Gevo, Inc. Q1 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call to discuss Gevo's first 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; Lynn Smull, 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 first quarter 2025 results and 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 projects, our recently executed agreements, potential contracts for carbon credits, our Gevo North Dakota and RNG projects 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 difference since the last quarter of 2024. In the first quarter of 2025, we generated $29 million in revenue after just two months of operations at Gevo North Dakota. The ethanol and carbon sequestration are performing well and adding value as we anticipated. Our revenue and profitability from renewable natural gas have also improved. We believe our growth strategy, highlighted by our acquisition of the North Dakota plant, will result in us being EBITDA positive this year. This plant not only produces ethanol profitably in a challenging market, but it also has one of three operational carbon sequestration facilities in the country. We have received IRS approval to apply for the 45Z tax credit, which we expect to monetize and further enhance our EBITDA growth. Despite market skepticism, we believe these 45Z credits are currently monetizable, and we anticipate seeing their benefits reflected in our profit and loss statement starting next quarter. Notably, we are aware of only two ethanol plants in the country that will benefit from the 45Z credits, and we own one of them, Gevo North Dakota. We are not seeking clarification regarding agricultural benefits since our carbon intensity score is already low at around 20. The more we learn about the Gevo North Dakota site, the more promising it appears. It features an ethanol plant with a capacity of 67 million gallons per year and ample room to expand the ethanol operations, enhance the corn supply, and possibly add more facilities like an alcohol-to-jet plant. The site has strong infrastructure including railroads and established carbon sequestration operations that have functioned without issues for several years. The carbon sequestration well is likely one of the best in the country due to its geological structure and size, with certification as a 1,000-year well. We own it, which gives us a vertical advantage. We've also encountered unexpected support from North Dakota's governor, legislators, and leaders in agriculture, gas, oil, and energy sectors, who are keen on fostering growth in the state. We believe the North Dakota site is ideal for establishing an alcohol-to-jet plant, given the solid corn supply and an efficient, well-constructed ethanol plant. In fact, we think we can expedite the construction of the ATJ plant in North Dakota compared to South Dakota by utilizing the design and engineering we've already developed for our ATJ60 plant. We aim to minimize capital costs, making the ATJ project at Gevo North Dakota even more appealing by initially starting with a smaller plant, specifically 30 million gallons per year of ATJ, which maximizes modularization to reduce project risks and lower labor expenses. This potential has attracted interest from several international companies eager to establish plants in their own countries. We're on the right path for growth and have also made advancements in voluntary carbon abatement, which is separate from California’s LCFS credits and 45Z tax credits. We have actual downstream customers purchasing carbon abatement at a cost per metric ton. Paul Bloom, our Chief Business Officer and Chief Carbon Officer, will elaborate on this shortly. Recently, we've sold a significant amount of carbon and with other fuel contracts, we estimate that we have about half of the anticipated capacity of the Gevo North Dakota alcohol-to-jet plant secured. The traditional commitment from the Department of Energy for our ATJ60 project in South Dakota is still intact, and we expect continued progress towards closing that deal. The DOE is filling positions, and while we acknowledge there is work ahead on their side, we also have tasks to accomplish such as adjusting some offtake terms for more favorable agreements with the DOE. We still need to understand the plans for the Summit pipeline. For instance, I’m reluctant to invest in a virtual rail pipeline to our North Dakota site if Summit manages to resolve their pipeline issues, as they anticipate. While we are optimistic about eventually securing the DOE loan, we are not pausing deployment of ATJ capacity. This is why we sought the Gevo North Dakota site with its numerous advantages. As you've stated repeatedly, Gevo is not solely reliant on alcohol-to-jet to generate cash flow. Nevertheless, the alcohol-to-jet opportunity presents significant potential for future growth. Given the supply and demand dynamics, jet fuel will be essential in this country. Should we import jet fuel or produce it domestically? We argue that alcohol-to-jet should be manufactured in the USA. We believe it is the most economically viable method of enhancing jet fuel capacity in the country, with HEFA (jet fuel produced from vegetable oil, used cooking oil, or animal fat) being the second-best economic option. Relying on fossil oil for more jet fuel domestically would necessitate the construction of a new petroleum refinery. While that might be possible, examining full cost production suggests that an ATJ plant using ethanol as a feedstock would be competitively priced compared to jet fuel derived from oil on a cash cost basis. We actually project that deploying alcohol-to-jet could be cost-effective. Furthermore, we can reduce or even eliminate the carbon footprint, and there are markets and customers ready to pay for these benefits. We see a substantial opportunity ahead. We estimate that over the next decade, the USA could utilize more than 30 alcohol-to-jet plants, each with a capacity of 60 million gallons, and even more if they are slightly smaller. The existing ethanol capacity is sufficient to support this initiative, along with ample corn supply without the need to increase farming land use. Everyone across the entire value chain is collaborating to make this work. While we acknowledge the market chatter, we are confident in the fundamentals, which suggest this is an exciting time. I will now hand it over to Lynn to discuss the numbers.

Thanks, Pat. Let's go over the numbers. We ended the quarter with $135 million in cash, cash equivalents and restricted cash. Combined operating revenue and other net income was $30.9 million for the first quarter. Our RNG subsidiary generated $5.7 million in revenue during the quarter. This reflects an increase of $1.7 million compared to the previous year, primarily driven by the increased LCFS credit generation due to our improved carbon score in that program, partially offset by lower RIN prices. Regarding our income from operations and non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA numbers, at Gevo North Dakota, or GevoND for the two months of February and March, income from operations was $0.5 million and adjusted EBITDA was $1.8 million. This does not include expected growth this year from our monetizing the ethanol 45Z. At GevoRNG, income from operations was $1.1 million and adjusted EBITDA was $2.7 million last quarter. This also does not include expected growth this year from monetizing the biogas 45Z. So we have positive momentum with adjusted EBITDA in those two segments. Turning to our Gevo and GevoFuel segments, which include R&D, project development and other operating costs, including the development of our ATJ projects, combined net loss from operations was $21.7 million and adjusted EBITDA loss was a combined $19.9 million last quarter. Company-wide, consolidated loss from operations was $20.1 million last quarter with non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA loss of $15.4 million. We expect continued adjusted EBITDA improvement throughout the year driven by the monetization of 45Z, increased RNG value from our new negative 339 CI score and ongoing performance at Gevo North Dakota. With that, I'll turn it over to Chris.

Thanks. I'll expand a bit more on operations this past quarter. Since completing the acquisition of Gevo North Dakota at the end of January, we've been working towards integrating that site into the overall business of Gevo and laying the foundation for growth of the site. We're evaluating a number of great opportunities and we've made progress on engineering of an ATJ or alcohol-to-jet plant that we could deploy there. This engineering effort has leveraged our ATJ design from our Lake Preston site, which is saving us time and money for development. This is all part of our copy-paste approach to building out ATJ capacity for ourselves and for others. Regarding operations at Gevo North Dakota, Gevo's first quarter 2025 results reflect the impact of just two months of February and March from Gevo North Dakota. During those two months, Gevo North Dakota operated exceptionally well, producing over 11 million gallons of low carbon ethanol, while selling over 40,000 tons of high protein animal feed and 3 million pounds of corn oil, all from less than 4 million bushels of corn ground— that's a yield of about 2.9 gallons of ethanol per bushel, which we're really happy with. We see those as strong volumes and yields during two months of production, and this reflects the consistent operational excellence of the facility. In addition to producing those value-added energy and food products, we captured and sequestered 29,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide at the site. And with an estimated CI score of 21 for our ethanol using the 45Z GREET model, we've avoided 7,000 metric tons of carbon emissions as a result of the use of our low carbon fuels. At GevoRNG, where we convert dairy manure into renewable natural gas, we produced about 80,000 million BTUs of renewable natural gas last quarter. So across the Gevo operations, including the two months from Gevo North Dakota and three months of RNG, we generated over 100,000 metric tons of carbon abatement last quarter. With that, I'll hand it over.

Thanks, Chris. On the commercial front, we continue to make solid progress for our adjusted EBITDA generating businesses that Chris just discussed and our alcohol-to-jet growth projects. Let me start with Gevo North Dakota and RNG as we are negotiating our first 45Z tax credit sales. Back in December, we received our Form 637 approval notifications from the U.S. Department of Treasury and Internal Revenue Service, which are required for Section 45Z credit generation. The team has been working to put all the necessary pieces of these agreements in place and we anticipate finalizing them in Q2. As Pat mentioned, we're also developing our market position for the sale of durable carbon dioxide removal credits or CDRs. Gevo North Dakota is actively generating high-quality carbon removals via CCS from biogenic carbon. Under the previous owners, our Gevo North Dakota facility was the first ethanol plant in the world to list CDRs on a public carbon registry and they made initial sales. Now we're in the process of expanding sales into that market and structuring the team under the leadership of our Chief Business Development Officer, Alex Clayton. We expect to share more announcements soon, as we help meet the needs of global customers looking to reduce their carbon footprint with high-quality CDRs. On the SAF front, we signed a groundbreaking offtake agreement with Future Energy Global. Under this deal, FEG will acquire Scope 1 and Scope 3 emissions credits tied to 10 million gallons per year of fuel from our future ATJ production. That value is in addition to and separate from the physical fuel, written value and other state and federal tax credits we expect to obtain and it shows the market value of our carbon attributes. By separating the carbon attributes from the physical fuel, we anticipate this unique booking claim approach with FEG will be a market accelerator that will expand as we work together to provide greater flexibility for corporate customers, airlines and airline lessors to access the solutions they need. Finally, we're actively pursuing opportunities to develop and deploy our ATJ plant designs and business system with partners around the world. We have the IP, engineering playbook, commercial capabilities, digital supply chain tracking solutions through Verity and the network of partners to derisk and scale this new industry. We don't plan to own 100% of every plant. In many cases, we'll be developers, licensors and strategic investors. We'll have more to share in the future as these opportunities develop. And with that, back to you, Pat.

Thanks, Paul. I want to conclude by saying that we are showing that domestic energy production can go hand-in-hand with economic growth, carbon reduction, and production of food. You can get all of these things together if it's done right and that's what we're all about. It's more than just fuel; it's about creating American jobs, supporting farmers, and strengthening the rural economy. Unlike a lot of others in the space, we don't have to sit around and wait for government guidance on how sustainable agricultural impacts the 45Z tax credit. We plan on monetizing the 45Z this year because we've already got an attractive CI score even without sustainable agriculture. Well, sustainable agriculture will be further upside potential for us if that happens. We believe that our Verity business, where we can track and trace land use ag practices, carbon footprint, crops, and other raw materials, in addition to being able to track the process energy needed to produce the products and consider all the impacts across the whole lifecycle, making it all auditable by anyone ideally, visible and most importantly, all based on science and data, this is going to be extremely important in the future. We want customers, consumers to know that they're getting something real for their money. We know that with data, we can push back on the false narratives around land use. Yes, we can measure land. Anyone in this industry can if they desire to do so. It's a fallacy that they can't. We have the ability to do so. We can push back on the food and fuel narrative. Real data shows that by using real crops that add protein and nutrition to the food chain, it's more economical and yet you can still produce raw materials to make energy products. The right paradigm is about producing energy and food concurrently. It's better for the world, better for economic development. Verity will help make this all clear. There's certainly more to talk about, but that wraps up our prepared remarks. We're now ready to go to the open line for questions. Operator, please go ahead.

Our first question comes from Dushyant Ailani with Jefferies. Your line is open.

Hey, team. This is Whitney Mutalemwa dialing in for Dushyant Ailani. Congratulations on a solid quarter despite a weaker than expected crush margin environment. You ended the quarter with $135 million in cash equivalents and restricted cash. I'm aware you don't normally provide guidance for cash, but given the Gevo North Dakota acquisition, the $40 million CapEx spend for ATJ60 and just some other general maintenance spend. How should we think about the cash cadence for the year?

Sure. Well, we are going to be spending $40 million this year on ATJ60. We've dialed back the spending on that, although, we are doing some work in shifting resources into the ATJ30 as we're waiting for the timelines to sort out for the DOE. So that'll be less. I think we also—well, I know for a fact we’re also planning on refinancing our RNG plant. We'll announce that shortly as to what we're doing there, but that'll also free up some cash. So you're right. We don't give guidance on cash, but we should be in pretty strong shape through the rest of the year.

Got it. I understand. And then just as a follow-up, relating to ATJ30, I don't believe there is a timeline disclosed on this project. Obviously, it's smaller and modular. How would the time frame compare to ATJ60? Yeah. That will be all. Thank you.

Same or sooner than ATJ60 is my guess. Yeah. We have been working on the ATJ30 for quite a time here, and it is a copy, edit, paste type of an approach in that we already have these designs worked out for the ATJ60. This is about making it smaller, but the concepts are the same, which is actually the harder part. Getting—many companies are going to fail because they simply don't know how to design a commercial plant well, and we do. That's our background. So those kinds of things have already been thought through. So we expect it to be more straightforward. We also expect that it's going to generate a lot of interest because it's going to be a lot cheaper to build than an ATJ60 that has project financing. So that's going to be very interesting. We'll talk more about it once I have more numbers baked and then who else was going to participate with us up there. But it would be a project-level game again for us in that, except for it's going to be adding on to our site. So it's a pretty—it's actually quite exciting up there between all that's happening around the 45Z, I don't know, in the Ways and Means committee and stuff and what's being proposed, it's like, all right. This is going our direction finally.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Amit Dayal with H.C. Wainwright. Your line is open.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Congrats, Pat on all the progress. Great to see the operating revenues and EBITDA starting to come through. I'm just curious, with respect to the carbon abatement product, right, it looks very interesting. Is there an established market for this already that you can tap into immediately, or will there be some work required to be done to build that product and create a market for it?

Paul, why don't you go ahead and take this question? This is your work.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Amit for the question. There is already a market that's growing for these durable carbon dioxide removals, right? And so, if we choose to take that value and sell it separate from the fuel, they're traditionally classified as BECCS CDRs. So that's called bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration. So that's really the market that we're in today and continuing to grow our presence there, which again was really started with the work that the Red Trail owners did before we acquired Gevo North Dakota. Now we're really going to grow that business and look at it as the optionality between selling that carbon value with the fuel or separate from that fuel depending on what we see in the market.

Understood. Thank you. And then with respect to 45Z, it looks like you're getting an extension on that at least what has been proposed so far. So that's really good news for you guys. Are you potentially going to start monetizing this right away in 2Q, Pat? And potentially, just wanted to see if I heard it correctly. Are we getting positive EBITDA in 2Q potentially or later in the year? Just wanted to get a little bit more concrete color on that.

Yeah. So, yes, we can expect to monetize it sooner rather than later. These are credits that exist, and they're already proven. Our CI scores are solid enough that unlike most companies, ours are really solid. I mean, we're metering carbon going down a hole. So, yeah, we expect to monetize it, and that'll surprise the heck out of people. Right? And then as far as the EBITDA positive go, that should be overall for the year. We should be EBITDA positive is what we'd expect. That's what we're shooting for. We're managing the cost side of things carefully. We see that we have these streams of money that can come into us, and we'll use those. But that's our goal is to do this because one of the questions that people always have, they always ask me, when are you going to raise more money, Pat? You're going to run out of cash. No. We aren't. Sorry, that's not the plan. The plan is we already have enough operations to be self-sufficient, that's the idea. And we can execute projects. We have a well-developed intellectual property portfolio, engineering portfolio, project portfolio, and mature projects. It's time to go execute those things. But the idea of big burn with no outcome, no. Well, we have to still get money for projects to execute whether we expand ethanol or we do a but when we—or we do ATJ, but we expand ethanol. Well, that's what OIC said they're interested in. Great. We'll find out. So we are pretty—we feel pretty confident in where we are. Now in terms of 45Z, I was in D.C. all last week talking to senators, representatives, and their staff. I got to tell you, it's pretty strong support for 45Z. So I think they're going to get it done. If they get the big beautiful bill done, I think we're going to be in good shape. The principles in play, I think are paid for performance. You got to do something in order to get into the money. It's very—it's more narrow rather than wide, meaning you have to actually do something, and the criteria remains stringent. We are in good shape. I think that extending it through 2031 was at least a year better than I was expecting, so I was kind of excited to see that. And the rest of it, well, I like one of the really important ones, they're getting rid of the indirect land use as a component of measuring CI. Outstanding, because that's bogus anyway. There's not any data that science-based that supports that. And so that is one of the problems that in games that people play is they say, well, gosh, I got to waste feedstock. It has a zero. Well, no. They don't have a zero. Not really, that's bogus. They have a charge. Just people don't want to look at that. Well, guess what? Now they said, well, corn doesn't have it—has a zero feedstock iLUX score as well. Cool. That'll make it and improve in the future the CI score even at our Gevo North Dakota plant and any of our other operations. And it also will help benefit the soybean people. This has been a big—there's been a lot of game playing in the Yuko area. You use cooking oil, and half a, where people are using counterfeit or the claims that people are using counterfeit oils and stuff. So it'll just go along like that. It's a brilliant idea. They did a good job. It makes sense. It levels the playing field. I think they still should go pound on CORSIA and Europe because of their biases against U.S. agriculture. But overall, I got to say, I was pleasantly shocked, surprised. It's great. It's really good. I hope they get it done. Hope the whole bill works and they make it all happen. And even if they don't, we're in good shape. We're in the money from 45Z already.

Understood. Good to hear that. Congratulations, guys. That's all I have. Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Derrick Whitfield with Texas Capital. Your line is open.

Hey. Good afternoon, Pat and team.

Hey. How are you doing?

Maybe staying on 45Z for the first question. Clearly, some positive news yesterday on the extension of the credits to 2031 removal of indirect land use, but also the creation of a dairy RNG pathway.

Yes.

Could you speak to the amount you expect to receive for ethanol and dairy, RNG molecules?

Well, it's proportional to the CI scores. So, when you have— we're already at about a 20. Chris mentioned in his comments a 21, and he rounded upward. I'm rounding downward because I think there's a couple of other things we can do still. So, we'll be down in the 20s before taking out indirect land use. So that puts us down, what, another 8, 10 points. That will be the lowest CI score for an ethanol plant. And so when you figure they're worth, what a couple cents—you got to get below 50 per—you got to get a 50% reduction before you get the money. And then we should be—it's $0.02 per CI point. So it's going to be pretty healthy. Now what they're trying to do is sponsor economic development, growth, investment, jobs, that's actually what they're trying to do. We are firm believers that tax credits have to have a sunset. They should not last forever because that creates wrong behavior. Everything's taken when you do that, it really people get starry-eyed in what they think they can do. No. They actually should help pay for a plant and its capital and the jobs that are created, and that's the right idea. And that is the approach that we're seeing this Congress take in their attitude. It's great. So it's significant. And then on the RNG side, that was fascinating and caught me by surprise. I was shocked that they included that because I wasn't expecting them to. The issue had been that they—one of the things when you're using biogas or making biogas, you can do it rather than letting whatever the raw material is just digest and spew methane into the atmosphere. You can—by using the RNG techniques or the processing, you can collect that, and you will also avoid then methane. It's a methane avoidance factor that goes into the LCA calculations. They punted it in the original 45Z calculations, and they just averaged everyone together whether it was landfill or dairy or whatever. And what that means is, for instance, if he was worth I don't remember exactly, Derrick, it was, like, 20 points or something. It was only, like, a negative 20 or something very small, but they averaged all types—all RNG methodologies altogether. What they're calling out here now is that you've got to do it discreetly. So it'll look probably more like California where we're at a minus 330, 339 score. So they have work to do to go figure that part out. In the meantime, that doesn't stop us from already monetizing that RNG credit. But I'll be very keen on seeing how all that does settle. The argument that the IRS had last time was that there's too much work in the working group. In the prior administration, there's just too much work to keep track of it all, so they just averaged everything. Well, this one calls out that they got to go calculate it. That's very good for us because we have one of the best RNG facilities in the country. So like I say, I was—this was a good week in terms of what I'm seeing in these bills. And what's fascinating and good is that the Republican leadership, they understand what we're doing. They know us pretty well. And they know that we're abating carbon, but they also know we're doing cost-effective products that create jobs and help agriculture and rural development. It's all of those things together that matter.

Completely agree, Pat. And we're hearing from the ministry that you're potentially going to see a repeal against the transferability that was stated in that house bill. From a senate perspective, what would you guys I mean, would you expect this to be very similar to what we saw from the House? Are there things that you're looking for out of that side that may be more favorable or less favorable for that matter?

No. I thought it was about—honestly, the only—the thing that you're right on my transferability after 2027 of the tax credits, I actually think that that's a good thing. And here's why I think it can be a good thing, and this can be a good thing, is that it forces investment in plants if you want that to take advantage of that. So someone who has a tax burden needs to put up capital into a plant in order to get that tax credit. That actually makes a lot of sense from—if that's the intent is to build capital, deploy plants. So I kind of like that. And of course, the alternative was that you can just sell the tax credit to anybody. Well, that is convenient. But I like from a policy standpoint, I kind of favor—I like these things that favor industrial investment and growth. I also like the other language of some—I forget what bill it was. I was just looking at it today where I was talking about depreciation and all that kind of stuff. They're trying to make it favorable for investment in America. Outstanding. Good guys. This is a good thing. So I like that quite a lot. So it's pretty good. Now remind me of the second part of your question there, Derrick? I lost track of my mind.

I think you covered it well. Just in it relates to if any changes you would expect coming out of the senate side versus the house.

I think I expect noise in the senate side. And the reason I expect noise is there's a fight that's afoot. And it's not in the—it's not a senate fight. It's a fight of people, and there's a group that wants blenders credit. Well, the blenders credit benefits a narrow group of people, whereas a production tax credit benefits a whole huge number of people. And I saw a strong support for a producers tax credit versus a blenders tax credit. And people like us are the ones doing the work anyway and taking the risk. The guys downstream blending aren't doing that. They're just blending. So there's that noise. That's going to create some noise. It's going to show up in the form of maybe some alternatives, but I think they'll get beat back. So we've heard strong support on the senate side, same way as on the house. However, it's all got to go through markup. There'll be twists and turns. And in the end, I think it's going to look a lot like what we just saw from the house, maybe with a couple tweaks, but nothing substantial. Just getting rid of leveling the playing field by indirect land use is a huge deal. This is the main way. Indirect land use is the way that environmentalists penalize U.S. agriculture and raise money for themselves. It's not okay.

And, Pat, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you just one last question on your offtake agreements with Future Energy Global. Could you speak to the amount of value you're receiving for Scope 1 and Scope 3 emission credits in dollars per ton? And again, just in generalities here, I'm not looking for the exact number, just so that we can start to think about that incremental value from a voluntary perspective. And then just confirm that it's driven by additionality requirements for the production of SAF.

Yeah. Well, so I'm going to have Paul answer this question. But, Paul, if you give it to—give a range of what's out there in the marketplace of the kind of credits and just kind of what you're seeing and what's happening. Because I think this is an important question because it is, I know that analysts in general, they're always looking at the LCFS or the 45Z, and they know what those are. This is a new thing, though, so you kind of got to give them guidance on the dollars per ton.

Yeah. Sure. Thanks. No, great question and appreciate that. I mean these values are well north of the types of carbon values that we see in LCFS markets today. So we can't give you—so well over in the hundreds of dollars a ton type of range. So we're pretty excited about that and really makes the case for the value of the carbon abatement and the booking claim case because you're not going to have SAF at every airport, but you've got customers who want to access SAF. And that's where Future Energy Global can really help customers by taking these Scope 1s for airlines or the operators and the Scope 3s for the customer and basically giving them options to do this in booking claim style. So it really expands the capability and the market reach. And that's why we've got—not just this first deal, but we hope that it's a series of deals that turn out this way.

Yeah. And the other thing that is, we're trying to make sure that we have access to that market directly rather than losing it to somebody who's blending in the middle because that's historically what's happened with some of our competitive companies is that those Scope 3s in particular get lost in the channel somewhere, and then someone else monetizes them. We're going to try to keep that for ourselves, and it's an important part of the strategy. And that's, of course, the whole reason for Verity and all the rest, and that really does help us.

Extremely helpful. Thanks for your time, guys.

You bet.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Peter Gastreich with Water Tower Research. Your line is open.

Thank you. Thanks for the presentation today and congratulations on your progress. You've got some great momentum here. Just three questions, I have about ATJ30 in North Dakota. First of all, it's great to hear that you have more than 50% of that capacity that's sold for ATJ30. Are these that entirely new discussions you're having or does this 50% reflect some excess demand perhaps from your volumes at ATJ60? So effectively, are these customers you already have in tow in South Dakota and now you have the additional volumes that you can give them in North Dakota?

They're different. And the reason they're different is because the contract structures are different. And the contracts for the DOE have to be done in a certain kind of format to lend itself to financing. We think it'll be more equity financed up there in North Dakota. And so, it's a different kind of contract. FEG is representative of it. And there's other deals that we've done where we've sold the jet fuel and part of the carbon to somebody else, and we keep the carbon and sell that to some yet again on a third-party. So it's pretty darn interesting. We're on the right track. It's about time we figured this out. And part of it is because the DOE process is onerous. I mean, it's onerous. There's no question. They're very thorough. They're very good. They have a huge success rate with their 97% track record of success. Awesome. But my God, it's tedious. And it's got belt braces, suspenders, and protections, and blah-blah, blah-blah. And one of those things is how contracts are written. Here, we can do—we have a wider range of latitude of what we can do. And so that makes it and that makes more sense. We'll eventually, I think, get that roped into ATJ60 as well, but we got to get it going first and make it happen. So we don't tie our contracts to one location. We can go make it anywhere. I mean, move contracts around. We have the ability to do that. It's just that here, we didn't have to start with the burden constraints.

Okay. Got it. Thank you. The second question is, how much expansion is theoretically possible at North Dakota site? I know you can get up to 1 million tons for the CCS capacity, but have you done any preliminary work on how much further you could scale up on ATJ if you wanted to go beyond ATJ30?

Yeah. So here's how we're thinking about it: we've had—people know about the—people in the industry. So colleague companies know that we're working on the ATJ30 plant, and the economies of scale for an ATJ30 are still pretty good. They're way, way, way better than a smaller plant. So it's already in the flat part of the curve, and we've made some optimizations. So the economics look pretty good compared even with an—comparing it to an ATJ60. So we see the opportunity to do an ATJ30 but then do carbon copies of them in other places and other locations in the U.S. and around the world. And remember, our paradigm is we're building these in a factory with large. And so, that derisks the living hell out of it because everything will be known to work by the time the modules show up on-site. They have to be assembled, and you can do regional contractors to put it together and avoid these lump sum turnkey EPC project financing projects that really just add a lot of cost. So we like it a lot. We would see that—the site up there has room to expand ethanol as well. Now that's an important thing because it's actually ethanol that generates more CO2 that we put down a hole. And so that's something we're looking at too, and I got to say, it's pretty darn exciting. I like it a lot. And so you can imagine that we do this—we would do this in a series of things. We're going to—I want that ATJ30 because I think that's the commercially viable plant that we can sell around the U.S. and around the world. We have other opportunities for ATJ60 that are copied from the one in South Dakota. We have a couple of sites that that'll play really well. We could expand that ethanol plant up there and then add yet another ATJ30 up there. So it's—I think that's more how the business will unfold. And in the meantime, we'll have parallel projects where we've sold the plant to somebody else for the deployment or we've licensed the technology to them. One of the things Paul mentioned in intellectual property, people forget that we have a hundred plus patents or so that cover the supply chain. We were the first to do ethanol to jet, even though other companies claim to have done so. We have the technologies that work. It's with—we're our partners with Axens. We have a lower cost technology in the future, or even Axens believes that we can win. So people forget that part of it, that intellectual property is a key component. We'll use it here along the way too. So it's a very interesting game. I'm so glad and thankful that we're on solid financial footing. It's really good. And I like what I'm seeing coming out of Congress.

Okay. Great. That's all my questions. Thanks, Pat. Appreciate it and again, congratulations.

You bet. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This concludes the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn it back to Pat Gruber for closing remarks.

I want to thank you all for listening in on our call. This has been a very exciting quarter for us. I think next one is even going to be better. And as I just got through saying, we’re putting—we're getting revenue up. We’re going to get EBITDA contributing. We're offsetting the costs. We're going to continue to make progress throughout the year. It's quite a transformational year actually. And as I just got through saying, we have well-developed projects and technologies. These are ready for deployment. And there's many people around the world interested. We got to go make that happen, and it doesn't come at a big cost to us anymore. We've already paid the upfront fees to go and get that done, all the learning curve stuff. We pretty much done it. It's now it's all about deploying things. And you know what? We've got a balance sheet that we can live on along with the income that we expect going forward. It's a pretty exciting time for Gevo. Best, that, sorry, it's the best that I think I've ever seen here, the best opportunity. Thank you all for joining us. Bye-bye.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.