Just doing drop-in hydrocarbon fuels, these are things like jet fuel, gasoline, and diesel. We'll exact drop-in replacement, but at this time they're using renewable resources. They're cost competitive with petro-jet on a production cost basis, and it is [audio distortion] they also will be carbon. They can wipe out the carbon quickly and [ audio distortion] . We have these four business areas: fuels, focus on the jet fuel, gasoline, diesel fuel, etc. We also have a chemical business because that comes along for free; it's the ride, basically. Same chemicals that we use to make fuel can also be made to [audio distortion] . Security tracking is a business that tracks carbon through the whole value chain. It's a SaaS business.
We use ELT technology, so you track where did the carbon come from, how did it get here, what energy was used during production, all the way, for instance, to the seat of an airplane to prove it. The question is, well, you buy jet fuel, how do you know it's different? We're telling you [audio distortion]. We also have an RNG business. [audio distortion] RNG is renewable natural gas. The reason we have that as a business is because I thought we were going to need it to drive the carbon footprint down, so we have some of the top, probably [audio distortion] RNG businesses [audio distortion] .
[audio distortion] T hat is where our basic business is about. What is interesting about us this year is we are in transition. We recently bought a plant up in North Dakota that does ethanol. It also has—it is one of the three operating CCS capture systems, carbon capture systems. That matters, and that makes us a different game in that we are a developer. We have a huge amount of technology, a huge number of patents. [audio distortion] combination of what we just did in North Dakota by producing ethanol, the 45Z tax credits, our RNG business, [audio distortion], etc.
We are in an unusual position for a developer that we have a strong balance sheet with several hundred million dollars on the balance sheet in cash, and we are in an unusually solid position for someone like us who's commercializing it. Our main project that we're pushing forward, we call ATJ-60. ATJ- 60 is a 60-million-gallon jet fuel plant targeted for Lake Preston, South Dakota. We have a DOE conditional commitment for $1.63 million for that project, and we're in the midst of sorting out the contracts, finalizing the [audio distortion] , and all the rest. We have a second jet project that we're working on in the US, and that's what we call ATJ-30, a 30-million-gallon plant up in North Dakota adjacent [audio distortion] . This is, of course, we are a growing business.
[audio distortion] North Dakota, [audio distortion] . We also have, with the original alcohol jet plant, an oil feed tank system in ours, operating since 2012 [audio distortion]. Our team is extremely experienced [crosstalk]. A lot of this came from Cargill. It's not like this doesn't really tell you what we did, though. This does. This slide up above was a cornfield [audio distortion].
One of the ones that is particularly fun to see is that this plastic here, I invented it when I was young, and then we built plants and commercialized it. The ones we drink from are from these cups. My kids get great crying everywhere we go, and they're like, "I didn't do that." That kind of filled me a tickle, too, when I see it. It's nice to see. We've done this. My team has been there and done it before. We've worked with seriously scarred veterans about how to commercialize things, make projects work, technology works. The lessons we learned in developing and commercializing that site are the same ones that we apply to diesel and jet fuel. It's not like we're making this stuff up. It's not magic. We can't scale things. You can't take risk on technology.
You can't take risk on supply chains of raw materials. You can't. It's too big. Everything's too big. Here is the market backdrop. One of the things that we always have to point out these days, because we have a fluctuating new president here, and he's—I like a lot of things he's doing. I particularly like this. It is [audio distortion] , and in it, he included biofuels on the good list. He included ethanol on the good list, and aviation fuel on the good list. That's a big deal, right? That matters, because people were betting against it. Anyone who bet against it will run. The administration is interested in SAF. They call it, instead of sustainable aviation fuel, they're calling it synthetic aviation fuel, which is actually closer to the original name anyway, the ASTM standards.
It's one of these things that I think is being overlooked, is that people are just, "Oh my God, all things carbon are bad." No, actually, it isn't about that. It's about it creates jobs. It's potentially cost-effective and competitive with petro-jet except for it's made from renewable resources. Oh, and it abates carbon, too, and creates a lot of jobs. It's a little bit different game to play in a different paradigm. One of the things that's really important that we always drive home is that this is a scatter plot of jet fuel price versus oil price. The blue dots are just the scatter. An integrated ATJ plant that we're talking about is the green one there on the lower side, lower left. It's cost competitive. I'm not joking.
You can make it from renewable resources and still be cost competitive on a production cost basis. Okay, capital's a different story. Capital costs have definitely increased. How do we pay for that? That's the question. When the marketplace pays for some carbon abatement, then we can actually solve that problem. There are other technologies that are out there, HEFA or power-to- liquids, e-fuels. E-fuels will never be cost competitive, ever. It's a mathematical chemistry problem. Never.
We have to have free energy and free hydrogen while we're asking. That's just the reality of doing the math. 3 lbs for e-fuels, 3 lbs of hydrogen per gallon of jet fuel. That sounds like a lot of hydrogen. These are real practical methods. The reason this works is that when you do photosynthesis routes, remember, CO2 in the atmosphere captured through photosynthesis makes a carbohydrate.
We take the carbohydrate, make it into an alcohol by fermentation. Then we do chemistry and make it into a jet fuel. We're capturing not just the carbon hydrogen, but all the electrons, too. Everybody forgets that when they do the analysis. Instead of having to man-made electrons, no, we're getting them from photosynthesis directly and keeping them and preserving them throughout. That's why we have such an advantage. This is an economic curve or bar chart against competitive technologies. Oil's on the left. Our ATJ-60 economics are the one next to it. They're the second from the left. The gray is the cash cost production, the capital requirements to get good returns are the light green. But you can see why I'm saying the cash cost production, we can be in the hunt with petrol. I find that astounding.
On a fundamental level, fundamental economic level, we can be cash cost competitive. How do we deal with capital is the question. You can see that we think we can lower it going forward as we learn how to do rather than stick-built EPC projects that have this old-fashioned way that boosts up cost. We think we can by modularizing, we can reduce that cost, and with all sorts of technology approaches. On the right side, starting with non-integrated ATJ, so imports from Brazil, they have to be at an advantage because of their economic disadvantage from jet fuel. Importing adds cost. They are at an advantage. You have smaller plants. Then HEFA is made from vegetable oil or waste cooking oil, things like that. We are about half of their cash cost of production. That is a fundamentally important point.
HEFA, though, is the one that's mostly sold by companies like Neste, Cargill, Diamond Green, and people like that, Montana Renewables. It's a good product. It works. It works. They take renewable diesel and convert it into jet fuel. It takes an extra step and adds extra cost. That's why it looks like that on the cost basis. We like the fundamental position. The capital is the issue. One of the things that you see on this thing up in the list about CI score is our CI score can be below zero. Why? We're capturing renewable carbon. It goes through the system. We get the new renewable electrons that come with it. We have to add energy during the process, but if we use green energy along the way, we can wipe out the footprint. That's how it's done.
When you brew, making ethanol, they make CO2 gas. You can capture it and sequester it. That's why we have a sequestration plant up in North Dakota, because that puts it into the ground. That's biogenic CO2 into the ground. Doing that creates value. You get the absolute lowest cost of carbon abatement. When the market gets this, the marketplace development, believe it or not, for carbon abatement, people are willing to pay for carbon abatement. It's a voluntary market. They call them for scope one and scope three emissions. Scope one emissions are what you would use if you're buying a fuel and you have to be a town before it. Scope three is what the customer of that would be. Look, that's voluntary. That's in addition to the regulatory market.
It's what people get wrong about our company frequently, is that they all, it's all about our 45Z. No, it's not. That's one part of it. The other part's a state part. The other part is RINs. Oh, and on top of that is the voluntary. We just announced yesterday a deal with a company in Europe who's collecting and buying the carbon separate from the jet fuel. I think that's actually how this market's going to unfold.
We sell the Jet A. It's just Jet A. It gets valued as Jet A. Then we sell the carbon separately. That's how it's going to work. This is what I just described. These are all the kind of customers that we talked to, just lots of them. It's a developing market. We even got Bill Nye the science guy up. He's interested in this. He heard me talk. He didn't come learn about this because it's a different paradigm.
Who heard of a cost-effective approach to solve carbon and make jet fuel at the same time and it's cost-effective? How about that? The jet fuel market is the demand for SAF is expected to increase. The airlines continue—the airlines, the whole industry around the airlines continues to want to decrease their carbon footprint. They have to have SAF, sustainable aviation fuel. ATJ is going to take up a large part of that because it's the most cost-effective route. This is just one projection that makes that point. That means for a company like us who has technology, we're going to deploy plants. We're going to be a developer in addition to operating our own plant or plants. That's a pretty good outlook for us.
Making the jet fuel, the car goes in, uses some wind, natural gas, we mill it, we make ethanol, and then it's literally connecting the ethanols together through chemistry to connect two by two to get to like 12 to 14 carbons locked. That's jet fuel. It's curious. Diesel fuel is 16 carbons. Octane gas is eight carbons. That's actually how it works.
You're starting them off using the same techniques, not the chemical that you use. What we did is we learned when we made this plastic about the business system, how do you really do a low-cost [audio distortion] We learned that system. We said, "Gosh, that would work for jet fuel gasoline." What we should do is then, but the cheapest fermentation in the world is ethanol.
We should leverage that. And so take the carbohydrates, make ethanol, and then where can we get that chemistry? It's using the chemical industry. So from a cracker, they make these primary petrochemicals, ethylene and propylene butane. Okay? What do you do with those? Well, you can make them into plastics. That's kind of a—that's a small market. But they also make them into jet fuel. That technology has been used for decades in the petrochemical industry.
So we said, "Hey, the Axens are partner." You get it. They're getting the lead. They want to know about the price of these technologies. They've been operating for decades. We're like, "Hey, you should work with us." They didn't know that you could lower the carbon footprint. So what you've done, we put it all together in a package. We use the overall plant designs. They own individual unit operations.
It works pretty well for all of us. It works. It's all scale. The risk, it's a de-risked technology [audio distortion] commercialize it. We also wind up making a huge amount of animal feed. For those of you who go, "Well, it's like food versus fuel," I'll tell you what. In corn kernel, there's carbohydrates, there's protein, and there's oil. You can take the carbohydrates—that's the part that makes us all fluffy with that—is the carbohydrates. That's the stuff that is not necessarily good. All high percent of nutrition is captured as protein to soil. That's 1.3 billion lbs of protein product to be sold [audio distortion] paradigm.
Oh, and by the way, it doesn't take more land either. That data that Barron's published is wrong. They're losing the argument. It's going to be interesting to watch over the years because productivity continues to increase here in the States and around the world around how you produce crops. This is our sort of edition or engineering rendition of the plant that we're building in Lake Preston, South Dakota. It made 600,000 tons of carbon, but it makes—and the jet fuel produces the pounds of protein that I just talked about.
This is a plant that we acquired up there in Richardton. It's what's called Richardton right on the house of [audio distortion], North Dakota. It has the lowest carbon intensity is how we in the industry refer to scoring carbon. That's the CI. That's what we talk about, carbon intensity. There's a model we use called GREET from Argonne, and 45Z is pegged to that. This plant is the lowest carbon intensity plant that we're aware of.
For ethanol production, that means that turns into money and allows us to capture value from 45Z. Here's another thing that the industry gets wrong or the analysts get wrong. 45Z is a law. It's not getting undone. It is not getting undone. Sorry, too late. We're already partway into the year. It's included in the bills that are extended to be included with jet fuel for three years. This is a real thing and a tax credit that can be monetized. We're already here, [audio distortion] . This is an important understanding.
The world is just in a different place than how it's talked about by a lot of these analysts. We're like, "What about this?" or, "No, I got news." It's certainly not correct for their marketplace with 45Z credits. That's reality. It is very interesting. It's just not what people say. This is a—we're trying to work on a slide that captures what we do because we're a little bit odd in that we have operating plants and we're developing technology. We're building plants. We're investing in plants. We're a developer, too. We also have—we have 100+ patents covering the things I was just talking about, the whole business system of alcohol to jet. That is actually a relevant point too. We're going to use that intellectual property over time. We have an outstanding position [audio distortion].
I like the emphasis of the Trump administration [audio distortion]. These are all good things for us. Verity is the system of carbon tracking and tracing. It really is tracking everything because how do you—look, here's the analogy of this cup. Look at this cup. Look at this cup. It's better. Why? It's plastic cup. How do I know it's made from renewables? How do I know it's made from renewables? I said so. No, it's because it has—we put this green band on this to let people have a clue that it's somehow different and then try to create a brand around it.
We had to do that because when people get to—how do you know it's different? Jet fuel is even worse. Jet fuel is just jet fuel. It literally is legally jet fuel. It goes into the marketplace. How do you know it's different? Trust me. Oh, they're colored. Yeah. It's all the same. Literally, legally, literally the same. It's legally the same. That's the definition [audio distortion]. There are artificial ways of doing it that are getting busted down. In Europe, there's a big rigmarole hoopla around the waste you go fats and oils. No fraud. Prove where the carbon came from. That's our belief. That's how you create the value. Think of it as a brand. Anyway, that's what Verity is about, tracking and tracing.
We're tracking through all the manufacturing. We have that operating already at the testing it out in plants. We're working with existing ethanol plants and soybean plants. We're already working to make sure that we can measure the energy and give direct real-time CI scores along as we manufacture stuff. We think the future—we think consumers ultimately are going to want to know, "Well, did I get something for that money I paid? Did I get something for it?" [audio distortion] I'm at RNG. This is a—we have 400,000 million BTUs. We built this ourselves. We didn't like the EPC bid prices. They were outrageous. It works and operates. We'll grow—it's on a path upward. We actually probably be like 500,000 million BTUs. It's already EBITDA positive.
We profitable contributing. BP distributes it into California for the trucking industry. As I mentioned, these building blocks, it is also—we can take any of these building blocks, the ethylene. We can make propylene with technology. Propylene, we have a deal with LG Chem in Korea to do these kinds of technologies. It is also—we can do these too.
Again, how do you—if you made these for renewables, how do you tell they're different? We're back to Verity. All these pieces fit together with us. This will follow. It will not be the thing that drives. The fuels will drive the development of the business system. You know what? These can have a heck of a lot of value to the business system. This slide, I'm not going to go through it. All the reasons why we did it. Thanks. Questions? Yeah.
How big can you grow? How extensive are you marketing? You're selling already carbons for trucking, using it for cars. Is there any limit to the size of the capital cost for construction? The question is, how big is the market? What's the potential? How big is the potential?
That's a really interesting question. We were just talking about that. We're looking at jet fuel. Jet fuel is projected to—jet fuel itself, its demand is projected to increase around the world by 2x or so over the next period of decades. That's only 5% of the carbon. It is. When you consider that, it's about 110 billion gal worldwide right now. It's going to sell that. All right? That's a lot of billions of gal.
When you're talking about a plant like ours, an 18-gal plant, it is a big capital investment. It is going to—there's a lot of room for growth here. When you consider that the ethanol industry is placed in the gasoline fuel pool and its mileage increases, there's less gasoline pool needed. EVs will have an impact too. There's less. It is not growing. Yet, production can increase. Corn production can increase. Here in the States, we have a situation where we have an abundant amount of corn. They can grow more on the same land. Ethanol is becoming overcapacity. It is overcapacity already. We can stop that up. There's a target in the market. All everything is corn. Here in the States, we couldn't. We don't have to. We can use—we're the first to make wood.
We can do it from wood. We're the first to fly jets, commercial planes on—not a big deal. It's just a carbohydrate. And India first to fly from molasses. So we can do any of those things. It's about what works economically. The economics are advantaged here in the U.S., that's for sure. Way more than Brazil. Capital cost for the plant. Capital cost.
Here's what I don't like. Is the capital cost for a plant—call it $200 million of equipment cost, the actual pure equipment cost. How do you do a DOB project from inside and install that damn stuff along with it? You got an EPC contractor who's going to give you the belt and braces approach, and then you're going to have all the financial wizardry to make it so it's belt and braces approach. It's a $2.5 billion investment. Are you freaking kidding?
That's reality. It still gives a good return of about 15%. That is where we're at now. This is why I say we have room [audio distortion] . If I could build it myself, if I had the money to just build it, I'd be done. Other questions?
Have you already started working with airlines?
We have. We have several hundred million gal of contracts already. The problem with airlines is they're terrible with their old customers. They don't have good balance sheets. You can't trust them. They don't do long-term offtake agreements. They do spot bases. They're the wrong people. They don't care about carbon billing. Only from the pressure they receive downstream then.
This is what I said about detaching the carbon value from the jet fuel value. Hi, we'll just sell you the jet fuel. We can't get this. The jet fuel goes to the market, [audio distortion]. Correct. They would like to keep the carbon credits. This is the tug of war we're going through. [audio distortion] might be able to monetize. We're the ones creating it all. This actually is the real-life tug of war that we work through right now. It's part of that game. The airlines aren't profitable. That's the reason. That's right. They can't take pricing on their—that's it. This is the challenge. Remember, my plan was paid off.
It's competitive with jet fuel. Straight up against oil. Now, if I get paid for that carbon value in some way in the marketplace, then I don't need any government stuff, any credits. I don't need anything. That's what the future looks like. How do we get from here to there? That's the business we're working on, of how to create that value. It comes down to [audio distortion] . That's what's interesting about it. We're in a very good [audio distortion] ethanol and a better way of developing new technologies [audio distortion] .
I would say the question is going to be about is a new technology and new business model. Changes is there are opportunities for incremental changes to technology. No, these technologies are mature proven things. We have a particular technology that skips steps and said, "Yeah, we're working on the Axens." Remember, they want to know about price. They think our process beats theirs. Great. In a few years from now, that'll matter.
Today, we don't need that. We just go to it. It's the business system that matters. What matters is our roadblock so far is all about financing. What's the marketplace for carbon? Who's going to buy this stuff? Same questions. Airlines, sure, they'll buy it. All day long, it's the same price. That's a hell of a lot. Who's going to pay the carbon value? That's the question. That is what we work on. That is what we have to establish. That takes real things.
In this space, there is so much hype and BS. It is mind-boggling. It is kind of magical stuff. It is going to save the world. No. No. These are giant 2 billion lbs of corn. 2 billion lbs of corn goes into a plant. It makes 1.3 billion lbs of animal feed, 60 million gal of jet fuel. Think about that. That is like a truckload of stuff every four minutes. Think about the scale of these things. That is what we are talking about here. You cannot work with them to create something new from nothing. You are going to work that way. It is marketing what exists and make it [audio distortion] .