Gevo, Inc. Stock

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Gevo, Inc. Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]

I would now like to turn the call over to Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. Eric, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Gevo's third quarter 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; and Leke Agiri, our Chief Financial Officer. We also have Greg Hanselman, our Chief Operating Officer; and Kyle James, our Chief Commercial and Risk Officer.

Earlier today, we issued a press release that outlines our third quarter 2026 results and some of the topics we plan to discuss. Copies of the press release and the slides we are presenting during today's call 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 the debottlenecking and potential expansion of our Gevo North Dakota plant, the timing of a final investment decision for Project Northstar, our expected future cash flows and adjusted EBITDA, our expected carbon business revenues, our expected future tax credit monetizations 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?

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm very pleased to tell you that this was a record quarter for Gevo. We set records for revenue, net income, adjusted EBITDA and cash flow from operations. But I think the significance goes well beyond one strong quarter. Gevo has become profitable. Our operations are generating cash, our carbon business is creating real value, we are expanding production and, importantly, we are building a stronger operating platform and balance sheet that gives us choices about how and when we fund our next stage of growth.

For the quarter, revenue was approximately $83 million, gross profit was approximately $48 million, adjusted EBITDA was approximately $44 million and cash flow from operations was approximately $41 million. We also ended the quarter with approximately $68 million of cash on the balance sheet. Leke will take you through the financials in more detail, but first, I want to focus on what is driving the business, why these results matter and where we plan to go from here.

Let me start with carbon, because I believe this is one of the most important developments at Gevo. In 2025, when I was Chief Carbon Officer, we set out to build carbon into a distinct product line for Gevo with its own customers, markets and revenue streams. We're now demonstrating that commercially. We expect more than $50 million of carbon revenue in 2026. This quarter alone included approximately $20 million of previously banked Canadian Clean Fuel Regulation, or CFR, credits and approximately $10 million of additional revenue from CFR credits recognized during the third quarter. Excluding one-time items, we estimate our carbon business can generate approximately $30 million of annual revenue on a run-rate basis, given our current capacity and market conditions.

Here's the important point: Carbon is becoming another product for Gevo. We sell fuel, we sell protein, we sell corn oil and, increasingly, we sell carbon credits created by the way we make those products. Carbon credits have their own customers and markets, giving us a distinct source of value beyond incentives like the 45Z Clean Fuel Production Tax Credits. That's the power of lowering carbon intensity. It's good for the environment, it drives efficiency and, at the same time, it increases the profitability of every gallon we make.

And the opportunity doesn't stop with ethanol. We're building a model that can create value across our entire low-carbon fuels platform, and I believe that opportunity becomes even more powerful as we move into sustainable aviation fuel and other renewable hydrocarbon fuels. There is still work to do. Carbon markets will evolve, prices will move and regulations can change. But this quarter is an important proof point that carbon can be a meaningful and profitable product line for Gevo.

The second theme I want to highlight is capital efficiency. We are increasingly focused on getting more value from the assets, technology and intellectual property we've already paid for. Renewable natural gas is a great example. Recent improvements to the 45ZCF GREET model provide greater recognition for avoided methane emissions from dairy manure, which is one of the environmental benefits our RNG assets were built to deliver. Based on current estimates, we expect this improvement to create more than $10 million of additional 45Z value from our existing RNG assets in 2026, subject to third-party validation.

And importantly, this is incremental to the approximately $70 million of 45Z credits we sold through the third quarter. I like this kind of growth. It doesn't require another plant or significant incremental capital. It's simply more value from the assets we already own.

We're applying that same philosophy elsewhere. In India, our alliance with Praj gives us an opportunity to monetize our isobutanol technology through a capital-light licensing and catalyst sales model. Praj is currently constructing the first demonstration plant for a leading oil marketing company in India, which is an important step toward the broader commercialization of isobutanol for diesel blending and other applications.

We're also generating additional value from assets we previously installed at the Trecora facility in Silsbee, Texas. Those assets are running near capacity, producing sustainable racing fuel blendstocks. With demand continuing to grow, we're evaluating opportunities to significantly expand our specialty fuels business using modular hydrocarbon equipment we already own, built with Praj and acquired in 2024.

These businesses may look different, but strategically, they fit together. We're building multiple ways to grow Gevo by creating more value from the technology, equipment and intellectual property we already own. And when new capital is required, we'll invest behind demonstrated demand where we see the strongest risk-adjusted returns.

That brings me to what this means financially. Based on the progress we've made, we now believe our full year 2026 adjusted EBITDA could exceed $90 million, including one-time items. That includes approximately $20 million from the previously banked CFR credits that we recognized in the third quarter and the additional $10 million of RNG 45Z value we currently anticipate. Leke will take you through the details, but I think the more important number for investors is what comes next.

After removing one-time items and based on the expected production and current market conditions, we currently anticipate reaching an adjusted EBITDA of more than $70 million during 2027. That's up from the approximately $60 million we previously communicated. That includes the benefits of debottlenecking at Gevo North Dakota and the anticipated improvement in RNG 45Z value. Of course, that outlook is based on current market conditions, and those conditions can change as we move through 2027. But the direction is important. The underlying earnings power of Gevo is getting stronger, giving us a significantly stronger platform from which to fund and build the next stage of growth.

And that leads me to growth. As we've outlined previously, our growth strategy has 3 steps: First, debottleneck what we own; second, approximately double the capacity of Gevo North Dakota; third, add SAF and other high-value hydrocarbon fuels when the commercial market and the returns support the investment. That sequence matters.

The first step is happening now. Our debottlenecking program at Gevo North Dakota is designed to increase annual low-carbon ethanol production to approximately 75 million gallons on a sustainable and repeatable basis while allowing us to continue optimizing beyond that level. Some debottlenecking projects are already operating, and the remainder are being commissioned. So investors shouldn't think about growth as something that begins several years from now. The first increment of growth is already happening, and we expect the full year benefit to show up in 2027.

The next step is considerably larger. We plan to approximately double annual low-carbon ethanol production to roughly 150 million gallons while increasing carbon capture to approximately 400,000 tons per year, with start-up expected to begin in 2028. There are several important reasons that we believe we can move quickly. First, we aren't starting from scratch and building a new plant. We're expanding the one that we already own.

Second, we've already acquired approximately 50% of the equipment we expect to use for the expansion, including certain long-lead-time items. That equipment is already paid for and reflected in our current cash position and will be repurposed for the expansion. We're reusing quality equipment where it makes economic sense and combining it with new carbon capture technology and newly engineered systems designed to use less energy and water and further reduce carbon intensity. The objective is not just to double production. The objective is to build a larger, more efficient and more profitable low-carbon fuel production platform.

And third, we are advancing our project-level joint venture for the expansion with Ara Energy. By combining Gevo's operating and low-carbon fuels expertise with Ara's infrastructure investment experience and strategic capital, we believe we are establishing the right partnership to help accelerate the expansion and reduce execution and financial risk. We expect to finalize the JV in the fourth quarter, subject to closing on its required definitive agreements, followed then by FID and financial close as the next key milestones.

Finally, there's another important element to the economics. As we approximately double production at Gevo North Dakota, we don't expect to see any substantial increase in corporate costs. This gives us the opportunity to spread and optimize our fixed costs across a much larger earnings base, creating meaningful operating leverage and greater cash generation. As we generate more cash, we can strengthen the balance sheet and increase our ability to fund future growth.

And that brings me to SAF and Project Northstar. I want to be very clear: Our conviction in SAF has not changed. What has changed is the strength of the Gevo North Dakota platform underneath it and the number of attractive opportunities now available to us. The question isn't whether SAF will become an important market for Gevo. The question is when will investing significant Gevo capital into SAF generate the right risk-adjusted return for our shareholders relative to the other opportunities available to us?

Today, we see attractive opportunities to deploy capital into assets we already own, increase ethanol production, capture more carbon, grow cash flow and strengthen the balance sheet with lower execution risk. So that's where we're putting our near-term priority. That is capital discipline. And importantly, expanding Gevo North Dakota first can make our future SAF opportunity stronger. Think of what we're doing today as setting the table for deploying alcohol-to-jet. It gives us more low-carbon ethanol feedstock, it creates more carbon value, it generates more earnings and cash and it strengthens the balance sheet from which we can ultimately finance SAF.

We have the technology, the proprietary position and a well-engineered plant design for Project Northstar. We will continue advancing the commercial readiness of Project Northstar so we can invest when we believe the market and the project economics support attractive risk-adjusted returns for our shareholders. That's not a change in our SAF strategy; that's disciplined capital allocation and sequencing.

So let me bring this together. I think the way investors should think about Gevo is changing. We're no longer a company whose future depends on financing and building one large SAF project. Today, we have a profitable operating business. We have demonstrated that carbon can be a valuable product line. We're increasing our production towards approximately 75 million gallons now. We're preparing to approximately double Gevo North Dakota to roughly 150 million gallons per year and double our carbon capture by 2028. We're growing cash flow and strengthening the balance sheet. We're finding capital-light ways to monetize technology and assets we already own. And we maintain substantial future upside from SAF and other higher-value renewable hydrocarbon fuels built on an increasingly strong operating platform.

We have the optionality in how we sequence our growth projects. We now have choices, and I think that is one of the most important changes for Gevo. Our job is to take the next dollar we generate and put it where we believe it can earn the highest risk-adjusted return for our shareholders. Right now, that means running our plants well, monetizing carbon, expanding production, growing cash flow and strengthening the balance sheet. And as we do that, we create more options for what comes next.

The vision is to build Gevo into a larger, more profitable low-carbon fuels company with multiple products, multiple pathways to growth and the financial strength to invest when the economics make sense. We're building that company one step at a time, and I believe that this quarter shows that the strategy is beginning to work.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Leke.

Thanks, Paul. Now turning to our third quarter results. Revenue for the third quarter was a record $83 million, which is nearly double the $43 million reported in the same quarter last year. Third quarter revenue included approximately $20 million from the sale of previously banked CFR credits. Excluding those nonrecurring banked credits, revenue still grew approximately 47% year-over-year, driven by higher low-carbon ethanol production volumes and pricing and continued growth in our carbon business.

Gross profit increased to a record $48 million, representing a gross margin of approximately 58%, compared to $13 million and approximately 30% in the same quarter last year. This margin expansion reflects the growing value we are realizing across the full economics of our low-carbon fuels platform, including fuel, carbon attributes and 45Z incentives. We recognize 45Z as a reduction to cost of goods sold when generated, which is why we view gross profit as an important measure of the underlying earnings power of our operating assets.

Adjusted EBITDA was a record $44 million, compared to $7 million in the third quarter last year, bringing adjusted EBITDA for the first 9 months of 2026 to approximately $64 million.

Net income attributable to Gevo was $23 million, or $0.09 per share on a diluted basis, compared with a loss of $8 million in the same quarter last year. Cash flow from operations was approximately $41 million for the quarter, and we ended the quarter with $68 million of cash and cash equivalents.

I want to distinguish between adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flow because the timing can be different in some quarters. Our 45Z credits are generated based on the volumes and carbon intensity of our low-carbon ethanol and RNG production and do benefit adjusted EBITDA in the period in which they are generated. Cash flow reflects when we receive actual cash proceeds from customers who purchase these credits from us. So cash flow can vary significantly from quarter-to-quarter even when the underlying earnings performance remains strong.

For the 2026 full year, we believe our operating assets are now positioned to generate adjusted EBITDA of over $90 million when we include the benefits of our nonrecurring CFR revenue and at least $10 million of the expected additional 45Z value from our RNG assets. We are also tracking to generate positive operating cash flow for the year.

Looking ahead to 2027, we currently expect adjusted EBITDA of over $70 million. This outlook also includes the additional expected 45Z value from our RNG assets. It excludes the benefit from the nonrecurring sale of the previously banked CFR credits recognized this year and includes a full year of the increased production from our debottlenecking project. The important point is that we expect strong underlying earnings power to continue even after removing the benefit of the banked CFR credits recognized this quarter. We will provide more detail in our 2027 outlook early next year.

Turning to capital allocation, our debottlenecking project at Gevo North Dakota is fully funded and remains on track for completion by the end of the year. For the Gevo North Dakota expansion project, we are working with Ara Energy to finalize the joint venture structure, including our respective equity commitments and anticipated project-level debt. Our objective is to fund Gevo's equity commitment from cash on hand and ongoing cash generation while using capital from Ara and project-level lending to fund the remainder. This approach is consistent with the capital discipline Paul outlined earlier.

For Project Northstar, our strategy has not changed. We continue to advance the project and intend to make a final investment decision when we have the financeable offtake agreements and financing structure necessary to support the investment. In the meantime, we remain focused on executing disciplined near-term growth opportunities that generate attractive returns and strong cash flow, providing additional capacity to advance Project Northstar.

This quarter demonstrates the increasing earning and cash-generating power of our operating assets. We are building a stronger financial foundation while maintaining the flexibility to fund growth in a disciplined way. That puts us in a stronger position to execute the opportunities Paul outlined and create long-term shareholder value.

With that, I'll turn the call back to Paul.

Thanks, Leke. It was an outstanding third quarter with record results, and we covered a lot of progress today. With that, I'll turn it over to the operator and open the call for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright.

Congratulations on really strong results. Now that you have multiple revenue streams, which ones can investors sort of expect to be more consistent and steady with respect to the revenue generation and cash flows, and which ones could we see some variability with?

Thanks, Amit. I mean, I think you were breaking up there a little bit, but I think I got the question. Look, on the durability, right, one of the big ones that we like today is obviously the carbon business, right? So that's where we've been focusing a lot of our time, and that's a combination of the compliance markets, so that's where we're selling our carbon with the fuel and then the voluntary markets, which are growing, right? That's a new, more nascent market. But overall, carbon is definitely turning into a durable business for us.

We've also got 45Z revenue, which, of course, we think it's great because now we're finally getting credit for the extra methane avoidance that we put in place already with the RNG project. So that's one that we still have to get that validated by third parties, but that's very strong.

And the demand for low-carbon fuels, the fuel itself, is only going up. We see more states having low-carbon fuel programs. RFS had record RVOs here. So the underlying business of fuels, carbon and incentives, and putting all those together, gives us a really durable revenue stream that we believe is going to continue. And then we can add everything else on top of that, just like what we're seeing in some of these new businesses like racing fuels, but those are more the new ones that we'll give those more time to develop before we say how durable those become.

Understood. And then just last one for me, maybe, to double ethanol and carbon capture capacity, like how much CapEx are we looking at?

Yes, look, we haven't disclosed what we're doing as far as the total capital that we're going to deploy today. But I think there's a couple important things. One, we've already got about 50% of the equipment that we're going to put out into that plant. I think that's a big step forward, and so we're excited to have that already paid for. And so that's really high-quality equipment that we're repurposing from an existing facility while we're putting together the engineering and getting some of the longer-lead-time items that'll help us reduce the water and improve the efficiency for the carbon intensity that we'll have in the expansion. So that, we think, is a big accelerator, which, you know, there's 2 factors: There's the capital, but there's also the speed that we get this thing done. So we think that helps us a lot.

I think then the other big pieces that we're working on today is obviously getting the JV done, like Leke was talking about, too, because we plan to finance this with a combination of balance sheet cash and project-level debt, combined with what we see coming from Ara as strategic capital. So I think that puts us in a really good position. And like I said, we're going to have more details as we reach FID. That's when we'll give you a little bit more background on what we see from the capital, but we're in a really good position to keep this moving forward.

Leke, any other comments on that?

Well, thanks, Paul. No, I think you captured it. I think from a financing perspective, so just to underscore, our priority is to make sure that we fund the equity commitments to be able to move the project forward -- the expansion project forward from cash on hand and cash that we generate from our operating assets. So we feel very confident that this is the right equation for us to deliver the project in 2028 as we're targeting.

But this is by far the best risk-adjusted return that we've got on the plate, so we're going to be going after this. And getting this at the right carbon intensity, the right returns and expanding this business gives us the platform that we need to grow Gevo. So thanks for the question.

Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Grampp with Northland Capital Markets.

Paul, given your comments that you've already got a fair amount of the equipment for the ethanol expansion, I was curious if that perhaps provides some timing acceleration optionality relative to some of the time lines you had put out previously, or was that time line already, I guess, giving credit for the benefits of having a lot of this equipment already on hand?

Yes, I think it definitely gives us the confidence in that time line, Jeff. So I mean, having about 50% of the equipment, which does include some long-lead-time items, is definitely kind of the feather in our cap right now. But still, we're on track for 2028. That's really the time, and that's an accelerated timeline to get an expansion done and get it all combined and up and running, and still achieve the low CI that we have today. Because really, like I said before, we're expanding the plant, but we have to not just make the gallon; we have to get this low CI, because that's how we derive the value from the carbon business and that's what we're already demonstrating with the kind of great returns that we're seeing this quarter. So it just continues to build that platform for us, but we really need to focus on delivering the right CI along with those gallons to get the value proposition that we're creating.

Understood. That's helpful. For my follow-up, the production in the quarter was super impressive. I think if we annualize Q3 numbers, we're kind of already at the debottlenecking increase you guys had talked about around mid-70 million gallons at a run rate. Are you seeing some early benefits from the debottlenecking you've done thus far, or is this just kind of organic outperformance? Just kind of hoping to get a little more context on the Q3 numbers.

Yes, no, good catch on that, because we really like the 19 million gallons of production, right? I mean, that already puts us on the run rate that we want to have going forward. But what we really need to do now is we need to prove that we can deliver that reliably and repeatably and then optimize from there. So I think there's a lot of upside that we can do from that, but we got to prove that performance before we really take credit for it. But there's no doubt that the team, the operations team, has just done a fantastic job and pushing that production to near 75 million gallons on an annualized rate this quarter already. So obviously, that gives us a lot of confidence in not only seeing that the 75 million gallons is repeatable, but where do we optimize from there.

Your next question comes from the line of Derrick Whitfield with Texas Capital.

Congratulations on a very solid quarter and update.

Yes, thanks, Derrick.

With respect to your 2027 outlook, could you just kind of at a high level give us the gives and takes from your updated 2026 plan?

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

Yes, absolutely. So we guided to $60 million last quarter in terms of what we're expecting in 2027. What's effectively changed is, as Paul went over, we expect incremental 45Z generation from our RNG asset this year that's going to translate to next year as well, and that's an incremental of $10 million. This takes us to the $70 million of the projection that we have for 2027.

What is really important to sort of take away is the guidance is prudent, and it's something that we feel very strongly about in terms of the ability for our business to actually generate cash to strengthen our balance sheet, but more importantly, to fund our growth projects. So we're really excited with that prospect.

And maybe just to add a little bit there, Leke, this is a good example of us really getting value from every aspect of our business. It's about how we're paying attention to the carbon, we're paying attention to incentives, we're paying attention to the underlying fuel and making sure that we're deriving that value. So I mean, just it's culminated in a really tremendous outlook for the rest of the year.

And not to set you guys into a much higher number for 2027, but when we're thinking about it, there's even greater upside than what you articulated because you've got greater run rate across ethanol, then you've got some cost control things that you guys are working through. So it seems like there's still the ability to move higher as you think about 2027.

Yes, look, I think that's a good point, and we'll be watching that closely. But if we can keep up the run rates that we're seeing in production today, we continue to see strong performance in the RNG business, obviously, we need to get the final third-party validation on the RNG score, and you put all that together, yes, we could see some potential upside over that $90 million. So we're saying $90 million, over $90 million, is definitely a possibility for us.

Right. And just to clarify, the $90 million is for 2026. So just to clarify, and I think the 2027 number, if that's what you were speaking to earlier, Paul is absolutely correct. I think there is runway for upside based on operational performance, so there's headroom there. But again, from a prudent perspective, recognizing where we are from a market dynamic perspective, $70 million is what we can point to, and early next year, we'll provide additional guidance when we know more as well.

Terrific. And then, Paul, with respect to carbon, could you speak to your ability to scale the value of carbon as you double your ethanol capacity in 2028? Like, can it scale on a one-for-one basis as you see it today?

Yes, that's absolutely the goal here for us, is that as we continue to scale carbon, we'll be scaling carbon not only on the expansion, but with the debottlenecking as well, right? So all that's starting, and we've got upside. And this is one of the great things that we have optionality because we're selling into compliance markets, we're selling into voluntary markets, and you've seen from our last business update that now we even have more offtakes that are -- and even multi-year offtakes that are starting in the voluntary market.

So we'll continue to scale our carbon sales at the same time that we're scaling the underlying fuels and look at how do we optimize that business to get the best returns for our shareholders by doing what we call carbon arbitrage, right? Making sure that we're getting -- where's the market taking us, and those markets will change, but placing that carbon value as quick as we can in those highest-value markets as we scale fuel. So absolutely, we plan to do that simultaneously as we expand volumes and get that revenue as soon as we're able to produce more gallons.

Maybe one last, if I could, just staying on carbon: While I realize you're nearly capped out on 45Z credits for ethanol, how could regenerative ag further improve your ability to lower CI in other regulatory markets?

Great question, right? So this is one that we're very passionate about because this is where our Verity platform really helps us. We've been working with farmers; we believe farmers should get rewarded for contributing to this. So we still have a few million dollars, maybe $6 million, $7 million, that we think we can capture, and regenerative agriculture can come in and play a part of that. Now we probably won't capture all of that because we'll be sharing some of that upside with the farmers who are generating the credits and putting that value to work.

But look, that's a great point, because as we continue to scale not only today, but as we double our production, then we're going to continue to use regenerative agriculture and those benefits that we're now starting to see in 45Z to get every last bit, again, back to optimizing all the value and making sure every component of our business is getting that value. That regen ag is a key point. So thanks for the question.

Your next question comes from the line of Peter Gastreich with Water Tower Research.

Yes, congratulations on the results, Paul. That's great to see the earnings power of your platform and also to hear about your disciplined capital strategy. So just first of all, could you talk a bit more about the CO2 hub, kind of how the third-party attraction is kind of evolving there, and what sort of -- in terms of building that, what kind of milestones should investors kind of be focused on there with respect to that strategy?

Yes, right now, Peter, I think it's a great question because we do have more capacity. Today, we're only using about 17%, 18% of the capacity that we have at Gevo North Dakota to store carbon dioxide. But our first goal is not necessarily to store somebody else's CO2; our first goal is to get the expansion done and then increase -- with debottlenecking, we're going to be up, and even right now, with our run rates of around 200,000 tons, we're going to be close to 400,000 tons of carbon capture for ourselves. That takes us to about 40% utilization.

So that's our primary focus and where we're deploying capital today, because not only do we have to make more fuel, but we have to capture more carbon, so there's extra capital that goes into that. So right now, I'd say the priority is not storing carbon for others. So we'll continue to monitor that as that opportunity develops, but that's going to be incremental revenue down the road, but not anytime in the near future.

Okay. Just my next question, turning to India, could you talk about the Praj partnership and how you'd size that market opportunity, and how should we think about the timing and the structure there of that licensing revenue?

Sure. Again, we're excited about this one because this is how do we monetize technology that we already own and developed. But there's really 2 sources of revenue that we see coming out of this: one, licensing fees that's going to be based on installed capacity; and the second part is a recurring revenue stream that we will get from selling biocatalysts, right? So the yeast, basically.

So the good news is Praj is already moving forward, and they're building a demo plant for a major oil company. If all goes well with that and the continued testing and the approvals that we're seeing, those revenues could probably start in 2028. There's still a lot that needs to happen, but just thinking about the market -- you asked about the size of the market, so think about a 10% blend, which is kind of where everybody's targeting, that puts the total addressable market in India at about 3 billion gallons of isobutanol. So we're talking a lot of plants and a lot of catalyst sales.

So again, we like this because it helps us monetize our technology that we already have, and Gevo doesn't really need to make a huge additional investment here. And once this gets going in India, we can continue to deploy the technology globally. So we think it's a really good fit and a great next step for the isobutanol technology and isobutanol platform.

Okay. Great. I'll just ask one more question about RNG. That was definitely a big surprise. It's been sitting there quietly for a while, but suddenly we've got these big numbers coming through. Does this sort of change how you think about or whether you think about growing that business from a production or capacity standpoint in the future, whether it's debottlenecking or other sort of growth opportunity?

Peter, I think it really just reinforces that we're getting the cash and the returns out of every asset that we have today. And so as we think about what we do next, we're going to continue to optimize that asset just like we're optimizing others and continue to derive as much of the incentives and the carbon value and the base fuel value as we possibly can. I wouldn't say this changes our mind on how we grow that business. Really, the focus on that was to be able to take that gas -- I mean, the strategic reason was to take that gas and to put it into and power a SAF plant. So that's where we started, and it wasn't really to build a renewable natural gas business and continue to grow that. Good question.

Great. Okay. Congrats again.

Thank you.

That concludes our question-and-answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Chief Executive Officer Paul Bloom for closing remarks.

Well, thanks, everyone, for the questions. I'll just close with this: I believe Gevo is in a fundamentally stronger position today than it has been in the past. We're profitable, we're generating cash, carbon is becoming a meaningful product line and we have a clear path to grow production and earnings from the assets we already own. Importantly, that gives us choices. We can invest capital where we see the strongest risk-adjusted returns while maintaining the upside from SAF and other high-value fuels as those markets develop.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but I believe this quarter demonstrates that the strategy is working and that we're building a larger, more profitable and financially stronger low-carbon fuels company.

I want to thank our employees, our partners, customers, communities and the shareholders for their continued support, and we look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Thank you. Thank you for standing by. My name is Greg, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to today's Jibo Incorporated Q2 2026 earnings call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question during this time, simply press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. And if you'd like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again.

Thank you.

I would now like to turn the call over to Eric Frey. Eric. Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Jivo's second quarter results. I'm Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy at Jivo. With me today we have Paul Bloom, our Chief Executive Officer, and Leike Aguirre, our Chief Financial Officer. We also have Kyle James, our Chief Commercial Officer, and Greg Hanselman, our Executive Vice President of Operations and Engineering. Earlier Earlier today we issued a press release that outlines our second quarter 2026 results and some of the topics we plan to discuss. Copies of the press release are available on our website at www.jibo.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 potential expansion and de-bottlenecking of our Jibo North Dakota plant, our expected future cash flows and adjusted EBITDA, our expected carbon business revenues, our expected future tax credit monetizations, 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.jiba.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.jibo.com.

I'd now like to turn the call over to the CEO of Jibo, Paul Bloom. Paul. Good afternoon, everyone. Jibo is a strong growing business. Our operating results this quarter demonstrate that our company is set to deliver revenue growth and positive cashflow from operations. Our carbon strategy is working well, and we are positioning the business for three stages of expansion that build on our existing operations and capture near and medium-term opportunities. Long term, we believe the businesses we are building today will serve as the blueprint for future growth. Our results also demonstrate that Jibo is not just a future story. Revenue increased 7% compared to the last quarter and gross profit increased 70% in the past quarter. the past six months compared to the same period last year.

Some of that increase reflects six full months of benefit from the Red Trail assets we acquired instead of five months during the same period last year. The majority of that increase reflects a durable strengthening of our core low-carbon ethanol and renewable natural gas businesses. In the second quarter, our team continued to deliver on critical milestones we've communicated previously. Our de-bottlenecking activities in our Jibo North Dakota facility remain on target to increase our low carbon ethanol capacity to 75 million gallons per year by the end of 2026. We also advanced new carbon market pathways identified new cost efficiencies, and optimized the sale of carbon attributes. As a result, we now expect full-year 2026 non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of more than $60 million, which is double our previous estimate. These developments are significant, and they reflect a disciplined execution to unlock new revenue opportunities.

A particularly important milestone is our recent Canada Clean Fuel Regulation, or CFR, pathway approval for low carbon ethanol with carbon capture and sequestration, which was granted in the second quarter. This pathway gives GEVO access to a more than 1 billion gallon per year compliance market for our low carbon ethanol beginning in the third quarter and further diversifies our cash flows internationally. It also gives us another lever to improve returns from our carbon business by directing carbon value to the markets where it is worth the most, whether bundled with our fuels in compliance markets or sold separately in voluntary markets. Importantly, the approval also applies retroactively to credits we banked for low-carbon ethanol sold into Canada beginning in 2025. And we've already sold approximately 17 million of these bank credits to be recognized in the third quarter. Going forward, we believe our carbon business, based on current capacity and market conditions, can deliver over $30 million per year in revenue on a run rate basis, excluding our bank CFR credit sales. We're not simply producing low carbon ethanol co-products in RNG.

Those commodity products are a means to deliver energy that drops into supply chains today while also driving down carbon intensity, producing more efficiently, capturing and storing carbon, and selling high-quality credits into compliance and voluntary carbon markets. And importantly, we believe the carbon business model we are building today will be the same durable model we use in the future for SAF, isobutanyl, and other renewable fuels and chemicals powered by our Verity Carbon Accounting Digital Solutions platform. We expect to grow with discipline by scaling the businesses we have today and delivering the products and solutions our customers and markets demand. At Jibo North Dakota, we are focused on growing our low carbon fuel and carbon businesses through a three stage plan. First demodel necking the plant, second expanding capacity to double low carbon ethanol and carbon capture, and third producing SAF. Stage one is our de-bottle-lecking initiative to increase low-carbon ethanol co-products, carbon capture and associated incentive volumes by approximately 10 to 15% by the end of this year. Meaningful progress was made during the second quarter, and we remain on track and on budget to deliver this anticipated extra capacity, thereby enhancing revenues, growing adjusted EBITDA, and expanding our margins in 2027.

This near-term expansion is fully funded and budgeted for this year and builds on our asset already own and operate. We believe our Jivo North Dakota complex can create more value in the near term while also supporting longer term growth. Stronger cash generation from Jivo North Dakota helps us reduce risk and enhances our future financing flexibility. Our Jibo North Dakota complex is better suited to support a strategic platform growth than the Lake Preston, South Dakota site we were previously developing. Jibo North Dakota combines one of the strongest active on-site carbon capture and sequestration capabilities in the world with access to advantaged local feedstocks, established rail and truck logistics, and experienced operating workforce, available land and pore space capacity for future growth, and it's in a business-friendly state that supports agriculture, energy, and carbon management. Given the strengths of the Jivo North Dakota complex and other business factors we considered, we have finalized their decision to exit our ATJ 60 project activities in South Dakota and formally discontinued other non-core project activities. As a result, we recognized $176 million one-time non-cash impairment charge.

Leike will talk more about this non-cash charge. Continuing with our growth plans, stage two at GEBO North Dakota targets doubling our capacity to about 150 million gallons per year of low-carbon ethanol with associated carbon capture and sequestration and tax incentive opportunities. Financing efforts for this expansion are on track and are targeted to be completed in the second half of 2026, consistent with our previously announced arrangement and timeline with Aura Energy. Engineering, permitting, and initial equipment procurement for the expansion project are underway. We anticipate completion of the expansion in 2028 once financing is complete and construction commences. This expansion is expected to result in meaningful revenue and gross profit growth. Stage three of our growth plan contemplates the conversion of approximately one-third of JIVO North Dakota's expanded low-carbon ethanol capacity into higher-value synthetic aviation fuel through Project North Star, also known as ATJ30, which is our 30 million gallon-per-year alcohol-to-jet development project.

We are making good progress on this medium-term, multi-year effort and provided details on our milestones in our recent business update. The team delivered our FEL3 engineering estimates on schedule in the second quarter. As we moved from FEL2 to FEL3, the capital estimate was refined based on substantially more detailed engineering, vendor engagement and execution planning. The updated estimate of $600 million remains the expected range and accuracy associated with an FEL2 estimate, and we believe it provides much higher level of confidence as we approach FID. FEL-3 showed very favorable results for the underlying alcohol-to-jet process modules, which were within 2% of the previous estimates. That's a good sign for enabling the development in a repeatable fashion at other locations in the future. The site-specific engineering and equipment logistics cost increased in FEL3, but we believe that the project's ROI remains attractive.

Securing additional financeable offtake agreements is needed to reach FID and remains a gating item. These are complex multi-year economic commitments. We are making progress advancing these agreements from the current term sheet stage. We remain committed to advancing our ATJ30 initiative in a disciplined way, sequencing capital based on customer demand, project financeability, and policy support. And as a reminder, we are currently pursuing non-dilutive project level financing for the project. We do not have to choose between becoming a cash generating, low carbon fuels and carbon management business and building future ATJ projects. The Jiva North Dakota site and its near-term cash generation are expected to support ATJ in the future.

We continue to target final investment decision for this initiative by the end of the year. I will now turn the call over to Lake to discuss our financial results and outlook in more detail.

Thank you, Paul. This last quarter was an important one for JIVO. We delivered solid operating performance and completed planned maintenance and the bottlenecking activities to expand capacity at our flagship North Dakota site. DURING THE SECOND QUARTER, WE REPORTED REVENUE OF $47 MILLION, COMPARED TO $43 MILLION IN THE SAME QUARTER LAST YEAR. This 7% year-over-year growth reflects consistent operations of our low-carbon businesses, even with modest impact of planned downtime at our Ojibwe North Dakota site for maintenance and deep bottlenecking activities. IN COMPARISON TO THE FIRST HALF OF 2025, REVENUE DURING THE FIRST HALF OF 2026 GREW BY 23% TO 89 MILLION, REFLECTING A FULL SIX MONTHS OF THE BENEFIT OF OUR RED TRAIL ENERGY ACQUISITION COMPARED TO JUST FIVE MONTHS LAST YEAR. coupled with continued solid performance in our carbon business. Gross profit was 20 million in the second quarter, representing a gross margin of 43% compared to gross profit of 19 million and gross margin of 44% in the same quarter last year. Relative to revenues alone, we believe that gross profit is a meaningful barometer of a business performance.

It captures not only our revenue performance, but also the impact of optimizing carbon, commodities, and incentives that are monetized as part of our business model. During the first half of 2026, gross profit was 36 million, an increase from 21 million in the first half of 2025, reflecting a full six months of the benefit of our retro energy acquisition, coupled with dynamic efforts to optimize 45 Z tax credit generation from our assets. NOTE THAT WE RECOGNIZE THE BENEFIT OF 45Z TAX CREDIT AS A REDUCTION TO COST OF GOODS SOLD. OPERATING EXPENSES IN THE SECOND QUARTER INCLUDED A ONE-TIME NONCASH AND PAYMENT CHARGE OF $176 MILLION. THIS WAS RELATED TO CAPITALIZED DEVELOPMENT AND ENGINEERING EXPENSES PREVIOUSLY INCURRED, WHICH WAS PRIMARILY ASSOCIATED WITH PRIOR ATJ 60 PROJECT IN LAKE PRESTON, SOUTH DAKOTA, AND OTHER PRIOR INITIATIVES THAT ARE NO LONGER IN ALIGNMENT WITH OUR STRATEGICAL PROJECT. PRIORITIES. THIS NONCASH IMPAIRMENT CHARGE DOES NOT IMPACT OUR CASH POSITION, LIQUIDITY, OR OPERATING CASH FLOW OUTLOOK. IT DOES NOT TRIGGER ADDITIONAL CASH PAYMENT OBLIGATION OR AFFECT THE UNDERLYING ECONOMICS OF CHIVO NORTH DAKOTA OR ABILITY TO EXECUTE OUR DEVELOPMENT PLAN THERE AS OUR CORE GROWTH PLATFORM.

Excluding the non-cash impairment charge, operating expenses in the second quarter were up 18% over the second quarter of 2025, which reflects an increase in G&A expenses primarily due to non-recurring employee severance and accelerated equity award charges. On a gap basis, net loss attributable to Jivo was $177 million or $0.75 per share in the second quarter. ON A NONE-GAAP BASIS, ADJUSTED NET LOSS ATTRIBUTABLE TO GIVO WAS $1 MILLION ON $0.01 PER SHARE. Reconciliation of this amount to the GAAP measure is included in today's earnings release. NUN-GAP adjusted EBITDA for the second quarter was $11 million. Note that the second quarter results did not include revenue related to our recently approved CFR pathway, which is expected to show up in the third quarter. We believe that this quarter's adjusted net loss, coupled with the growing adjusted EBITDA, reflect an ongoing improvement in our underlying earnings power of our business.

This quarter establishes a strong foundation from which we expect meaningful adjusted EBITDA and operating cash flows during the second half of the year. As we look to the full year, we now expect 2026 adjusted EBITDA of more than 60 million, which is more than double our prior outlook of 30 million. This is a meaningful acceleration from our first AF2026 operating performance and is supported by four main drivers. FIRST, THE RECENTLY APPROVED CANADA CFR PATHWAY AND ASSOCIATED SALES. we expect to begin realizing those sales in the third quarter. Second, our assets are on track to generate more than 70 million or 45 Z tax credits that we expect to monetize in 2026 compared to 52 million last year. This is driven by updated policy guidance and our operational efficiencies this year that improve the carbon intensity of our operating assets. Third, continued operational execution of low-carbon fuel sales, including revenue growth from our specialty fuels.

And fourth, further fiscal discipline. OF THE MORE THAN 70 MILLION IN 4-5Z MONETIZATION WE EXPECT TO ACHIEVE THIS YEAR, already closed on the sale of $20 million in 45-day credit after the end of the second quarter. With our current engagement with seasoned tax credit buyers, we expect to monetize the remaining approximately 50 million of credits and receive the associate proceeds by year end. A reminder that our 45Z tax credit incentives are generated rateably each quarter based on the volume and carbon intensity of our low carbon ethanol and RNG production. These credits show up as a reduction in our cost of goods sold on our income statement and are a benefit to our adjusted EBITDA. Note that the cash proceeds from 45Z can lag behind the quarter in which the credit is generated. This results in some quarter-to-quarter variability in our cash flow from operations. While we continue to expect operating cash flow to be neutral to positive for full year 2026, we also expect meaningful positive operating cash flow in the second half of the year.

This further demonstrates the underlying cash-generating power of a business's continued to threaten. TURNING TO LIQUIDITY, WE HANDED THE QUARTER WITH CASH, CASH EQUIVALENT, AND RESTRICTED CASH OF $58 MILLION. IMPORTANTLY, THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE APPROXIMATELY 16 MILLION OF CASH PER SEES FROM THE MONETIZATION OF 45Z CREDITS THAT WE HAVE COLLECTED SINCE THE END OF THE SECOND QUARTER. We are also excited about our performance in 2027 and beyond. Our debottlenecking project remains on track and on budget. We expect 2027 adjusted EBITDA to be broadly in line with our current 2026 full-year target after we factor in some non-recurrent revenue this year and the debottlenecking production uplift started at the end of this year. OUR EXPANSION OF JIVO NORTH DAKOTA TO DOUBLE ITS PRODUCTION CAPACITY IS ADVANCING, WITH FINANCING ON TRACK FOR COMPLETION IN THE SECOND HALF OF 2026.

THIS IS CONSISTENT WITH OUR PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED ARRANGEMENT WITH OUR FINANCING PARTNER, AERA ENERGY. And as Paul mentioned earlier, we also continue to push forward on securing bankable offtake contracts to enable securing accrued financing of our HCJ 30 project. We are engaged with various project level capital providers and remain focused on moving forward to FID by year end. In closing, we are seeing continued improvement in adjusted EBITDA and cash flow generation supported by the strong underlying fundamentals of our business. We are confident in our ability to sustain our positive momentum as our near-term group projects at G4 North Dakota continue to mature on schedule. Today's results anchors GVOTE's growth trajectory for their strengthening our capacity to execute our long-term objectives while delivering sustainable value to our shareholders.

With that, I would turn the call back to Paul. Thanks, Leke. We strengthened our financial position, doubled our expected 2026 adjusted EBITDA outlook, and are starting to show that Jibo North Dakota can serve as a scalable blueprint for profitable growth. We've talked before about the potential for a capital licensing or franchise type model, and that opportunity is becoming more tangible as we demonstrate how our technology, operating model and carbon capabilities can be deployed to meet customer demand and capture value across markets. We'll have more to share as these initiatives advance. For now, I want to thank our employees, partners, customers, and shareholders for their continued support. We're building JIVA with discipline, focus, and a clear path to creating long-term value. With that, we'll open the call for questions.

All right. Thank you very much. And at this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. Once again, star one. And we will pause just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. All right. Looks like our first question today comes from the line of Jeff Gramp with Northland. Jeff, please go ahead.

Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for the time. Hey, Jeff, how are you? Hey, Paul. Thanks. I wanted to dive into the, the $60 million EBITDA target that you guys have refreshed here lately. I just wanted to understand some of the moving parts with, with respect to the approval to reach the Canadian markets. It sounded like some of that 60 million is a little bit of a one-time bump related to some volumes prior to getting that approval, like a retroactive credit, if you will. Can you help us understand how much of a windfall that might be just to kind of level set.

I guess, kind of what the true earnings power of the business is in 26? Yes, sure thing. And that's a perfect question, right? Because, you know, we're really excited that the carbon business itself, right, has grown now to what we think is a run rate of about $30 million a year going forward, right? So that's going to be the part that goes forward as well. This was a big part of what we wanted to get done because we had made a bet that we were going to be able to capture the value from the CFR credits once we got the approval. And, you know, we had sold a lot of fuel in 2020. and the first half of 2026 here. So we haven't been able to monetize those credits yet, but about 40%, a little more than 40% are actually credits that were realized this year. So when we think about that, there's a big component of those bank credits that really are in a run rate for 2026. So that is a big component going forward.

But I would say that when you think about the 60 million that we're talking about, going forward, remember we're going to be completing the de-bottle decking by the end of the year. So we believe that this is really the upside of that, minus maybe these one-time events. We're really kind of flattish going INTO 2027. SO WE THINK MOST OF THE 60 MILLION IS GOING TO BE A REPEATABLE RUN RATE ON THE FORWARD BASIS. I DON'T KNOW, LAKE, IF YOU HAVE ANY OTHER COMMENTS ON THAT. THANKS, PAUL. GENERALLY AGREE WITH THE DESCRIPTION THERE. SO THE WAY TO THINK ABOUT IT IS WHAT PAUL JUST MENTIONED.

As we complete the bottlenecking, there's going to be uplift in terms of production volume. That increases just our revenue profile. And then when we subtract out the non-recording basis from 2026, effectively we end up at that flattish.

a projection as to what we offer 2026. Yes. And remember, this is like, we're really thinking about how are we going to grow this EBITDA nicely? It's also about the increase in the 45 Z tax credits that we've got. Right. So we're kind of putting all of these different levers together to make sure that we can have this durable business going forward that hits that exceeds that 60 really.

Got it. Thanks for the details. For my follow-up, just to stick in the Canadian market, What person, do you have like an estimate? I know this changes as market prices and dynamics change, but like round numbers, how much of your ethanol do you expect to send to Canada in the second half of this year? I mean, seeing some of the pricing points, it seems like that's the most economic market for you, but perhaps there's some other factors.

at play that might, I don't know, make sense to send to other markets or if there's any constraints to how much you can send to Canada? Thanks. Yes, no, again, great question. And this is the whole point of our business on carbon arbitrage, right? So we want to make sure that we've got all the levers that we can pull to maximize the returns for Jivo and our shareholders. And so having this new lever that we can send is, you know, as Canada is a very strong market over, you know, a billion gallon opportunity for us. Obviously, we're a lot smaller than that. So we want to continue to maximize the volumes to where we're going to get the highest returns. So really no limitations. on how much we can send. We're going to continue to make sure that we've got the right certifications and everything in place to do that.

But then we have to look at the other markets. We have to take a look at, how's the voluntary market developing? That's something that we talked about because we've got more interest in that side. You saw that in our business update, We talked about NASDAQ, you know, is a second year that they bought carbon from us on a substantial size buy. So we're always weighing, you know, how do we place the carbon in either a compliance market or a voluntary market? What's going to give us the total return that we're looking for? How do we diversify our business too? Because we don't want all our eggs in one basket. I think that's the thing that we've learned you know, about being in the fuels and carbon markets that, you know, we want a good mix there and be able to play these off of each other.

That makes a lot of sense. I appreciate the details. I'll turn it back.

All right. Thank you, Jeff. And our next question comes from the line of Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright. Amit, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. Congrats on all the progress. Hi, Paul. On the ethanol expansion, Paul.

Can you remind us what the CAPEX requirements are going to be on this project? Yes. So we haven't disclosed the capital requirements on the ethanol expansion. You know, we, if you, you know, flip back to the deval necking, we said we were deploying about a $24 million of capital in that range, about half of that was going to operational reliability. The other half was going to the actual de-bottlenecking to improve the output from 67 million gallons to 75 million gallons. So we'll have more details as we get further along here, but it's really about getting this done and getting our deal done with our energy WE'RE FEELING REALLY GOOD ABOUT THAT AND EXPECT TO GET THIS DONE WITHIN THE NEXT FEW MONTHS BECAUSE WE WANT TO THEN MOVE DIRECTLY INTO THE EXECUTION. AS WE MENTIONED, WE'RE MOVING QUICKLY ON THIS AND LOOKING AT PERMITTING. WE'RE LOOKING AT A LOT OF THE OTHER ENGINEERING THINGS.

ALL THAT'S WELL UNDERWAY BECAUSE IT ESSENTIALLY DOUBLES WHAT WE'RE we're already doing today at Jibo North Dakota. And because the carbon business is working, because we're able to monetize and kind of firing on all cylinders, monetizing tax credits, this is the most accreted project that we have in the hopper. We want to get this to the finish line.

Understood. So we'll have maybe more color on this in the 3Q earnings column.

MOST LIKELY. I THINK THE BIGGEST THING, AND GREG, YOU CAN JUMP IN HERE TOO. GREG HANSELMAN IS ON THE LINE WITH US. SO GREG, YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT WHAT YOUR EXPECTATIONS ARE?.

capital? We don't know the exact timing, but the engineering team is working hard on designing an integrated plant. This isn't like two separate facilities. We really want to optimize the CapEx and the OpEx to drive the best synergies for the long term. And we don't have all those answers yet, but we're working hard to solidify that so we have the answers.

or when the time is right and we bring that together later in H2. Yes, and very much like what we're doing on ATJ working through an FEL2, FEL3, we're refining these estimates. So, you know, today we're not there yet on refining that estimate to where we want to be, but we'll keep moving that forward so we have a much finer.

your point on this when we're able to communicate that. OK, understood. No, thank you for that. So for ATG 30, would you potentially go with Aira or are you looking at other financing options and partners?.

Yes, I'll let Lakey chime in here on some of the updates we've got on financing. But this has been something that we've been working on for a long time. So the key thing again is that we've completed the FEL three estimates like we talked about, we're working on these financeable off takes. And really when we think about the FEL, about financing, you need to make sure you've got a bankable project. And the discipline that we're putting in this is making sure that we not only have the off takes, but we've got the right customers, the right customers who are going to be there because it's going to take us a few years to build this plant and then have long term, very complex, multi year you know, financial arrangements that are going to support this project. So it's, it's a mix of making sure that we've got the off takes and that we've really got the right set of customers who, who see us. And then, you know, the financing at that point, um, it kind of falls into place because then you can start to look at what's your risk profile on the overall project, but we are working through that de-risking today.

Like, I don't know if you wanna make comments on the other- yes.

I think just to probably sum it up, in terms of cap raise or capital raise profile, we're engaged with multiple project level lenders and equity providers. So just not... era at this point. But also just to express really the excitement that we have is as we look to the development of ATJ30, what's also very important is to highlight our existing operations, the cash flows that we're generating now, those actually enable the ability for us to fund ATJ30 from a development perspective, but also fund our portion of the construction capital as well. So that's the really exciting part. I think the engagement with the project level capital is on the right track. And as Paul mentioned, as we secure the bankable offtakes with the right partners, with the right economics, then the puzzle comes together in terms of.

just moving forward with the project at the right time yes just to maybe close the loop with our we're really laser focused on the expansion today right that's what we need to get done and like greg was saying you know move that forward so we can get you know 2028 we'll be here before you know it so we've got a a full court.

press on making sure that we can get that project executed. Thank you guys for the color. Just last one for me, maybe just on Verity, any updates on progress with commercialization, et cetera, for that offering? Yes, great question. Verity, one of my favorite topics. So with Verity, I think the thing we're.

really learning more than anything else is as we get to this run rate of 30 million on our carbon business, verity is just a key component of how we put all that together. It goes back to the original reasons of why did we build this platform? And it was because we can take one source of data from multiple areas, whether that's comes from the farm inputs, whether that's from the energy inputs, carbon capture, tie it all together, and then use that tool to basically be able to substantiate and track our claims and carbon accounting into multiple markets, whether that's Canadian CFR, whether that's 45Z, whether that's a voluntary market. So it's becoming, I would say, a much bigger part of what we see as a key component of the carbon business for us. The other thing with that is that we're just getting to this point now in the development phase. But not only can we track, but we can optimize. So you start to think about now, how do we use Verity? as an optimization tool. So I think internally, we're very... very optimistic about how Verity is contributing value to the carbon business results that you're seeing today.

Externally, we've got a number of customers. I would say a little bit slower on the uptake of, you know, external development, mostly because we still don't have good clarity on things like 45 Z ag benefits, right? Those are kind of the some of the big things that we've we've looked at. And we're still trying to figure out how much are we going to be able to pull in from a compliance type tool, right? And as we look at this, you know, not everybody everybody's running a carbon business. I think we're actually the only ones running a carbon business like us. So I think as this catches on, there'll be more demand for Verity out there. But we still have the eight customers that we've had in the past and continue to develop that. that portfolio, but it, the external development's definitely been a little slower on the uptake.

Understood. I appreciate all the callers. Thank you so much. I'll step back and kill.

All right, thank you, Amit. And our next question comes from the line of Derek Whitfield with Texas Capital.

Derek, please go ahead. Thanks. Good afternoon and congrats on the quarter and the updated outlook. Well, thanks, Derek. I HAVE TWO QUESTIONS FOR YOU GUYS. BOTH ON FNL. WITH RESPECT TO THE FNL EXPANSION TO 150, COULD YOU SPEAK TO THE EXPECTED CAPITAL STRUCTURE FOR THE EXPANSION? and second stand on the ethanol facility. It's clear that you guys operate a very low CI plant based on deficiency in CCUS, given that you operate in a more progressive region for CSA practices, how are you thinking about the benefit of expected CSA policy on your 25Z credits? Yes, both great questions. Thanks.

I'll start with the first one. So on the capital structure, right, as we work through the details with ARA on the expansion, you know, we'll stay in the lead, right? So we're going to be, have a controlling interest in the plant. Obviously we will operate the plant and as we work through that everything's going to be consolidated on our balance sheet. That's the plan going forward.

I don't know, Lake A, you want to chime in there? The only thing to add to that is there is going to be project level debt that we also use to optimize the financing strategy. So as Paul mentioned, we are targeting a controlling interest. We'll consolidate the expansion project and then the rest of the capital stack is going to be provided by us and Aira. which again, it goes back to the point I was raising earlier, our existing operations generating the right level of EBITDA on a recurring basis, cash is coming in for us to be able to fund our ownership interest of the expansion project. Yes, and then again, just to be clear, right, again, a non-dilutive financing approach at that project level.

That's right. That Lake is talking about. Moving on to your second part of the question, we do have one of the lowest CI scores out there. And so, you know, from a 45 Z Ag benefits perspective, the question is always how much lower can you go? So we do have a little bit, but that's going to be, you know, Greg, I can chime in here too, but we've got more energy optimization. When you think about CI, carbon intensity, it's kind of a proxy for a lot of good things that happen. The best one is called efficiency. So as you continue to do more with less or have more output with less input, you drive down the carbon intensity. your economics in a favorable way for your projects. So we're laser focused on that.

Again, we already have a low CI score, so probably compared to a lot of others, we've got a smaller amount that we can take advantage of, like a CSA or a CSA. you know the AG benefits, region AG benefits that are coming in because you can't go lower than zero, right? And so we're already getting pretty close, so it could be a few million dollars that we're we're going to be trying to, you know, pull out of that, but it's really going to come to that. You know we're going to need more bushels. We've got an expansion coming, so we think that this is, this is just a bigger deal. And again, we're optimistic that this is the right way to go because climate smart agriculture or regen agriculture, all of those things help to also enrich the carbon in the soil. They make soils more robust, you know, to weather events. And so we think that this is just the right way to, to move forward. Um,.

So farmers can do more with less too, right? It's just, it's a good practice to have. I don't know, Greg, if you want to talk about anything else that we've got. No, I just add on the CI score. We do have a little room to go and volume is a nice lever to dilute out fixed obviously, but also energy is there's less consumption as you get that next unit at the top end of a big facility. And so working and solving for that in our modeling and our design is a key part of what we're working on, not only in the demodellnecking, but also the expansion project.

And I think the other thing that we're really focused on is that reliability, because we can't get time back. So our operational excellence, we're laser focused on making sure that we're a great operator and the only downtime we have is the planned downtime. And so that's the thing that gives me a lot of optimism about this growth plan that we have is we're already demonstrating this, bottlenecking now this year. And thinking about that, take a look at our website when you get a chance. We've got some time-lapse photography of everything that we've been doing. I mean, it's fantastic. The team's really been executing well. We've been building and growing while operating.

It's not an easy thing to do, and we need to do that same We need to make sure that that's at the top of our list and continue to be focused on that. But then we're going to move into the next phase. We're really going to be doing the expansion. And then we'll move into the third phase beyond that where we've got the ATJ project. So I think my confidence level is really building with the entire team because they're able to execute. on this and you can see it. So again, go to the website, check out our photos and it's pretty cool stuff.

I think as in congrats, congratulations on all your progress. Thank you.

All right. Thank you, Derek. And it looks like our final question today comes from the line of Peter Gastric with Water Tower Research. Peter, please go ahead.

Thank you very much and congratulations on the results and thanks for taking my question. Just a couple questions. First of all, for Frontier Infrastructure and Carbon Future, they announced a new partnership a few days ago to market CDRs from ethanol CO2. That's a parallel initiative, right? Does that have any implications? to you in terms of advancing the strategy and what can you share about that?.

So, Peter, I think, you know, CDR is just in general, right? I mean, this is what we're selling today, right? So the CDR is the voluntary side of the carbon market. And so the carbon CDR stands for carbon dioxide removal. And so we've been certified from the very beginning. getting through Puro.Earth. And that's the business that we continue to look at growing. You know, we sold 8500 tons to Nasdaq. Overall, we were actually, you know, just finalizing some more transactions around the carbon business on the voluntary side. So we think this is great if you look at the overall macro on that business, about $12 billion has been actually committed in CDR purchases.

But only about 3.3% of that has been actually delivered. That comes from a website called CDR.FYI. I think that is a really good place to look. We're actually number five on the list leaderboard on CDR.FYI as a supplier. So the thing that I think is great about what we're doing is we're one of, you know, the handful of companies who can actually not only just talk about CDRs and sell CDRs, but we can deliver those CDRs. So we're becoming, I would say as you work through the quality requirements which are very we have very high quality carbon and we're going to stay focused on delivering that high quality product that you know we're a trusted supplier in this space.

Okay, great. Thank you. Just a second question on the EBITDA challenge which you discussed in the Q1 results. Have you thought about where some of the low-hanging fruit could lie and also with respect to the South Dakota, are there any other benefits to your cost that could be reflected, for example, in the GBO business segment or other that could come up in subsequent quarters?.

Yes, look, we're very happy with how we've been progressing the EBITDA challenge. So there's a lot in the hopper. We've gone through, I don't know, Lake can provide the details. He's the champion of the EBITDA challenge here at Jibo. But we've identified quite a number of opportunities and started to execute on those. So, Lake, I'll let you give some.

Yes, absolutely. So great question. So in terms of the challenge, we're at a place where we've identified over three dozens of opportunities in front of us, which are really probably half of it is low hanging fruit. So to date, we've actually implemented about 50 percent of those identified items, which is not necessarily a good thing. related to ATJ 60 or the South Dakota project. This is actually a recurring operational project efficiencies that we can actually just implement this year. And during the second half of this year is what we expect to see some of those executions and implementation to start manifesting in our financial performance for the year as well. So where we are tracking today our Q3 and Q4 results is going to be reflecting our focus and the implementation of the EBITDA challenge. And we're on the right trajectory to see some very, very groundbreaking milestones on that as well. Yes, and it's really the combination of how do we continue to unlock revenue through new pathways.

things like the CFR, right? I mean, we were focused on that. That was part of the EBITDA challenge, and we've got more pathways to unlock. And then the other part is just how do we really manage and control our costs going forward and really have a disciplined approach to these are the things we need to accomplish and make them happen. sure that we understand what that's going to return for us and our shareholders as we do that.

Okay, that's great. Thank you very much. Thank you, Peter.

And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our question and answer session. So I will now turn the call back over to CEO Paul Bloom for closing remarks. Paul? Thank you. Hey, this quarter shows that Jibo is really executing. We've got stronger adjusted EBITDA. We're improving our cash generation. We have a working carbon business. disciplined growth plan centered on Jivo North Dakota and that's the platform that we intend to scale. So again I just want to thank all our colleagues and and really the our partners and our our customers and and our shareholders for all the support. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Paul. And ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call. Thank you so much for joining and you may now disconnect. Have a great day, everyone.

This live transcript is auto-generated without human intervention or review.

[Call has ended.]

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.