gevo's Footprint at the title.

Excellent. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks, Julia. So our headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. We have a demonstration facility in Minnesota. That's Box #2 that we're in the process of selling. In the past, Gevo has used a facility in Silsbee, Texas to make Alcohol-to-Jet and bio-octane fuels. Box #4 is our flagship greenfield project called ATJ-60, that's in South Dakota, which is in the financing stage. Box #5, we have a dairy manure renewable natural gas operation in Iowa. We also have a wholly owned subsidiary called Verity, which makes carbon tracking software that we are deploying for customers who do things like ethanol and soybean crush, so they can track carbon end to end through their value chain.

And then finally, last but not least in North Dakota, we have a low-carbon ethanol facility, which is very unique because there we have operating carbon capture, which is doing over 160,000 metric tons per year of biogenic CO2 that CO2 that came from the atmosphere that's being pumped a mile underground.

And now if we could go to Slide 5, please. Thank you. So those things that I just showed you are the ingredients. They -- today, they make fuels and chemicals that people can use in existing infrastructure. Today, they reduce carbon footprint. But tomorrow, they're the ingredients for even more valuable value-added products that are in even greater demand and less supply like sustainable aviation fuel. The demand globally and in the U.S. for sustainable aviation fuel is growing. It is not currently being met by existing supply. And most of the future supply will need to come from abundant feedstocks, in particular, plant sugar. That's the ATJ bar right there. That's the Alcohol-to-Jet process that comes from plant sugars, because plant sugars are so abundant and scalable.

Next slide, please. What's really important -- and this is just a point I want to emphasized from what I said earlier is that this Alcohol-to-Jet process is very effective at making sustainable aviation fuel because it leverages nature, because it leverages what the work that nature does for you in the microorganisms that do fermentation. What this is showing the green box. At the bottom left there is our cash cost of production estimated from using this Alcohol-to-Jet process, and it overlaps with those blue circles, which is a scatter plot of the price of jet fuel, fossil jet fuel at different crude oil prices.

And so what you can see is that at the beginning of our industry, we believe that we can make sustainable aviation fuel at a cash cost of production per gallon that's already competitive with fossil fuels. And so that's what gets us really excited is that we can do things that both reduce carbon footprint and do it cost effectively using things that the Midwest U.S. are good at, including rural communities in this process and rewarding them for doing things like reducing fertilizer and reducing land use.

So with that, that's a brief overview of our company and what we do. Again, you can find a lot more information on our website. But I want to turn to the real agenda here, which is to have a chat with Leke, our CFO. So Julia, if you don't mind bringing up Leke? Great. So maybe we can just start, Leke, with your background and how you got here.

Well, thank you, Eric. And first, let me start by thanking everyone for joining this discussion live. And for those that are going to access the video at some point in the future as well. Thank you for your time.

Again, my name is Leke Agiri, I'm the Chief Financial Officer for Gevo. I've been here at Gevo for about 3 years in a number of different functions. I started out leading our debt capital raise originally and then morphed into raising all of our capital raises, debt and equity for our projects and then ultimately started gaining more responsibility in terms of our operating finance and accounting functions, and then that has led to me effectively being the head of our finance organization at this time.

We've had, over the last 3 years, as you know, Eric, we've had some exciting milestones that has occurred that we've worked on together. And some of those, just to highlight is what you mentioned, the acquisition of our ethanol and CCS assets. That's tremendous for the future of Gevo. We were invited to the underwriting phase for the DOE loan program office for ATJ-60 project in Lake Preston. And ultimately, that led us to the conditional commitment approval last year as well for that project. We've worked on refinancing our RNG facility bonds, the tax-exempt bonds as well sometime in 2023. We've been monetizing our tax credits for all of our operated assets.

So by no means, it's been fun 3 years to be a part of Gevo. And I just want to, again, just stress and thank all of our, call it, our Gevo employees or Gevo resources that's helped us achieve this milestone. But more importantly, too, by no means we accomplished this by ourselves. So I would like to personally thank all of our partners for making that happen.

Prior to Gevo, I spent a couple of years with Bank of America structuring tax equity for the most part and then some term debt as well in during my time at Bank of America, focused on a lot of renewable technologies, so solar wind battery storage. Over the course of about 2 years, worked on transaction of about $1 billion there. So that was really an exciting time as well. But then prior to that, I worked briefly for solar and the developer, raising sponsor equity, tax equity construction debt and then term or permanent debt facilities as well. Prior to that time, working with developers, I worked over a decade with in oil and gas, worked for Solar and LNG developer, raising sponsor equity, tax equity, construction debt and then term or permanent debt facilities as well.

Prior to that time, working with developers, I worked over a decade with -- in oil and gas, worked for Anadarko Petroleum Corporation. I spent about 5 years in corporate development, executing inorganic growth strategies, which is effectively by and selling of oil and gas assets, identifying opportunities on the market that makes sense to be acquired or effectively monetizing nonstrategic assets. And then I moved into international operations. I worked for international business services, where at the time, I was managing and evaluating non-operated asset positions in 6 countries for the company that introduced into international finance and accounting and effectively led me to pivot into project finance work for Anadarko.

So at Anadarko, we were successful in originating and executing the debt capital raise time of about $14 billion to $15 billion for Mozambique LNG. And the project capital was originated from export credit agencies and commercial lenders internationally. And all that was effectively coming to a close in 2019 when Anadarko was publicly, as most people might be aware, acquired at the time of Occidental Petroleum after a bidding war with Chevron. So that was a really, really interesting time, call it, for just the industry, I guess, and Anadarko.

So with that being said, I think hopefully, that picture of my career over the last 2 decades, it's clear that I have the right skill set and capabilities to service Gevo's, call it, strategic financial -- Chief Financial Officer, especially around the aspect of optimizing operational financial performance of operating assets, prudent capital allocation for not just our operating assets, but of course, our growth projects, how do we execute the acceleration of our growth projects. And we do all of that with the priority of keeping in mind fiscal discipline as well. And all that should translate into measurable shareholder value, which is the foremost, call it, fiduciary duty that we have for the management team.

So I'm really excited to have this conversation and to be a part of this discussion, Eric.

Thanks, Leke. So one of the -- I talked earlier about the big challenge of making energy, making more energy, making it reducing emissions because there's a big market for that. There's demand for that, both in the U.S. and globally, both on the voluntary markets and on the regulatory side, where there are mandates and so on. Making it so that it's always there when you need it. Gevo is trying to address that challenge. What -- how does Gevo's approach in your mind, make that possible? And what gets you excited about being here and having your leadership role?

Well, Eric, it's pretty simple. I think in terms of what keeps me -- what gets me excited here at Gevo, it's all of the initiatives, the exciting initiatives that we're working on. They are groundbreaking. I think it's fair to say that we have a lot of exciting things in front of us, and we are going to, most of the time, be maybe one of the first parties in the world to execute some of these transactions or to execute some of these projects. So that's really, really exciting.

And I should say the fact that we have the right resources internally, so from a human capital perspective and then we have partners that can help us achieve that, that gives me a lot of confidence that we can actually achieve our goal. So it's really exciting from that perspective. But how are we uniquely positioned to actually navigate through this industry challenge that you're referring to?

Well, you kind of touched on it when you provided the overview, but let me summarize as well. We are making dropping fuse from renewable sources. the products that we're making are competitive to fossil-based fuels. And the keyword there is the fact that we are competitive, because we also deliver the additional parameter of reduced greenhouse gas emissions for our products. Well, with that sort of product that's really a niche product, we have -- we are also making our process is very unique, but scalable. So our ability to actually scale our processes and to have a lot of different use cases for it to grow our company is also unique or a unique opportunity for us as well.

And then when you add on to the fact that all of our projects that we have in our portfolio, they align very well with the energy security of the U.S. aligns with the energy policy of, call it, the federal governments across the various parties. So I think it's very clear to -- or very important to make that distinction. And you tag on to the fact that we are stimulating rural economies, I think you mentioned that earlier as well. When you put all that ingredient together, all the specific project characteristics that we have in our projects, I think it just makes it very unique for Gevo for projects to be successful.

So from that perspective, I think we have competitive advantage that really is going to serve us well, not only just [Audio Gap] really positioned to deliver a tangible or measurable shareholder values in the long run.

And our vision for achieving those objectives at a high level, feedstocks, technology and that type of thing. But getting a little bit more specific in the last 12 months, as you look back, what has changed? And as you look forward, where do you see us going next?

Yes. No, it's great. As I was just articulating, I think Gevo is at a pivotal stage now where a lot of our aspirations or goals that we've communicated over the years, we are now execution focused. And some of those executions are now going to be manifested in our financial performance that's going to be available publicly as you're seeing for 2025 and going forward. So that's really, really exciting.

But I should say, our philosophy, our goal has not changed. It's just the execution and the acceleration of the execution. So for example, as folks that are put up our financial statement, all of the revenue, for example, of 2024 is around $ 17 million. Our first quarter revenue alone is $29 million. And because of the acquisitions that we've made in 2025, the ethanol and CCS asset, recurring revenues is only going to grow substantially from where we are today.

So our ability to discuss about optimization of operating asset, margin expansion, ability to actually generate positive EBITDA, generate profitability, generate cash flows from operations, those are now tangible goals, right? And then the question becomes how do we fund a lot of our strategic projects, a lot of our capital projects that we're working on. Of course, there is going to be project financing. So we're raising capital from the DOE to do project level equity corporation, having the pathway to actually generate operating cash flows, we can fund and accelerate the commercialization of the strategic project from our own cash flows as well, which effectively should also accelerate value creation for our shareholders.

So that's changed. That's really exciting. I think folks that truly do follow Gevo, they should be excited as I think it's just a unique time for us to really start seeing tangible difference in terms of our financial performance.

And one of the boxes -- the sort of 8 boxes that was on that slide of Gevo's footprint and assets -- there's a whole bunch of those, and most of those are driving our results that you mentioned. One of them is our project, our future greenfield project in South Dakota, where we have a conditional commitment from the Department of Energy for a loan guarantee. Can you give us an update on that?

Yes. No, absolutely. I think as I mentioned before, it was a privilege to be invited to the underwriting phase. We got a conditional commitment of $1.63 billion when you put [Audio Gap] still in the process of marching towards financial close. We're having -- we are engaged with the Department of Energy Loan Program Office working through that path. What we cannot disclose as hopefully is consistent with what we've said [Audio Gap] we are not -- we cannot do that. It's a requirement of the DOE process. But I can assure you, we're engaged with the LPO and we're doing everything we can to be able to accelerate our ability to get to financial close.

And the LPO is engaged with us. So it's a 2-way street. But we cannot ignore, obviously, what's taking shape in 2025 with the new administration, which has been great, as I mentioned, our project aligns with the energy policy. But in fact, there typically is [Audio Gap] that's there. And that is very common. It's not unique to any administration coming in. It's just a natural process that you see from a transition perspective.

I would also say, I think our path to get into financial close for that transaction, it's real. There are some [Audio Gap] of the Summit pipeline, where if and how the timing that happens. The good thing for us is we have a pathway to arrive at financial close that does not depend on effectively fully on just the Summit pipeline being completed. So there is a pathway there. But I should say, our plan A is to be able to utilize the Summit pipeline to effectively sequester our CO2 or biogenic CO2 from that ATJ-60 facility. So pathway to closing is there, but we don't want to minimize our desire or need to see Summit pipeline be completed. It's quite strategic for our ATJ-60 project.

Yes. And I'd just remind folks who are listening, if you want to look at our near term -- more near-term EBITDA growth we just talked about is long term, and it's very strategic. In addition to that, we have other locations where we're looking to deploy our proprietary and patented ATJ process technologies. And one of those is in North Dakota. And if you look at our near-term EBITDA growth strategy, we have a slide in our corporate investor presentation that's available on our website, and we talked about it in our business update earlier this year. We talked about it in our 1Q earnings, what that near term looks like. So it's helpful to kind of put things into those 2 buckets. What Leke was just talking about was one of our long-term growth projects that's a huge enabler for us. But there's also the near term, which is all the other things that were on that slide that I showed of Gevo's footprint. Well, I think something that we -- go ahead.

No, I was actually just going to pile on. I think that's a very great hat. And just to add to that, the pathway to -- as I mentioned before, our technology, our alcohol-to-jet platform is very scalable. We are deploying as much modular technique that we can replicate, not even just at our project sites, but our aspiration is to be able to enable all the developers to construct or have ATJ facilities at their facilities as well or their locations as well.

The significance of that is we have the pathway, as Eric was just describing, to commence and accelerate the development of our alcohol-to-jet project at our Richardson North Dakota facility. And we have -- we control a number of the key parameters to actually enable the project to be accelerated and to happen at a time line that could potentially be even at a faster pace than our ATJ-60 project. So by no means are we suggesting that ATJ-60 is not a priority. It's just as we are prudent or call it, we're heavily focused on allocating capital and utilizing them effectively for the benefit of our shareholders, it has to be part of our calculus as to how we accelerate ATJ-30 at this time, because the value that is going to drive or deliver to Gevo is going to be quite attractive.

So from that perspective, we're really excited about that project as well. And hopefully, at some point, we'll be sharing more details as to how those commercialization of that side is going on from an ATJ30 perspective.

Excellent. Thank you, Leke. It appears we're having technical difficulties. Eric just dropped off. He's back. Sorry about that to our audience. We will now continue with the Q&A. Thank you for the presentation. Your first question is, what is the time line for ATJ30-60 retrofit at Red Trail? Is NZ1 really possible without a pipeline? If not, when do we make a final decision to scrap it?

Yes. So I can take this question. So regarding ATJ-60, and I already touched on it, there is a pathway to actually get ATJ-60 done without requiring the Summit pipeline. But by no means our preference is to have the Summit pipeline. So I think I can leave that response there.

In terms of ATJ-30, ATJ-30, we are actively working on our engineering design and our engagement with the EPC contractors to be able to commence the project as quickly as possible. Based on where we are today, it's very possible to say maybe we can arrive at a point where we might be able to start construction sometime next year. But I say that with a lot of caution, right, because, again, we still have to go through the engineering, get the cost for the project to be finalized and then issue a final investment decision for that project to go forward. And also, of course, there is the angle of capital raise.

But I'm very bullish on the alcohol-to-jet project in North Dakota. The economics are going to be -- is going to meet the hurdle for us to raise capital and also the fact that we control a lot of the key parameters, for example, sequestration, we have CCS asset at that location, that is also something that enables the project to go forward. So we're really excited about that path forward. I would couch the response in terms of when the project is going to get done. Of course, the first key step is let's get to a financial investment decision and that impacts when the project is going to get done.

Excellent. Thank you for elaborating on that, Leke. Moving on to your next question, viewer asks, what are Gevo's plans for SAF while it's not producing SAF in the U.S. Will it produce SAF in other countries for other companies? Or will it have subsidiaries in other countries? Which countries? Or will we ultimately produce SAF in the U.S.?

Yes. No, I think we are primarily focused on, of course, our projects here in the U.S., but we have commercial discussions going on for us to be able to achieve the same outcome in Europe. Specific details around what those projects are and the countries that they are, they are not at a phase or they are not public information at this time. We want them to remain nonpublic because they are strategic. So what I would refer back to the audience asking a question is, stay tuned. There will be more information coming to bear or publicly at the right time, but we are working on SAF development, not just in the U.S. but globally.

Your next question, a viewer asks, can you provide any update on Verity?

I'll pass that to you, Eric.

Great. Yes. So we said last year that our goals were to deploy the product and get to first revenue. And so last year, we did get to first revenue at Verity. If you look at our disclosure, we have another income line in our 10-K and our 1Q, and that includes Software as a Service. And so we've started to build revenue from that. We have several customers where we're deploying the software, not least of which would be ourselves. At Gevo, North Dakota, we're deploying the Verity software right now there so that we can better track and trace the product all the way through the value chain from the field through grain elevators through a plant processing to the customer that's using that fuel or voluntary customers globally that may want to purchase a virtual attribute.

A virtual attribute is where you say we sequester this many tons of carbon dioxide a mile underground, it's biogenic and you can list that on a registry to ensure no double counting. And global customers that want to reduce their carbon footprint, especially software-type companies, they don't have a lot of tools to reduce their carbon footprint, except to purchase the right to claim those carbon credits that other people are doing and basically retire it against their own ESG reports.

So all that stuff is stuff that Verity is useful for, and we're deploying it. We're in the process of copy and a paste. There's a lot of work to be done on software of this type because the value chain in this industry is very complicated. That's a great thing for us because that means that customers have a very complicated problem to solve, and we can help them solve it with a push button in software.

Excellent. Thank you for shedding light on that, Eric. Your next question, a viewer asks, does the recent bill change the necessity for a pipeline at Gevo, South Dakota?

Well, short answer is I don't think it does. I think the pipeline requirements irrespective of the outcome of the bill is preferred for a project. So I keep coming back to that point because it's a key point for us. But the bill, the big beautiful bill has done some positive things for our operating assets as folks on the call might be aware in terms of 45Z, our operating assets does qualify for 45Z. And in fact, we did file an 8-K for monetizing 45Z for our Gevo North Dakota assets. So that's exciting.

However, from a SAF perspective, our long-term products that we are in the process of commercializing, that bill also did reduce the 45Z credit generation per gallon for SAF from $1.75 to $1. Well, that means the economics of those projects, which the good thing is because of the expiration date of 45Z anyway, a lot of our project is not dependent on it. Our economics, we designed them for resiliency around government support of 45Z. So our project, even though those 45Z implications or 45Z as they reduced for them, it's not going to have material implication on our ability for us to execute and hopefully raise capital to get those projects done.

Can you all hear me okay?

Yes. Sorry about that.

One of the things I just want to emphasize for folks who may be hearing the Gevo story for the first time is there's -- when you look at companies that are trying to reduce emissions, they can kind of encounter a world that's divided into 2 camps, a world that cares about cost-effective energy and making more energy, things like jet fuel, things like diesel, things like natural gas and ethanol. And then there's a world of folks that care about reducing emissions and sustainability. And there's not as much overlap as we wish there was between those 2 different worlds.

Gevo is a really interesting company. We think our approach is really bridges that divide in a really interesting way. And the reason I say that, I'll just give you one quick -- 2 quick facts to help you understand that. So in the previous administration, the Inflation Reduction Act passed a number of clean energy tax credits. The current administration just passed a bill, a budget bill that extends the tax credits that are most important to us that are related to biofuel, in particular, the 45Z tax credit that Leke just mentioned.

And so we've been saying for a long time that we appeal to a broad spectrum of folks who want to see more energy, who want to address industries where it's impractical to switch to electric or at least to switch the entire fleet to electric. And so what are the other options? And at the same time, address market demand to reduce emissions in a meaningful way. And so I think that, that is clear evidence that we're actually doing that, and that's something that makes us -- our approach, I think, a little bit unique.

Excellent. Thank you both for sharing your comments on that. Your next question, a viewer asks, why is Gevo North a profitable ethanol plant? What's unique about its operations that drives profitability compared to industry? What are your plans to increase gross margin and operating margins on the cost side? What are your plans, if any?

Yes. So I think in terms of operational performance, what's unique about our ethanol facility in North Dakota, first, the obvious angle is the fact that we have this sequestration infrastructure appended to it. So from an operational perspective, having our own ability to sequester biogenic CO2 that improves, call it, the economics of the revenue streams that our molecule from that facility actually can generate.

And how is that the case? Well, as Eric was just talking about the fact that one molecule of our ethanol probably has a larger carbon value associated with it, which can come from actually going to the voluntary markets or transportation markets to get those or we also have the ability to generate, as I was just alluding to earlier, 45Z credits with those molecules, a large amount -- well, a good sized amount of 45Z credits. When you couple those factors together, our ethanol facility will -- by almost any math you do, be much more profitable than a traditional ethanol facility in the country.

And in terms of what are we doing to further expand margins, of course, after the integration of those assets this year, our #1 priority is to ensure we integrate those assets very well, make sure that we don't accelerate any implementation of strategies that can artificially deflate margins. But starting next year in terms of operational measures that include, call it, derivative instruments that can help us be able to expand margins that has to be on the table. Are sourcing strategies around the feedstock for us to deploy or to evaluate that has to be on the table. Are there ways for us to even man and operate the facilities. I think those are just fair questions.

We believe our facility is efficiently running at this time. But like any organization, we always have to ask those questions to be able just to continue to improve the economics around the facility. So I couldn't be more excited about the facility. Our facility is uniquely positioned to do very, very well than any -- than most facilities in the country.

Excellent. Thank you, Leke, for your response. Moving on to your next question, if you were commented. Thank you for the presentation and congratulations to Leke on the new role. How does the outcome on 45Z and the BBB impact Gevo's capital allocation options for North Dakota? There is a 45Z extension, but also a cut to SAF credit to $1 per gallon. Does this make an investment in low-carbon ethanol expansion and utilizing the 45Q CCS credit more attractive than an investment in ATJ-30?

That's a very good question. And I mentioned effectively those same parameters earlier. So yes, 45Z, and Eric also alluded to it, was extended from expiration date of 2027 to 2029 as part of this -- the passing of the bill. It's exciting, and you're right for ethanol facilities for ethanol facilities like ours. That's a very key differentiation. Not every ethanol facility has the ability to -- and the expertise that actually brings to bear to implement strategies to lower carbon intensity score of our molecules. Because we have that, we can optimize, call it, our proceeds from 45Z for ethanol asset. And because we can do that, the opportunities around what do we do to expand our production, that has to be a natural question that we're asking. And of course, we've asked the questions, and that's going to be part of our play.

So yes, I think the bill naturally incentivize that thinking, and we are in a good place to be -- we are in a strategic place to be able to move forward and execute. As it however, relates to our SAF project, as I mentioned earlier, technically, the longer the expiration date of 45Z, the more our projects because of the execution time line, our SAF projects will benefit from it, right, even though it's a reduced dollar per gallon amount.

But our projects alcohol-to-jet projects, the way they're designed, they're engineered, we already factor into our economics, the ability for us not to benefit from 45Z. So from that perspective, yes, we would have liked to see the dollar per gallon for SAF to be left at $1.75, but I think it's going to incentivize if there's a pathway for short-term production, absolutely.

But what's more important actually is the tenant of the 45Z for alcohol-to-jet projects because of the development time line for these projects, the long lead capital and construction time line for the projects, that is how you are actually going to be able to raise capital with the existence of 45Z for alcohol-to-jet project. So from a fiscal incentive perspective, 45Z extension similar to what you have for 45Q is actually going to stimulate additional investments or capital going into our alcohol-to-jet projects versus what we have now. But as I said, we sort of designed our process to account for the less than surplus 45Z environment for our alcohol-to-jet project and they still deliver returns that meet the capital raise hurdle.

Excellent. Thank you, Leke, for shedding light on that. Moving on to your next question. What are the conditions that are currently holding up the DOE loan from being approved if there are any?

Yes. So just to correct that narrative a little bit, we have the conditional commitments approval already. So -- and what that means is effectively the Treasury Department, the Federal Financing Bank and the Department of Energy have actually approved us -- conditionally approved us for that loan facility. We are working to address conditions precedent, negotiate closing -- definitive closing documents so that we can actually start drawing down the facility and commence the construction of the facility, okay? And as I was explaining earlier, you've got circumstances in 2025 that I think it's common for any change of administration.

There's going to have to be changes of team, the learning curve. But I can assure you that we're doing everything we can to accelerate our pathway to financial close. So from that perspective, I think this is the natural course of any financing. We have to stay on the treadmill, do satisfy all the processes that we -- or the conditions precedent that we're supposed to, and then we can arrive at financial close after negotiation of the closing documents.

Excellent. Thank you, Leke. We're coming up to your last 2 questions for today. Your next question, a viewer asks, since 45Z was law as of January 1, 2025, shouldn't Gevo be able to retroactively take 45Z credits from January 1 onwards? If not, then why?

We are. So we -- there is a Form 637 approved by the IRS that entities that can generate 45Z to apply for and get before the end of 2024 that Gevo has done for our 2 operating assets already. So our recently acquired ethanol facility and our RNG facility qualify for generation of 45Z effectively from January 1, 2025. However, because we closed the acquisition of the ethanol assets January 31 or January 30, we start generating 45Z credits for the ethanol facility starting January 31, 2025. The prior owners of the ethanol facility, they own the credit generation for the first 30 days.

As you probably saw our 8-K that was filed this Monday, we are monetizing credit generated since January 31 of this year for the ethanol facility. That's what we're monetizing. And we're going to continue monetizing credit generated throughout all of 2025 for RNG facility. So yes, we have inventory "inventory of 45Z" that we've generated that we will be monetizing and the cash will be effectively received over the course of the rest of the year.

Excellent. Thank you for that response. Moving on to your next question, a viewer asks, how will the suspension of the tax credits by the Biden administration affect you? And when does Gevo expect to be profitable?

Our narrative has not changed. And just to also be clear about my last response in terms of monetization of credits, our goal, I should correct myself, our goal is to monetize and receive those cash by the end of the year. So just to be clear. Now to this question in terms of pathway to profitability, our message and our target has not changed. We've communicated historically, we are targeting our pathway to actually be EBITDA neutral. So for us to start generating greater than 0 of EBITDA. And then once we achieve that pathway, then we can start working towards true profitability.

As I started with my commentary, you've got to -- for you to be profitable, you've got to be EBITDA positive. You've got to generate taxable income, you've got to generate operating income. And then -- so operating cash flow, I mean. So we've got all of the right thinking ahead of us. But our goal will be let's be EBITDA neutral, which I believe based on a lot of the execution that we've already set in motion this year that we are still on target to achieve our goal of being EBITDA neutral.

Excellent. Thank you, Leke. And your last question for today, a viewer asks, how much would ATJ-30 cost roughly? And are we still waiting on the Summit pipeline for any progress to be made on ATJ-60?

Yes. I think I already addressed the question. But relating to the cost of ATJ30, that's a competitive information. We can divert that at this time.

It appears we have lost Leke. Eric, are you still there?

Yes, I'm still here. I can pick up where Leke left off while he rejoins.

Yes. Sorry about that.

No, no worries. Yes. So I think you pretty much already heard Leke's answer. We're not disclosing the cost of ATJ-30 at this time. We're still in the process of the feasibility and the engineering really of doing that. But what I would say is this is the important thing. At North Dakota, we have hundreds of acres of site that we own. The ethanol plant occupies only a fraction of that total footprint. We have hundreds of thousands, in fact, perhaps up to 1 million tons per year of pore space rights. That's the rock, the geology about a mile under the surface where you can store CO2. And there's a very supportive community, a great community of farmers who are up there, excuse me, 1 second.

So I think that it's a great site, and there's lots of options to do things, both big and small, ATJ-30, but all the way down to like road improvements and grain silo expansion, that type of thing. We're looking at all that, but it's too early to say what the capital cost of the ATJ-30 would be. You can expect it will be significantly lower than the ATJ-60 for just 2 basic reasons. One is we're not building the ethanol plant that's already built. Two is it's smaller. It's about half the size. So it will be substantially smaller than ATJ-60, but the exact cost is something that we're still working on.

Perfect. Thank you, Eric, for all your answers today, and thank you to our viewers who submitted questions. If you do not get a chance to submit your questions, feel free to reach out to the appropriate account manager here at Renmark. This concludes our presentation for today. But before we go, I'll turn it back over to you, Eric, for final remarks.

Great. Thanks, Julia. And if Leke rejoins, I'll give him a chance to say goodbye. But I want -- for those of you who may be new to the Gevo story or for those of you who know us really well already, I just want to emphasize a couple of key points. One is that we are, we think, a company that's already tangibly reducing emissions, which is our mission. Last quarter, it was over 100,000 metric tons of carbon sequestered or avoided by using our products, RNG, low-carbon ethanol and carbon capture.

So that's -- we have a base business that's grown a lot since last year. If you extrapolate that to the end of this year, maybe we'll do hundreds of thousands basically of tons of carbon sequestration or avoidance, which is the equivalent to converting a pretty tangible -- it will be the emissions equivalent to doing a whole bunch of electric vehicles, but we're doing it with drop-in products that work in existing infrastructure, things that are hard to electrify, like big trucks and in the future, jet aircraft. So that's number one. Number two, we're growing revenue and EBITDA, and we have targets to grow EBITDA a lot in the near term, even before we do things like a long-term DOE loan. Am I still here? I just got a message.

Yes, Leke has joined. Would you like me to join him on screen with you, Eric?

Yes, that would be great. Leke, I was just giving final remarks, I'll turn it back to you.

And the third thing I want to -- so we're reducing carbon footprint using drop-in fuels and existing technologies. We're growing revenue and EBITDA. And the third thing I want to emphasize is we have a lot of support across the spectrum of communities, states, countries, whether you're Canada or Europe or the United States, the last U.S. administration or the current U.S. administration, all those have shown support for the type of fuels that we make. And so I think when you take those 3 ingredients, that makes us a unique story, and that's why Leke and I are excited to be here.

But Leke, maybe I'll turn it over to you to give any final remarks.

Yes. No. Well, first of all, I apologize for dropping off there. I'm not really sure what happened from a technical difficulties perspective. But just to probably summarize a lot of discussions today, I think Gevo is on a great, call it, trajectory. A lot of the historical messages, aspirations, goals that we've communicated, we are on an execution-focused mode. And effectively, those are going to translate into financial performance that we are going to be very proud of as a management team. And of course, as Eric mentioned, we are very excited to be a part of this journey. Our assets, our projects, our, call it, strategic attributes that we have here and our capabilities enable us to be able to actually achieve these outcomes. And I couldn't be more excited to see when we actually achieve those goals and they start being reflected in our financial statements.

So from that perspective, I want to thank everyone again for joining these discussions with us in person or live and those that will download this video and take a look at it. And please feel free to reach out to our Investor Relations team if you have any questions. And we look forward to subsequent interactions with you from our routine business update perspective, but also more importantly, in a couple of weeks when we have our earnings call. So until then, we wish you well. Thank you.

Thank you again, Eric and Leke for the presentation. Once again, this was Gevo, Inc., trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol GEVO. Thank you again to everyone in Houston and surrounding areas for joining us today. The playback for this virtual non-deal roadshow will be available on our website 24 to 48 hours after the presentation under the VNDR Library tab. Stay tuned for other presentations in your area. Thank you, and see you next time.