Thank you for joining us. The floor is yours.
Great. Thanks, Mark, and can you see this slide that's up on screen? Okay, I assume you can. Thanks for the introduction, Mark, and the Noble team, and thanks for putting on this virtual conference. As Mark mentioned, I'm Eric Frey, VP of Finance and Strategy here at Gevo. Our ticker is GEVO, trading on the Nasdaq. So, Gevo is essentially a company that—it does a few different things, but they all are united by one thing, which is to start from renewable biomass-based carbon resources and use cost-effective, scalable technologies to convert them into fuels and chemicals that are drop-in to existing aircraft, cars, diesel trucks, that kind of thing. So you get the same molecules that we—that industry currently uses from fossil fuels, except we derive it from a non-fossil-based resource.
The reason we do that is because those resources are renewable, because they are 100% domestic production, they put more crops, more sugars to good use, and they're scalable and can be cost-effective, and they also reduce carbon footprint. That's what unites all these different things. But there are a couple of different things that we do. In the upper left, the box called Gevo Fuels, we have an ethanol plant, so corn comes in, corn co-products, and alcohol goes out, as well as carbon dioxide. And we also have technologies and projects to build alcohol-to-jet. Alcohol-to-jet is where you take ethanol, and you convert it to jet fuel, and then you get a lower carbon jet fuel, and you also increase the total supply of jet fuel.
So that's a great engine of EBITDA, for us, as well as organic growth and large capital products in our future that I'll talk more about. In the lower left corner here, Gevo RNG, in Iowa, we have assets, multiple farms, partnerships with farms, where we take dairy cow manure and run it through digesters to capture fugitive methane greenhouse gases. We make them pipeline quality and inject them into the local pipeline system. So we ma-- you make methane, CH4. It's the same gas that comes out of your gas stove or your gas grill, or that's used in industrial processes, or that's used for compressed natural gas trucks. You might see UPS or FedEx trucks that say CNG, compressed natural gas.
That uses molecules like these molecules, but it's very low carbon because it starts by capturing carbon effectively, and it supplements existing carbon-based fuels. So that's also an existing asset for us. In the upper right, this is more of an up-and-coming growth area for us, Verity and Gevo Chem on the right side. So Verity is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gevo. I'm actually CFO of Verity. Effectively, Verity is a software start-up tech company within Gevo. Why would we do this? It's definitely a little different from these things, where these are process industries. Why would we have a software start-up within our company? Well, the reason for that is because we're making a commodity product.
The molecule looks the same as jet fuel, or the molecule ethanol looks the same as other ethanol, and the molecule methane looks the same as other methane. But we're claiming that the process that we use to make it is low carbon. If you want to sell that to regulatory markets and voluntary markets that value a lower carbon footprint, you have to have an audit trail. And these are industries that don't always have a precise audit trail because that's not how commodity industries work. So we knew that we needed a track-and-trace cloud-based system that would unite all these different counterparties in this ag-based commodity supply chain into one platform so that everybody could show their data transparently.
And so if you are Google or Microsoft or some end company that wants to buy a lower carbon product, you can audit that supply chain and prove that it was lower carbon, how much fertilizer was used, or was renewable electricity used, and so on. So we made this for ourselves because we knew we would need it for the left side of the page, but we're offering it up to the industry because there's an existing biofuel and ag-based crop industry that we think needs it, too. So that's very exciting. And then on the bottom right side of the page, Gevo Chem, this is effectively our research and development effort.
So even as we're building plant, and plan to build technologies and plants that convert ethanol to jet fuel, we're, in the meantime, developing the second, third generation version of those technologies that'll be even better. We're big believers in continuous improvement. There's not one just moonshot strategy that gets you to a low carbon footprint. There's a series of incremental, continual improvements and positive feedback loops, and R&D is one of those for us. So we think we can reduce by 20%-30% the OpEx required to convert ethanol to jet fuel. It won't be ready for serial number one that we want to build, but you need to have a pathway to make the industry better and better. And when you have capital-heavy industry, one of the best ways to make it better is to make the capital more efficient.
So those are all the things we do, but like I said, they're tied by one common thread. We have a great team, and we have some changes in place that you may have seen recently. Our longtime leader, Pat Gruber, who's been with the company for a really long time, he's our current CEO, he will retire, and Paul Bloom, who's current president director, will become CEO. Paul's been with us for several years. He also has his PhD in chemistry. He worked at ADM, and a company called Valspar, so long experience in bio-based fuels and chemicals, and he's been working with us for quite a long time. So it's... Internally, for us, it's a positive change. It's bittersweet, obviously, 'cause, 'cause Pat is so passionate about the company. He's been such a mainstay for us, but-...
Pat also had a vision that he needed to develop the next generation of leaders. So that's why Leke became our CFO a year ago as well. Greg has been brought on as well to become effectively our VP of Operations and Engineering. So we have a really good team that spans the nexus of agriculture, chemistry, and bio-based fuels and chemicals, and you don't find that everywhere. So this is the core of our assets right now. This is a real picture, by the way. It's the Northern Lights, which is a really cool picture in North Dakota here. But last year, we made a transformative acquisition, and that transformative acquisition is what we now call Gevo North Dakota. So in North Dakota, we have 500 acres. There's an ethanol plant that sits there.
Corn comes in, corn co-products and ethanol comes out. We also have one of only three ethanol plants in the world so far that has its own wholly owned carbon capture. Bubbles come off the fermenter, that's like the bubbles in your beer or champagne. Nature concentrates those bubbles, and we have the geology about almost a mile underground, where we pump that gas, that carbon dioxide, which originated in the Earth's atmosphere. We pump it underground, where it has 1,000 years permanence. This is, and it also has 500 acres, so it's got room for more expansions and more production. This is effectively an engine of revenue and margin for us now, and it's also a platform for us to do alcohol-to-jet in the future.
We have over 300 patents, many of them related to Alcohol-to-Jet, and we want to deploy that technology here. One thing to make super clear is, when you do fermentation, which is what we're doing, in principle, any starch or sugary input can come in the door. In the U.S., in the Midwest, it's corn. In other places in the world, it could be other cereal crops, but in the U.S., it's corn. It's not the corn you eat, actually. Only a small amount of the corn that's grown actually goes into popcorn and canned corn that people eat. This is industrial corn, so it's milled, it's separated into the nutrients, effectively, the protein that goes into animal feed, the oil that goes into corn oil, and then you have starch or sugar.
And we can have starch or sugar, but honestly, we have a lot of starch and sugar already. So in the U.S., a lot of that is fermented to make alcohols. If you look on the right side, these are really important. This is why what we do is sustainable. The U.S. harvested something like 75 million acres of corn in the last few years. If you go back 100 years ago, it was the same. The same land has made more corn because farmers are about continuous improvement and doing more with less, and that's synergistic with sustainability. It's not an either/or thing. It's not like, well, we either have food, like popcorn, or we have fuels like ethanol.
They actually go hand in hand to do more with less, and that's what you're seeing here, as yields have gone up on the same land. So that's why we think and it all starts with carbon capture through photosynthesis. So what do you get from a bushel of corn? By weight, you get a third, a third, a third. You get ethanol, protein for animal feed. Effectively, this is the nutrients that we need in our bodies, and then carbon dioxide. Historically, the carbon dioxide, you know, it's a dilute, inert gas. You could vent it if you wanted to, but there's other industrial uses for it. For us, the carbon dioxide is a co-product because nature has concentrated biogenic gas, and we can pump it down a hole. I'm gonna skip ahead.
This is an important slide that we came out with. We 8-K'd this, last year. This is very different from the year prior. So we have this growth in front of us to deploy alcohol-to-jet. Last quarter, we had $6.7 million of EBITDA across our company for the quarter. We think we can get to this $40 million per year, okay, on an annualized basis, by just over the next several quarters, by just optimizing what we have, so improving how we count and sell our carbon, without capital. This $110 million over here, this is the size of the, of the pie. We'll see how much of that we get and, and how fast, but this is how much we could get before we build a big alcohol-to-jet plant.
If we fully utilize our carbon well, we'd have 1 million tons per year of pore space. So we need to bring in some third-party CO2 to fully utilize that. And if we fully optimize how we count and sell our carbon, and if we do small amounts of debottlenecking and produce incremental more volumes, think, think like $20 million of capital that's self-funded, that type of thing. So this is very different. This is now kind of the basis of Gevo, and in addition to this, we have alcohol-to-jet. We have a good balance sheet. I'll skip over that. Let's see. How am I doing on time? Okay, I'm gonna just go through this next section very quickly, so I can go to Q&A. But what I just talked to you about is basically our platform.
That's a good platform to take ethanol and make jet fuel, because if you do that, and it's low carbon, you can get synthetic aviation fuel, or SAF. The U.S. needs more jet fuel. It's hard to electrify jets. As people urbanize, they don't fly less. Gasoline and other products are kind of flat to down, but jet fuel is going the other way. Well, that creates a bottleneck because the U.S. hasn't built a new refinery of scale in, like, 50 years, and refineries only produce 9% jet fuel. When you do alcohol-to-jet, you make, like, 90% jet fuel. You really target the jet fuel without exacerbating gasoline. The cost to make it is $3-$4 a gallon, which is in the hunt to be competitive on a heads-up basis with jet fuel.
We have capital we have to pay for, so we need more than that. But our product also has more benefits because it's low carbon, so we get more for it... We think of plant number one, it's not really plant number one, the large scale plant number one. We built demo plants in the past, but large scale plant number one in North Dakota costs about $500 million to build and generates $150 million of EBITDA for us. So it's a good, it reduces carbon, but it's a good fundamental business, and that's why we're doing it. Once we build plant number one, the goal is there's 180 ethanol plants in the U.S.
We then take that technology, take that as a showcase and say, "Hey, do you wanna license our technology, or do you want us to come and deploy capital to take some of your ethanol and make jet fuel out of it?" We think that this, this can be done repeatedly. You could build 70 of these plants, and it would just satisfy the incremental jet fuel demand that the US is gonna need in the next 10 years. We don't know that we'll build 70 plants or how quickly, but the point is, that's a target-rich environment to build several. The administration supports biofuels and ethanol and aviation fuel. In fact, Trump talked about it, I think it was last week at an Iowa conference. So to summarize, what are we doing right now?
Grow our current EBITDA with what we have, deploy the technology that we think makes us really unique, which is to convert alcohol to jet in a really efficient way, and then copy, edit, paste those plants as many times as we can. So that's kind of near term, medium term, long term, our strategy, and maybe I'll stop there and go to questions.
Well, thank you, Eric. We do have a few questions that have come in on the queue, but just to start, you know, how does Gevo's proprietary technology differentiate your, sustainable aviation fuel offering compared to other pathways?
Sure. Let me, let me go back, actually. So this chart, the what the blue is showing you here is a scatter plot of the price of crude oil on the bottom and the price of jet fuel on the top. So if crude oil goes up, then jet fuel goes up. And this box here is our cash cost of production. So if our plant was built, fully paid off, fully depreciated, that's our cash cost to make a gallon of jet fuel from this process. Other ways of making jet fuel can work, but generally are more expensive. So, for example, HEFA is a way, there's very little SAF today, but HEFA is a way to make it. It starts with things like corn oil. Well, corn oil is one of our co-products.
When we make things out of corn, one of our co-products is corn oil, so our product is their feedstock. What that means is that fundamentally, we're upstream and integrated, and we'll always have a lower OpEx. So that's, that's kind of number one. And then number two is the technologies to go from corn to ethanol, ethanol to ethylene, and then ethylene to jet fuel. Those technologies exist, but they haven't been co-located in one plant to reduce carbon footprint. What Gevo's done is engineered a good mousetrap that does that efficiently. So do you have... Do you use power effectively? And when you do use power, do you, you know, try to use renewable power? That, that kind of thing. So those things combined are what drives the cost down. And then the final thing that drives the cost down is we're leveraging Mother Nature.
So Mother Nature does all this work for you through photosynthesis. When, when crops grow, it's effectively nature's solar-powered direct air capture machine, right? It's pulling in carbon dioxide and solar power. When you do fermentation, that's another - Mother Nature, again, is doing all this work to take this complicated biomass or biomolecule and give you a really clean alcohol. Once you get a clean alcohol, now you can do chemicals, industrial-scale chemicals, 'cause it's, 'cause it's clean. So those things are what drives down cost and makes it scalable. And our view is, if you wanna reduce carbon footprint, that's great, but it has to be low cost and scalable. It can't, it can't rely on government incentives forever.
You know, I think you just touched on it, but so where are the biggest opportunities to, to manage those costs and improve margins in, in SAF production?
Yeah, so that's the great thing, is there's a bunch of ways to improve the process. You have to remember, oil and gas, right, fossil fuels, they're great, but that industry has had billions and billions of capital plowed into it, and it's been fully matured, fully optimized, right? We're starting a new industry, slightly new. We're leveraging an existing agriculture and ethanol industry, and we're extending it. So you're starting from a new optimized industry, but to do ethanol to jet is not yet optimized. We've built demo plants in the past. We've done alcohol to jet and flown in planes in the past. Now, the key is, can you do it at scale in a way that gets an economic return that's repeatable? That's the key. How do you do that?
The way you do it is you design the plant to use energy efficiently, to reduce carbon where you can, where it makes sense to do so, because the end customer values that. There are customers that will pay for that, that want that. And also, you know, using the resources that are at hand. So the U.S. Midwest, for example, has some, in some cases, the geology to do carbon capture. Great, then you should do carbon capture. In other areas, the U.S. Midwest has a lot of livestock that produce manure. Well, if you have a lot of manure, you can take that methane and make biogas. Great, then you should use that biogas. And in the Midwest, the U.S. Midwest produces a huge amount of cheap corn. It's the world's biggest, cheapest, biggest exporter of, of corn, so you should use that.
Other areas in the world where they produce other crops, that's what you should use. So we're all about being agnostic as much as we can to drive down costs, and we've kind of left a trail of patents in our wake. Gevo has over 300 patents, a number of them issued in the last five years as we've engineered the alcohol-to-jet process specifically.
Can you walk us through the milestones ahead for the ATJ30 and how you're thinking about timing towards final investment decision?
Sure, sure. So we're targeting FID sometime in the second half of 2026. In order to get there, we have a conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy, okay, now called the Energy Dominance Fund. Okay, so under the previous administration, we received a conditional commitment for $1.5 billion as a construction loan to build a facility originally in South Dakota. We had a greenfield site in South Dakota. Last year, we acquired the site in North Dakota, this brownfield site that we're really excited about. And late last year, we did an 8-K filing that said that the Energy Dominance Fund was willing to discuss with us changing the scope of that loan to the North Dakota site. So we're very excited about that.
What that means is, we've spent the past few months talking to them about diligence, progressing the engineering to final engineering stage, FEL2, FEL3, and talking about debt sizing and debt service terms, and ensuring that they are okay with building this smaller project, better, we think, but doesn't require $1.5 billion. It requires, we think, about $500 million of build CapEx. So we're rejiggering that loan. The current administration and the current Energy Dominance Fund office has been super supportive and great to work with, and they were willing to extend that commitment period until April so that we could sort that out. So between now and April, you should see more definition from us about, you know, what is the loan size and term gonna be?
Will they extend that commitment period so we can get to FID later this year?
So then, what once you reach FID, what does the construction timeline look like, and how quickly could the project begin generating value?
Yeah. About 2-3 years, we think is the construction time. So you're talking about late 2026, 2-3 years construction time. These are not small endeavors. You know, this is... the intent is that this is a commercial-scale, repeatable plan. You don't have to build one that's a lot bigger than this, although you could. So it does take time, and the U.S. is a country where, you know, industrial products, frankly, take a fair amount of time. So we think it takes 2-3 years. However, once it's been financed and once it's in construction, our view is that that site becomes the showcase for agriculture done well, working with farmers in partnerships so that everybody wins, tracking the product using our Verity platform, and making things low carbon, using carbon capture and sustainable aviation fuel.
So while we're in that construction phase, we're gonna be going out and saying, "Hey, you other 180 ethanol plants in the U.S. and others globally, do you wanna deploy something like this at your site? Do you wanna license the tech from us, or do you want us to come build and be your neighbor and take some of your ethanol and make jet fuel?" So hopefully, we can get some of those products lined up during the construction phase, but we gotta get plant number one done first.
And then, what, what are the main operational and commercial levers that support EBITDA growth, say, over the next couple of years?
Sure. So, you know, if you look at our last filing, our in 3Q, that Gevo North Dakota asset generated, it was, like, $16 million or $17 million. So it's close to $70 million per year EBITDA, okay? And it makes a number of co-products, but let's just take the one product, ethanol, okay? It's making 67 million gallons a year of ethanol. So effectively, the EBITDA from that asset is more than $1 per gallon of production. Now, that's misleading 'cause we're not just making ethanol, we're making carbon capture. But the point is that that's a big margin in an industry, a traditional ethanol industry, where, you know, 20 cents per gallon is a really good margin, but we're getting more than a dollar.
What that means is, if you can expand, if you can de-bottleneck and expand production volume, ethanol, co-products, and carbon, by 10%-20%, you get a, you get a big boost to your margin, right? Because, because it's high... So a little bit more volume gives you a lot more margin. So that's one of the things we're doing is, we're already deploying modest amounts of self-funded capital from that asset to de-bottleneck, make a little bit more volume, to make some site improvements, and to improve how we, to improve our carbon intensity. Because the better carbon intensity we have at that site, the more value we get from our carbon.
You know, I saw the announcement, you know, Verity, and Bushel-
Oh, I-
announced,
Sorry
... the integration that'll connect their Bushel's on-farm data with Verity's sustainability model and compliance platform. So I was just hoping, since you run that business, can you kind of give us an update on Verity and how it fits into Gevo's broader strategy?
Yeah, sure. So, Verity, like I mentioned before, we have a team of software engineers and agriculture and compliance experts within Gevo. And the idea of Verity is a cloud-based software that gives you an audit trail from, you know, Jill, Jill's farm, and Jill actually is one of the people at Verity. Jill's farm that grows whatever, soybeans or corn, through a grain elevator, through the corn mill and the ethanol plant, all the way to some end customer, and then maybe, at the end of the day, companies like Nasdaq, Google, and Microsoft, and those types of companies that wanna purchase carbon offsets. So you need to track that through the value chain. The announcement with Bushel is great because Bushel has existing software that helps.
They have things like Bushel Wallet and these other software platforms that. You gotta remember, there's a huge number of farmers in the U.S., and they've got enough, they've got enough screens. They've got enough screens, they've got enough apps. They don't necessarily want more. Bushel already has that upstream contact with an enormous number of farms and grain elevators, so they're already getting kind of some of that initial data. And what, what we want to do with them is have Verity be a plugin, effectively, to Bushel. So we're, we're getting that upstream data.
Now, what Verity can do is track and trace that crop, that ag product, as it goes all the way through the grain elevator to some biofuel plant, to some end customer, and have it be an audit trail that also gives every counterparty in that audit trail confidence that their data is not being shared without their permission, okay, basically. The more, the better they do, the better everybody in that value chain does. So if Farmer Jill uses less fertilizer, if she does a better job, does more with less, not only is that good for her farm because she spends less money on fertilizer, but now she can claim that, "Hey, my bushel is lower carbon than that other bushel. So I can get more value in low-carbon markets than that other bushel." That's good, because everybody benefits from improvement and transparency.
So we're super excited about that partnership with Bushel. If you look at our other earnings, or other revenue, rather, on our quarterly income statements, that's where you'll see our software-as-a-service revenue starting to show up. So we do have revenue from that business. It's small, but it's also a software company. So our view is that it could be really transformative for Gevo if we really start to grow that revenue.
You know, I think we're ending near the end of our time, so I think we'll close with... If you could just maybe touch on the capital allocation for, say, the next 12 months, and also the closing argument for the investors watching today.
Sure. Well, thanks, Mark, to you and to the Noble team for setting up this conference. It's been a great conference. Had some good meetings earlier today, so thanks a lot for that. What I would say is capital allocation, one, we're going to grow EBITDA without capital allocation, just by optimizing our sales strategy. Two, we're going to grow EBITDA. It takes a little bit more time. Think of, think of not years, but not a couple of months either, to de-bottleneck our site and make more ethanol co-products and carbon dioxide. We think if we do that, and then bring in some third-party CO2, we could get to $110 million of EBITDA. That's the total. Again, we'll see how fast we get there and how much of that we get, but that's the size of the prize.
That does not require us to form $hundreds of millions of capital, okay? That requires us to have self-funded $tens of millions of capital. Think, like, maybe 20, something like that. That's kind of like a, you know, that, that's a year or two type horizon. It's not. It doesn't take years and years and years. Then the third element of growth is we need. You know, we have to build a product of $500 million build CapEx to build a big plant that converts ethanol to jet fuel. Again, we have our Department of Energy loan that we're discussing with them to, to finance that. That does take a longer time. That takes 2-3 years, but it becomes a showcase to build potentially dozens of similar plants.
So those are kind of the three elements of growth for us: optimize what we have, grow what we have, then deploy our Alcohol-to-Jet technology and do it as many times as we can. We think you could build 70 in the U.S., total. So yeah, that's the-
Well, good.
That's what we're doing. That's the pitch.
Well, it's a compelling presentation, and thank you so much for joining us today, Eric.
Thanks a lot, Mark. Thanks to you and Noble. Appreciate it.