Okay, we'll move right along to our next company. We're honored to have CEO Mark Duff from Perma-Fix Environmental Services with us today. Perma-Fix is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. It treats low-level radioactive and hazardous waste and has 13 million shares outstanding. Stock trades around $12 for $165 million market cap and $7 million of net cash. Mark has served as CEO since 2017 and has over 38 years in the Department of Energy and Department of Defense Environmental and Construction Markets. Mark's going to come up and just give a brief overview, and then we'll sit down and do a little Q&A. Okay, welcome, Mark. Thank you for being here.
All right, thanks, Tony. Appreciate that introduction. We'll do just a quick overview. It's just good, big green, big green button. Okay. For those of you who don't know Perma-Fix, I'll just do a skim across the surface. What we do is we have two segments of the environmental market that we focus on. One is we treat and manage radioactive waste for disposal in long-term disposal facilities. In addition to that, we also do services, which is pretty much the removal, remediation of radioactive contamination from facilities from the ground and anything that's radioactively contaminated. They make up about 50/50 of our revenue. They're split kind of down the middle. We'll talk a little bit about those.
Company founded 1991, became public right away, and has grown from very small facilities to include our current several facilities we'll talk about in a second. Our services group grew through acquisition about 15 years ago. Focuses on demolition, remediation, and, as I mentioned, cleaning up contamination, radioactive contamination that is from a legacy event, as well as ongoing and current cleanup initiatives as well. We've got a pretty established management team. I've been there. I'm the most junior tenured person with the company at 8 years. Everyone else has been there 15-20. Lou's our founder, and has been was CEO up until 2017. Very innovative chemist, PhD chemist that focuses his life's work on solving very complex waste problems.
So if you've got a really nasty radioactive toxic material that you don't know what to do with, Lou has focused his career on finding solutions, bringing those to market, and solving the problem. Our primary market-based, or our overview is with the government. We probably do about 80% of our revenue comes directly from the U.S. government, from the Department of Energy, who has a division within the DOE that focuses just on cleanup of legacy DOE liabilities. Pretty much, if you've seen Oppenheimer, the EM program started when he started with the Manhattan Project. We're still cleaning up a lot of waste from the Manhattan Project and all the way to today. So the nuclear weapon side of the house, as well as remediation of other different things the government's been involved in on the DOD side of the house.
Also getting more and more into commercial power, as well as international work, from the decommissioning of plants in the power industry, as well as other medical waste and other radioactively contaminated materials and spills. On the DOE side of the house, it's a very large market. A lot of people aren't familiar with it. It's the third largest U.S. government liability on the books, behind the pension program and the deficit, is the cleanup program. So, interestingly enough, as I mentioned, the Environmental Management Group within DOE spends about $8 billion a year on cleanup. And that number, in regards to our liability, grows about double that every year. So that it goes up about $16 billion a year, and they spend $8 billion a year.
So it's kind of converse to logic, but their liability grows all the time as new projects are added to their docket list from ongoing facilities that support emission within the government. When they're done with them, they end up in the EM liability bucket, which is basically 100-150 years at a very large number, right, which hovers around $600 billion for the total liability. The leading liability is up in Hanford, where during the Manhattan Project and up until recently, that's where the plutonium came from and was processed through the facilities up there. There was a large number of reactors up there at one point in time. Now it's pretty much a cleanup project. They have about 57 million gallons of waste in underground storage tanks, and that's the primary liability within the DOE and our biggest focus.
We have four treatment plants, fixed-based plants that have been around a long time. The first three, we own outright. We're in the process of securing the fourth one, on the right. Each one of those, we own outright with all the permits that go along with them. They're very, very robust, one-of-a-kind permits that are really difficult to get. 10, 15 years of permitting time. You have to go through public comment. So it's permitted. The barrier to entry here is just enormous. Each one of those facilities is located in Richland, Washington, Kingston, Tennessee, and Gainesville, Florida. I have about 10 different technologies at each one, from incineration to grouting, other types of things. So when we get a nuclear waste in our sites where someone says they've got one, we can probably solve the problem with the facilities we've got and the technology we've got.
As I mentioned, it's highly regulated, lots of regulatory requirements all the time. A lot of people doing assessments of us all the time to ensure quality and safety. We maintain those relationships. We have over 40 patents, but it's closer to 50 now. We've got the record of safe and compliant operations over the last 30 years. We've seen that as well in the services side. In the services side, we're basically have across our company. People ask me where we're going right now. We're very, very focused on 2025. Last time I was here, David and I were debating when last time I was here, we were pretty much chugging along. We're growing pretty well up till COVID. COVID knocked us back. COVID knocked us back about 2 years, with the impacts. 2023 was a decent year.
We got back into growth mode. But really what we're focused on is 2025. And we have half a dozen initiatives that will show that 2025 has a very, very promising backlog of commitments and contracts that will take us to a different level. I believe in your handout you'll see that we're shooting in the $140 million range. It's probably a reasonable target for us. But it begins with our services growth, primarily bidding on very large projects with teams. And we're still, by government standards, a small business, you know, under 1,000 people. And that puts us in a position where there's, if there's a small business requirement for a big project, we fit that niche. On the West Valley Demonstration Project was a contract for a facility just northwest of here, outside of Buffalo.
That's about a $3 billion contract that's out for bid right now. Proposals have been submitted. Award is supposed to be in Q4. The Enterprise is a decommissioning project for the decommissioning of the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier. We've done. We just completed a ship in Norfolk Naval Shipyard, which is one of very few companies that have done a decommissioning, and that decommissioning includes complete decontamination of the whole ship, and all the nuclear or all the radioactive waste or radioactive contamination throughout the entire ship, to the point where you can actually free release it. I need to scrap it or sink it or do whatever they want with it. The Enterprise had 8 reactors on it, lots of radioactive contamination. And the Navy wants to scrap it.
So our job will be, if we win this contract, is to go in and remove all the radioactive material, decontaminate it, so they can scrap the ship. All, there's a lot of other DOE contracts, including the 4th one there, OSMS. That's another $3 billion job that's out for bid. It's to be awarded here, sometime in May. Again, our portion is small, but big for us. We can see a $30-$40 million revenue base when those are awarded, in late this year. On the treatment side of the house, we're constantly upgrading our facilities to address identified markets, as the business grows. New technologies, including the VTD. We'll get in a lot of technology stuff, but there's a lot of growth in that industry as the difficult waste the DOE is generating gets harder and harder.
In other words, they've already done the easy stuff, and the harder stuff is coming our way. Other growth initiatives stem to Hanford. The DFLAW, as you can see up there, low-activity waste DFLAW. It is a facility that our friends at the Department of Energy have spent 24 years in construction. This plant is being built to take the waste that I mentioned that were in those large tanks at Hanford, take it out of the tanks, make glass out of it, so they can put the waste, that glass waste, into a secure landfill to Hanford. That's their overall strategy for the Department of Energy is to do that. They've spent just about $15 billion on this DFLAW plant.
They built it, knowing that when they put one gallon of waste, one gallon of material from those tanks in that plant to make glass out of it, they will generate three gallons coming out of the plant, what we call effluent. All that waste, they've deemed, will go to commercial treatment. In a Record of Decision a year ago, January, they defined that that waste would go to Perma-Fix, specifically identified us as the only option for treatment of that waste when this plant starts up, and that is estimated to be about 8,000 cubic meters a year, which is about $80 million a year in revenue for us. So that's written in stone in a Record of Decision.
As soon as that plant starts up, which right now is sometime in mid-2025, early 2025, that that revenue will start for us, and will be sustainable for at least 10 years. Then another portion of the tanks themselves are going to go directly to what they call grouting, which is basically making cement out of it. Our plant in Richland, which is right next to the Hanford plant, will be picking up a significant portion of that as well, which should be $40-$50 million a year, sustained revenue once that starts as well, which right now looks like January 2026. So both those components are big contributors to a strong 2025, and put us in a position of significant growth in that timeframe. We continue to develop technologies all the time. We've got a significant R&D budget every year.
We're doing several different, very applicable technologies for sorting radioactively contaminated soils, so we can pull the radioactive piece away from the non-radioactive piece, separate it, minimize people's disposal costs. That's growing very fast. We're building our second unit now, or third unit now, and it's got a good backlog internationally, as well as with the EPA, and the Navy. We've also got a big advancement in our PFAS technology. I'll talk about that in a second. We had a press release come out yesterday, that launched our stock about 20%, on the recent advances we've made there. We also have got a lot of R&D going on in mercury decontamination as well. Our international program is exploding right now for us. We've got a lot of revenue coming in in association with the German decommissioning program.
We just won a EUR 50 million contract in Ispra, Italy, with the Joint Research Council, or the JRC right now, which is awarded through the European Union, to remove about 6,000 drums of waste that's been buried over there for a long time, and treat it at our facility in Washington State. So we'll ship it all the way over, treat it, and ship it back. That's a EUR 50 million job over the next 7 years or so. That's one of the bigger jobs that's ever been awarded with the European Union. It's kind of a breakthrough contract, and it really puts us on the map internationally, and it's going to lead to us building a facility or a treatment facility in Europe.
Lots of other initiatives going on in Europe right now, and in Slovenia, we're accepting waste from Croatia, UK, Germany, and United Kingdom. So things, and just won a contract in Mexico just a few weeks ago. In Canada as well. So PFAS. I'm sure everyone's heard a lot about PFAS recently. I'm not going to get into what the chemical is, but basically it's in a lot of things, particularly groundwater, soils, biosolids, coming largely from firefighting foam that has been used in airports over years. A lot of folks are doing deep well injection in Texas. Folks that are more environmentally focused as far as the legacy of that liability are looking for treatment options.
We've been spending the last 5 years developing our process, with the chemists that we've got in place in our R&D facility in our labs, that could bring it to market. We've been through bench scale in our lab. It worked very well. We just finished pilot scale. It's a little picture of it there, about a 55-gallon drum's worth. And we've met the criteria that EPA has for cleaning up PFAS. We've been able to do it through reactive chemicals, with minimal pressure and temperature needed. So that puts us in a position where, with a little bit of pressure and chemical, we can do it fast, but we can do it at room temperature as well, which really gives us a robust technology that can be deployed anywhere. There's no off-gas.
It basically you just have an effluent, and the effluent will be a non-hazardous material of water and calcium fluoride. So basically defluorinating the chemical chains themselves. Won't spend a lot of time on that, other than to say that it's an enormous market. I'm sure several other presentations have focused on this. Environmental Business Journal and Barron's have estimated remediation to be about $200 billion market overall. There's a lot of technologies we're competing with. We like ours because it's so simple. It's easy to use. It's very inexpensive. And it's very scalable to large volumes, as well as mobility in a skid mounted unit to people's facilities with no permitting requirements. So, as I said, we just finished bench; we just finished a pilot plant, met all our goals. Now the next step for PFAS is to move into an operational phase.
We're doing design build right now, working with vendors to do the construction of that. And we'll launch at one of our facilities here, in September. As long as everything scales up the way we believe it is from the pilot plant, we should be treating waste, in September, and our goal is to have, a unit at each one of our facilities by the end of next year. And, rolling right along. Our services and our treatment segment both, have different kind of approaches to, margins. Very high margins on the treatment plant. The more waste we get in, the more fixed costs, are limited in regards to the margin percentage. And, once we get over about $35-$40 million, in receipts, we see our margins go up significantly on the service side.
They're very much more scalable, because our it's mostly labor. And so again, that number can go up and down. The service side provides a much higher ceiling on potential revenue. There's a lot more work out there on the service side. Unfortunately for us, there's only a certain amount of radioactive waste generated each year. So we do have to fight with a couple of competitors on that. But it is good margin work, typically in the 70% range on overall gross margins. You see our revenue, oh, and EBITDA over the past several years. As you can see, we had a good growth rate from 2018, 2019, to 2020. COVID crushed us. People stopped generating waste. The government stopped doing field work. And we took a beating from it. But we kept our head above water. Had a decent 2023.
2024 is going to start out a little bit rough. We had a tough Q1. We made a lot of investments in our PFAS, a lot of investments in our growth, with the continuing resolution. Coupled with those investments, we took a pretty good pounding in Q1, but Q2 is going to come around. Those of you that have been following us, our company, understand that we're making the investments, in the late 2024, early 2025 timeframe. We're sticking to that path. So 2023 is pretty good. 2024 should be a little bit less than that, but still, hopefully above water. Financial highlights. Again, I talked about 2023 growing about 27%, with an EBIT about $3 million, and a profit of just below $500,000.
Again, I went through all the key initiatives for our growth, and very unique company, with a strong client base, loyal clients, that are used to working with us directly to solve their overall environmental problems. We've got the our even a reconciliation. I think most of that's in your handout. I mentioned the fact that we're growing to 25 overall. You can see our stock price here, which we didn't update from about a month ago. I believe we were closer to $13.5 yesterday. So we've seen some good growth in the stock, with a couple of good press releases along the way. Hopefully we'll have a few more in the coming weeks with some additional progress in our technology development. All right, Tony. Hopefully left a little time.
No, that's great. Thank you, Mark. Another great overview. You know, and please feel free to sit down. Looking great. I'm sorry. You know, it seems like you'd be, your company would just, you know, what you what you do, you'd be the best positioned as as you were talking about the with the PFAS opportunity. And you you went into some pretty good detail on how how you actually go about doing it. You know, maybe you could give us some more color on how you compete against, sort of what differentiates you from maybe you've heard a couple other people talking about it today. Sure. And and how do you do it against them? Sure. Is this on? Yeah.
Well, I'm not that familiar with our competition relative to the actual specifics of the technology. I will say that there are some merits in each technology, as far as how fast you can do it, to what level of degree you get destruction. What I can say about ours is, because it's a reactive process and doesn't depend on temperature and pressure, it has a different set of discriminators. We again, not having any air emissions whatsoever. There's no stack needed. There's no permits needed to run it. You can be much more mobile with it. And it's basically based on chemistry on the formula, and the system that you're running it through. So, there's an opportunity to recycle your reactives. We're working on that. The thing that excites me the most about it, besides those things, is it's very applicable to the broad range of markets, which includes soils.
We had a meeting with the EPA about 2 weeks ago, and about 30 folks from the EPA headquarters were on the phone. And they said, you know, AFFF and water is great. You know, there's some things moving on that. But what really concerns the EPA right now is farmland. And they specifically mentioned that there's 200 million acres of farmland in the country that's contaminated with PFAS that needs to be remediated. And the reason the farmland is contaminated is because for years, bio sludges from sewage treatment plants were spread over all across the farmland, and before they knew it was a problem, and it's accumulated in the, you know, the top 12 inches of the soil. So that's all got to be remediated. And it's a pretty significant liability.
So that's what EPA is focused on, and is really pushing us to spend our time on the water and the liquids. Right now is competing with deep well injection, which is just a horrible way to dispose of anything. It's very cheap. It's $1 a gallon. Friends of mine in that business have told me they've done 500 million gallons in deep well injection over the years. So it's very, very prominent. There are several places in Texas that do it. We're confident that that's all going to slow down with congressional support and EPA pressure, as well as state pressure. So but that's really been just popular, from what I understand, in the South and the Gulf States altogether. There are many states that don't allow that, and a lot of government agencies that don't allow it. So there's still an enormous market.
So a lot of available water available for processing. And we feel like it's going to take us about six months to really get our feet under us after we get our operating system going. But we have enough clients right now that are used to sending us waste. We feel like we got the infrastructure in place and the sales group in place to start off doing pretty well.
Yeah, it seems like there's still quite a bit of moving parts. There's a lot of regulation needs to happen. But obviously you have a background. You have a strong background in it, and probably gonna, you know, gonna be a big beneficiary of it. So as far as the, you talked about the direct feed low-activity waste, the DFLAW, business for the Department of Energy.
Could you just give us a little more color on what that business is, and why were you picked over others?
That's a great question. I should have said that. Yeah. So the reason we're gonna have an exclusive market on that is because we have such a large facility right outside the Hanford Gate. So from the tanks to our facility across the Hanford site is about 10 miles. So you only have to go across the public roads for a mile or two. If we get to our facility, there's no other facility in the region within 600 miles. And when that waste comes out of those tanks, it gets basically there's a landfill at the Hanford site to dispose of it.
So it would not make sense to send it to somebody else and send it back. No one else has a permit that we have. Nobody else has a facility that's been going for 30 years that we have. So we really have an exclusive position for that, and the government has recognized that, and has partnered with us, moving forward. So when that DFLAW plant goes operational, they've got an outlet for those waste. So it's a very good situation we're in. It's just a matter of when it starts.
Maybe I'll open the floor up to the audience. Any questions? If not, I've got a bunch more. Oh, sir.
Yes, Alan Danzer, individual investor. Mark, I've been on your conference calls for years now. I'm very impressed with you and your team.
I always have been since I met Lou, maybe 15, 20 years ago in an investment conference. And I just want to congratulate you for going through what you had to go through the last couple of years and get to the point where you are now. And now it seems like you're on a path that will require quite a large investment in all the projects that you're involved in. Now, whether that takes the form of, getting, qualified personnel to increase your, you know, your attractiveness to, win contracts. Or whether it means having a larger partner to, help you, get up to speed. To do what you do best, faster. I'm just wondering how you view your, path with those things in mind.
Well, first of all, thanks for your support, Alan. I certainly, as a hobbyist investor myself, appreciate the people that have stuck with Perma-Fix for so many years, because we've had many, many years of promises, associated with Hanford, and it finally looks like it's almost months away instead of years. And, we're very excited about it, and appreciate people who have stuck with us through decades of promises, that and slipped schedules. You know, you're right. We're at a point now where 2 things have to happen. We have to find partners, particularly on PFAS, and we're aligning those partners, large business partners. Partners like big firms that have numerous clients and large contracts, where their clients, typically government, have large inventories of PFAS to get rid of. And working with them, on a mutual beneficial basis to define it a large inventory that you can meet the needs.
The difficult thing about PFAS is you don't get a lot per gallon, but you get a lot of gallons. But that means you gotta get a lot of sales. So to run a plant, for example, full time every day, and make $6-$10 million a year, you're gonna have to get like two tanker trucks a day delivered to your plant. So you gotta find that there's companies and entities that have that kind of volume. You're not gonna make a living on one drum here and two drums there. You gotta have a backlog. So you gotta have large business partners on the capital side.
I see us needing to do a raise in, you know, some time in the next couple quarters, to support cash flow, to support operating capital, and to really start building the units we need to for PFAS. You know, we've had an offsite last week, and one with the management team, and we really viewed PFAS as bigger than Perma-Fix, as far as where we are and how we need to think big, and find those relationships you're talking about. We have the relationships with big companies that we've worked with in the past, and are working through that as far as the Hanford stuff. The Hanford capital investments will really kind of grow gradually to the point where we can self-fund a lot of the equipment growth and facility growth that goes along with it.
You know, we expect to start out with 100-300 gallons a year for grouting, which is, in the ballpark of, you know, $10-$30, but $100 a gallon for estimating sakes. That will put us in a position that we can fund the growth, as it comes. PFAS is a different story. We need to be positioned for when EPA passes their hazardous waste guidance for PFAS, which is expected in 18 months-2 years, that we've got our facilities built, operational, technology proven, and client base all before those regulations come out. Because anyone in this business knows that when those regulations come out and EPA determines that PFAS is a hazardous material, everything changes. Clocks start, and people have to start moving their waste fast. So you gotta be ready when that happens.
But thanks, Alan. Appreciate that.
Well, Mark, that was a great overview. You're in a very interesting. Looks like there's gonna be a lot of growth and opportunities in this business going forward. Thanks for being here again, and hopefully we'll get you back in next year.
Thanks. So we appreciate your interest.