All right. Hello everyone, and thank you all for joining us during the Lytham Partners Spring 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Blum, managing partner here at Lytham Partners, and today, Eric Frey from Gevo will be walking us through the company's slide presentation. Quick reminder, Gevo trades under the ticker symbol GEVO on the Nasdaq. All right, Eric, thanks so much for your participation today. The floor is all yours.
Thank you, Robert, and thanks to your team for having this conference. I'm Eric Frey, VP of Finance and Strategy at Gevo. As Robert mentioned, our stock ticker is GEVO on the Nasdaq. Essentially, we're a platform for sustainable aviation fuel or synthetic aviation fuel. The first thing that makes us successful is our team. Our company, everything we do is at the nexus of energy and bio-based fuels and chemicals, and sustainability. Our team has decades of experience in all those sectors. We're very fortunate to have people who have so many decades of experience in doing all that kind of stuff at that nexus, from early stage beginnings all the way to full commercial scale. Here's what we do in a snapshot. There's a couple of pieces to our company, so I'll dwell on this for just a second. What we call Gevo Fuels.
We have assets that take corn in the door and produce corn co-products plus ethanol fuel and does carbon capture. The fermentation process of ethanol produces a high-purity carbon dioxide that's biogenic, and we have a good geologic sink to sequester that carbon. We're one of a few public companies that's doing carbon capture. In addition to that is a platform that sets the table for us to do Alcohol-to-Jet. One of the ways you can make a sustainable aviation fuel is to convert ethanol to jet fuel. Ethanol is blended into gasoline in your car. Jet fuel obviously goes on jets. It's hard to electrify a jet aircraft. If you use a low-carbon ethanol as your feedstock, you can, at scale, make a lower carbon jet fuel. That's what we're doing at Gevo Fuels.
In the bottom left, Gevo Chem. We have plans to build a world-scale Alcohol-to-Jet facility. In the meantime, we're doing the R&D and the technology and the know-how to make it as efficient as possible. If there's going to be plants that convert ethanol to jet fuel, it's an industry that's not mature. The fossil fuel industry is very mature, this industry is not mature. We won't stop with plant number one. Our goal is that there will be second and third generations of these plants to convert ethanol to jet that will be more efficient, more capital cost efficient, and OpEx efficient. We have really great partnerships with large strategic partners like LG Chem and Axens to scale up those new technologies. You can also make a lot of different materials and things from these products, too.
In the upper right, if you're making a low-carbon product that's the same as the fossil fuel product, if I had a glass of sustainable aviation fuel and a glass of jet fuel, they would look the same, and they would work the same in engines. For customers and regulators to know that one of them is different, you have to track, have an audit trail of traceability all the way to its source. What were the farming practices that were used? What types of energy were used in the operations to produce your product, and so on. That's what we do at Verity, is to provide that digital audit trail. The lower right corner, Gevo RNG.
That's another form of carbon capture, actually, except instead of capturing carbon dioxide, we have dairy farm partners where we take their manure, we capture the fugitive methane emissions. That's a greenhouse gas as well. We clean it up, and we inject it into the pipeline. You have, instead of having natural gas, you have renewable natural gas. It's the same natural gas that comes out of your stove or your gas grill, but it's negative carbon. When you burn it, you've actually put more carbon away than you put back into the air because you captured carbon on the front end. Those are a few different components of our business, but what ties them all together is making drop-in products at scale that are also low carbon. Why are we so interested in scaling up to do Alcohol-to-Jet?
Because it's a scalable way to make a low-carbon jet fuel from plant sugar, and plant sugars are very abundant. When you convert corn to ethanol and co-products, by weight, you get a third, a third, a third of carbon dioxide, co-products like protein and corn oil, and sugar. You can convert that sugar into ethanol, or you can convert the ethanol into jet fuel. This process makes 90% jet fuel in terms of its product stream. Fossil fuel refineries generally make 9% jet fuel. Every barrel of crude oil, most of it is not jet fuel. Every gallon of ethanol that we convert to jet fuel, most of our product would be jet fuel under this process. The demand for jet fuel is going up, but most fossil fuels demand is in decline.
We think that it makes a lot of sense to trim the plant sugar and the ethanol supply and convert it into jet fuel. Last but not least, why are we interested in jet fuel? Because you can produce it at relatively low cost for a first-generation plant. To convert ethanol to jet fuel, your cash cost of production is about $3-$4 per gallon of jet fuel. That's in the hunt to be competitive with fossil jet fuel today. In fact, fossil jet fuel today is over $4 because of international conflict. We can be in the hunt on day one, and that's before you include the benefits that customers and regulators are willing to ascribe to lowering carbon footprint. We can make it better over time. This is a good place for a starting point versus an industry that's already mature.
It's also the lowest cost of production route to make SAF, is through Alcohol-to-Jet. Last year was a transformative year for us. We made an acquisition in North Dakota that gave us the foundation of producing ethanol and carbon capture, and that sets the table for us to deploy Alcohol-to-Jet in the future. Last quarter, we made a little bit of Alcohol-to-Jet SAF. In the past, our company has made it and flown it. The goal in the future is to make it big. To make it big, you need feedstock and carbon capture and a base of cash flow. That's basically what we got to last year. That's how we were able to get this $16 million of EBITDA last year. Now, how do we grow that $16 million of EBITDA? Well, here's the breakdown by segment.
What we plan to do, we think we can grow that 16 quite a lot. In fact, our target is to get to $40 million per year just by execution this year on a run rate basis. A key element of doing that is being efficient everywhere. In this segment, that's the ethanol and carbon capture segment, that's a real engine of earnings for us. We want to grow and in fact double that segment. We have plans to do that. Here's what Gevo North Dakota looks like. It's been operating for quite a long time, and it's one of a few permitted Class VI operating carbon capture wells that's around. Again, we're one of the few public companies that does carbon capture and is doing it profitably today.
We have about 1 million tons per year of capacity to inject carbon dioxide one mile underground into the rock where it mineralizes and is rated to have over 1,000-year permanence. We're only using about 17% of that pore space today. That CO2 comes off the fermenter when you make ethanol. It's the same bubbles that are in beer if you make beer. We inject that CO2 underground, but we can inject about 1 million tons per year. We're only injecting about 170,000 tons per year today. We plan to grow that. One way to grow it is by producing more on-site, and another way to grow it is by bringing in third-party volumes. This is a good spot for us to be right now, but it also sets the table for us to build large scale alcohol-to-jet.
We have the captive ethanol feedstock, we have the captive carbon capture. We can sell our carbon in a couple different ways. On the left side of the page, when we reduce carbon intensity by one ton, in fact by 80% relative to fossil fuels. California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Canada have low carbon fuel programs. Effectively, those are cap and trade programs, where if you sell fuel that's lower carbon into those markets, you get so many dollars per metric ton of a credit. Those credits trade. We generate those credits in those markets. That's the left side of the page. Alternatively, on the right side of the page, if we don't sell to those LCFS markets, no one has claimed or paid for that carbon value.
Increasingly, we've been developing, and I think we're pioneers in this area of selling into the so-called voluntary or carbon dioxide removal, CDR markets. There's a really cool website at the bottom of this page, cdr.fyi. You can go check it out. Effectively, companies like Nasdaq, PayPal, Bank of Montreal have paid us so many dollars per metric ton for the tons of carbon dioxide that we've been sequestering. We will deliver our effectively carbon value into the regulatory markets and into the voluntary markets, depending on which market needs it the most. We have plans to grow quite significantly based on debottlenecking and optimizing the existing operations. We have plans to expand and in fact double our existing ethanol and carbon capture. Beyond that, to then deploy Alcohol-to-Jet. There's existing technologies to convert ethanol to jet fuel.
We've licensed those technologies, and we have a project that we call ATJ30 to convert a portion of our ethanol into jet fuel and make SAF. After that, the idea is, can we franchise and license and do many plants like that in the long term? We've got a short, medium, and long-term vision for growth, which is based on cash flow from operations, based on strategic partnerships, and based on project level capital raising. Where we want to deploy ATJ30, the goal is, as I said, in North Dakota. Why is that important? Our view is once we get product financing in place so that all the pieces have satisfied lenders and we're in construction, we think construction takes two to three years for that project. It becomes a showcase to do more projects like that. We call that Project North Star.
In the past, we've used our assets to showcase how SAF works to airlines to get them to use and buy batches of Alcohol-to-Jet. In the future, we want to use this site as a showcase to capital providers to say, "Hey, we should do more of these." The reason we think we can do more of these is because there's a large amount of ethanol plants in the U.S. and the world, and we think it makes sense to trim that supply and make jet fuel out of it. You could produce about 2 billion gallons per year of jet fuel. That's about how much additional jet fuel the U.S. will demand in the next 10 years by building about 70 of these Alcohol-to-Jet plants.
We're not saying that necessarily you would produce 70 of these plants right away, but there was a period when the U.S. built dozens of ethanol plants. We do think that there is scope to build many of these jet fuel plants, and that's why we need to get serial number one done. We do broad-based policy support. In fact, both of the past two administrations have passed and extended biofuel-related tax credits. The current administration released the largest renewable volume obligation ever as part of the Renewable Fuel Standard. Both major political parties in the U.S. have historically supported biofuels in general, and increasingly aviation biofuel in particular.
This isn't the first time that we've. A lot of the things we want to do are, in some sense, new to the world, but this is not the first time we've done new things as a company. We were the first to produce Alcohol-to-Jet at demo scale, the first to certify it, and the first to have it fly on commercial flights. To summarize what our vision is, step one is grow. Grow our base EBITDA by optimizing and expanding the volumes that we're producing today. Step two is deploy our ATJ30 project. That's what makes us really differentiated, is to have Alcohol-to-Jet at our own site that's using that feedstock that we have, and then copy, edit, paste.
We think that in the U.S. and around the world, there could be an industry that trims plant sugar and ethanol supply and converts it into jet fuel. If you use this process, you get a low-carbon jet fuel. That's all I have for today. I hope that was nice and concise. If you have any questions, please reach out to our ir@gevo.com email bucket, or you can email me, E-F-R-E-Y, that's my name, ericfrey@gevo.com. I hope to hear from you. Thanks, Robert and Lytham for setting up this conference.
Fantastic, Eric. Yeah. Thank you so much for your participation. Thank you to everybody, of course, for watching here. As Eric mentioned, reach out to his IR email or his direct email to schedule a meeting or get any questions answered. Similarly, if I can be of assistance, you can shoot me an email as well, Blum, B-L-U-M, @lythampartners.com. Be sure to visit our website, lythampartners.com, to learn more about us, and stay connected with us as well on LinkedIn to be alerted on future presentations and webcasts such as the one here with Gevo. Eric, thank you so much for your participation today. Greatly appreciate it.
Thanks, Robert.