Gevo at Lytham Partners Conference: Renewable Energy Strategy

On Tuesday, 30 September 2025, Gevo Inc. (NASDAQ:GEVO) presented at the Lytham Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference, outlining its strategic efforts in renewable energy. The company, known for its focus on Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), highlighted both its recent accomplishments and ongoing challenges. Gevo is leveraging its expertise in renewable fuels to address increasing jet fuel demand, while navigating market conditions and optimizing its operations.

Key Takeaways

• Gevo reported a run-rate adjusted EBITDA of $20 million annually in Q2 2025.
• The company aims to increase EBITDA to over $100 million through expansion.
• Gevo’s Alcohol-to-Jet (ATJ) plant designs are central to its growth strategy.
• The acquisition of North Dakota assets has been transformative for Gevo.
• Gevo is focused on optimizing its carbon intensity score to enhance product value.

Financial Results

Gevo’s financial performance in Q2 2025 was marked by a run-rate adjusted EBITDA of approximately $20 million annually. The company aims to double this figure to $40 million through optimization efforts. With $127 million in cash and $700 million in total assets, Gevo is well-positioned for future growth. The company’s debt stands at $168 million, including tax-exempt green bonds.

Operational Updates

Gevo produces about 67 million gallons per year of low-carbon ethanol and operates a Class VI carbon capture well with a capacity of 1 million tons per year. The company is currently utilizing 16% of this capacity. Gevo also captures methane from dairy cow manure, injecting it into local gas pipelines. The deployment of Verity software to various biofuel and grain customers is underway, enhancing operational efficiency.

Future Outlook

Gevo anticipates rising demand for SAF, driven by sustainability concerns and an expected 2.3 billion gallon per year increase in U.S. jet fuel demand. The company plans to deploy "serial number one" ATJ plants in North Dakota and South Dakota, with a strategy to replicate this model globally. Gevo expects continued government support for biofuels and aims to leverage incentives for SAF and related sectors.

Q&A Highlights

No Q&A session was included in the transcript.

Readers are invited to refer to the full transcript for more detailed insights.

Full transcript - Lytham Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference:

Robert Bloom, Managing Partner, Lithium Partners: All right, hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the Lithium Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference. My name is Robert Bloom, I’m a Managing Partner at Lithium. Our next presentation today will come from Gevo, and presenting from the company is Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy. As a reminder, the company trades under the ticker symbol GEVO on the NASDAQ. Eric, thank you so much for your participation in the Lithium Conference today, and with that, the floor is all yours.

Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy, Gevo: Thanks, Robert. Appreciate that. Yeah, as Robert said, this is Gevo. Our stock ticker is GEVO on the NASDAQ, and I’m Eric Frey. We’re a diversified energy company and a leading developer of synthetic aviation fuel, or SAF. We’ve actually been around for a while. Let me flip to this slide here. We were the first to make alcohol to hydrocarbon fuels in the lab. We were the first to get ASTM certification for jet fuel made from alcohols, and we were the first to do a synthetic aviation fuel flight, actually on the U.S. Navy Warthog, from alcohol to jet synthetic aviation fuel. We have a number of firsts, and this last quarter in particular has been really transformative for us in terms of showing that this can be a durable business.

Just a disclaimer, there are going to be some forward-looking statements in my presentation, and we’ll have a couple of non-GAAP measures like EBITDA. You can see more detail and non-EBITDA reconciliations to GAAP measures in our second quarter earnings release. We have a really strong team that has over 240 years of relevant experience across the things that matter to our business: agriculture, fuels, chemical production, and carbon reduction. In particular, we have folks who have a lot of experience in fermentation, chemical processing, and plant operations, but also renewable products, renewable energy, and hydrocarbon fuels. These are historically separate things in most industries. Gevo kind of sits at the nexus of those things because you need to cross over some of these industries to produce what we want to produce, which is drop-in fuels that give you a lower carbon footprint.

What do we do and how do we organize our business? We’re a diversified renewable energy company. Do not think of electricity. That’s one way to get renewable energy. That’s one way to reduce carbon footprint is to electrify trucks and aircraft. We’re talking about drop-in fuels. Use existing fleets, existing infrastructure in terms of trucks and aircraft. Use the same fuel, the same molecule, so the engine doesn’t know the difference, but derive it from a process that is different from and complementary to fossil fuels. Instead of getting fossil fuels from under the earth that were there for millions of years, we can grow things through biomass on the surface of the earth, and those things consume carbon dioxide. They strip it out of the air. If you do it right, it can be scalable and cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

You don’t have to spend to replace fleets with expensive electric vehicles, or it can just complement the mix of fleets of electric vehicles. It’s certainly difficult to electrify aircraft. What we have today is a platform to extend alcohols to jet fuel. We call that our Sustainable Aviation Fuel or SAF platform. What we have today are the ingredients to do that. We separate into these four buckets that you see here. To do this, you need to produce molecules. You need to produce renewable energy. You need to have a way to track it and have an audit trail so that the end customer, the brand owner, knows that you used a lower carbon process since all the fuels are dropped and look the same.

Finally, you need a cycle of continual improvement because our belief is that it’s through continuous incremental change that accumulates year after year, decade after decade, that we will reduce carbon footprint and provide value to the marketplace. That creates a durable business for us, that continuous cycle of improvement. Those four things that I just mentioned are encapsulated in these four boxes here. Up here in the upper left, Gevo Fuels. Those are exemplified by our assets in North Dakota. We produce about 67 million gallons per year of low carbon ethanol and animal feed co-products, as well as vegetable oil. We also have an operating Class VI carbon capture well that takes biogenic carbon dioxide, pumps it about a mile underground where it mineralizes and will stay for a thousand years. We have about 1 million tons per year of capacity there.

We’re using about 16% of that today. That is the basis for an Alcohol-to-Jet platform. Once you’re making ethanol, which is an alcohol, we have the technology, the IP, and the know-how to do a bolt-on at that site and extend that ethanol to jet fuel, which is a difficult to electrify sector and a sector that needs Sustainable Aviation Fuel, both to complement jet fuel and to reduce carbon footprint. We also have a greenfield site in South Dakota where we have a design to deploy ethanol to jet, and that’s in the commercialization and financing phase. In the lower left corner, Gevo R&G, we have a business where we take the manure from dairy cows.

We actually have a couple of three dairy farm partners where we take their manure and we capture the methane, the fugitive methane emissions, clean it up, and then inject it into the local gas pipeline distribution system. That’s a profitable business today. Why do we do that? It provides us with a low carbon methane or natural gas, and we can use that to power our facilities. This gives us a strategic option. We originally built this because we thought we would need it for our SAF facilities. We’re not sure if we do need it, but it is a profitable business by itself, which is good for us. In the upper right-hand corner here, we have Verity. Verity is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gevo.

It’s essentially a software startup within Gevo that is developing and deploying software for this value chain, the agriculture to biofuels to end customer value chain, so that you can have an audit trail of exactly where a lower carbon product came from. If you have a low carbon product that’s drop-in, the product looks the same as a fossil fuel product. You need an audit trail of exactly where it came from, what energy inputs were used, how much fertilizer was used, was the land that’s been there for a long time, that type of thing. It’s designed to track and trace those sustainability attributes through a complex value chain.

Gevo stood Verity up because we believe we need this to be successful in our SAF platform, but we’re also deploying it to other biofuel, soy crush, grain elevator customers in this value chain because they’re producing today crops and agricultural products and biofuels that can benefit from it. That’s a software as a service business. In the lower right here, where it says Gevo Chem, we also do R&D. We have over 300 patents. A lot of the technologies we use are technologies that have existed at commercial scale, although we do have our own proprietary technologies too. It’s the engineering that wraps them together and gives you an efficient, low carbon result. That’s some of our proprietary know-how and IP as well. We also have great partners with LG and Axens, who are working to improve what we’re doing.

What we’re doing today is sort of the first generation of commercial scale SAF, but we believe in continuous improvement. There will be second and third generations that get even better. The common thread here is we want to make drop-in renewable products that reduce carbon footprint, but importantly, are cost-competitive with fossil fuels. That’s the goal because that’s what makes it a durable business in our view. Where are we? We’re kind of all over North America, and actually we have folks globally as well. We’re focused on North America today because there are some great places to do business like North Dakota. There are a lot of incentives that support agriculture and biofuels, as well as access to the markets that want low carbon results and low carbon products. This is a great starting point. Ultimately, our platform and our business is intended to be global.

Here’s a picture of Gevo, North Dakota, within our Gevo Fuels segment. This is that low carbon ethanol plant that I mentioned. Below the surface of this plant is really good geology. It’s on about 500 acres, and we have the pore space rights for about a million tons per year of carbon capture. We’re using about 16% of that, as I mentioned, and that’s biogenic carbon capture. It came from the atmosphere. The idea is that this is a durable business today, but it’ll help us do SAF tomorrow. I already talked about carbon capture. I want to talk about our feedstock. What comes in the door of the plant? The plants are located in corn country. Now, we don’t have to use corn. We could use any crop that generates a lot of starch and a lot of sugar.

In the U.S., corn is abundant, very efficient, and very high yield. In the U.S., it’s corn. In other countries, it can be other crops. Importantly, the corn that comes in the door of our plant is not corn that’s destined for human consumption. It’s not popcorn. It’s not canned corn. It’s corn. It’s field corn. We do mill the corn on the front end. We extract the nutrients, the amino acids, the protein, the vegetable oil, and that goes back as high protein animal feed co-products and things like that. The raw material that goes into fuels is really the sugar. The sugar gets fermented, and that makes ethanol. Then you can further use chemistry to convert ethanol to hydrocarbons like jet fuel. The important thing is the resource we’re starting with is abundant. Here’s a chart of the, you know, we don’t really need a lot more sugar.

We don’t need a lot more ethanol necessarily. We do need new uses for corn. That’s good for U.S. agriculture and U.S. energy. If you look down here, the amount of land that’s been harvested for corn hasn’t really changed in 100 years. Actually, you could go back even further, and it’s the same land area. What’s happened is farmers have learned how to do a lot more with less or the same. Corn yields have gone way up. Production and food and energy has increased from about the same land. The reason we like this business system as a way to make low carbon drop-in products is because you can make the same fuels, and the whole supply chain is incentivized to do more with less. If you do more with less, that’s good for farmers, it’s good for consumers, and it’s good for sustainability.

The goal is to use less inputs, less fertilizer, less energy, and then you get a low carbon result too. The end customer likes that. That’s why we do it. What comes out of a plant like this? By weight, it’s about a third, a third, a third. You get ethanol, which you can then convert into jet fuel or diesel. You get high protein animal feed, and then you get bubbles of carbon dioxide. We capture those bubbles and capture them. That carbon dioxide is a co-product. There are markets, voluntary markets that want to pay us for sequestering that carbon underground. There are also markets that want to do things like enhanced oil recovery, especially in North Dakota, that want to pay us to put that carbon dioxide in a rail car and also pump it underground, but for enhanced oil recovery.

Our view is that we’re going to do, we’re a great nexus to capture carbon. That carbon is a co-product, and we’ll deliver it to the highest value market. What do we get in terms of revenue streams? That previous slide is simple in terms of what we make, but the revenue model has a lot of components to it, as you’re seeing on this slide. The point of this slide is today we’re milling and then fermenting that corn into all these co-products, not just one, not just two, but several in terms of the revenue streams that we get. There are state and federal credits and incentives, and there are voluntary markets to sell carbon offsets from our carbon capture. That’s a platform to extend that ethanol to jet fuel, where there’s another set of incentives to make synthetic aviation fuel.

In order to be successful at doing this, you need a number of skills that we think are unique to Gevo. You have to understand how to navigate these regulatory and voluntary carbon markets and comply with them. You have to know how to do the engineering and design to take ethanol to jet fuel. That’s a little bit new. It’s not new for us in terms of making it and getting it certified and flying it on aircraft, but it is new for the world in terms of doing it at large scale. We think this is our core competency, is levering what’s being done today and then extending it into jet fuel tomorrow. Just double-clicking on one of these end markets, most of these co-product streams stack. They’re all on top of one another. One thing we can optimize is where we point our carbon.

I mentioned CO2 is a co-product that we can monetize, and we can monetize it in multiple ways, actually. For every quarter that we point our gallons of ethanol, we can send them to low carbon fuel markets. These are regulatory markets like Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and California, where the value of carbon reduction is anywhere from $50 to $200 per metric ton. Those prices change because these credits trade. On the other hand, we can sell some or potentially all of our ethanol in other markets that don’t have regulatory LCFS markets. Without double counting, we can detach the promise, basically, that we sequestered carbon from those volumes and sell it in these other voluntary markets called Carbon Dioxide Removal credits, or CDRs. Buyers in that market include the logos that you see on this page. This is a business-to-business, B2B negotiated sale effectively.

Actually, and this is a great website at the bottom here, this cdr.fyi, that’s at the bottom of this slide. If you click on that, what you’ll see is this is a marketplace that’s had $10 billion of transactions, actually. The prices range from $100 to $300 per metric ton, depending on quality and depending on your audit trail, basically, because these companies want to see that if you promise that you sequester carbon, you really did. Only 2% of that $10 billion of transactions in this market have actually been delivered. In other words, these companies are purchasing a future promise for a company like us to sequester carbon. We think we have an advantage in this market because we’re not selling a promise to do it in the future. We’re doing it every day.

Every day that we’re producing low carbon ethanol in North Dakota, we’re pumping CO2 under the ground, and anyone can look at that meter and verify it, look at the engineering reports, and see that it’s going a mile underground where it mineralizes and should stay there for over a thousand years. We’re selling a high-quality product to a voluntary market that we think is durable and not going away. By optimizing this mix of where we send our product, whether it’s the left side of this page or the right side of this page, we can enhance our margins a little bit, we think, by just making sure that we’re delivering our product where it’s in the most demand. Where are we right now? Last quarter was transformative for our company. We closed on the acquisition of our North Dakota assets at the end of January.

In the second quarter, we reported that we had a run-rate adjusted EBITDA of about $20 million. We reported $17 million in that quarter, but we had run-rate EBITDA of $20 million annually. We think that we can actually double that. We think we can get to $40 million a year in kind of the near term by just optimizing what we’re doing. Optimize our carbon intensity score, which optimizes the value of our products in the different markets that I talked about, and doing kind of de-bottlenecking, that type of thing. We further think that we can get to over $100 million of EBITDA. That’s the green bar on the right side of this page by kind of real de-bottlenecking and incremental expansion in North Dakota of our low carbon ethanol and full utilization of our CO2 as well.

If we can do all those things, we think we can get to over $100 million of EBITDA. That’s before we deploy our synthetic aviation fuel platform. This is kind of a near to medium term stuff. We think this is the stuff where if we optimize and do incremental expansions, we can get to potentially these numbers, this $40 million and this $110 million. On top of that, we’ve got the long-term growth of extending the ethanol to jet fuel by building ATJ facilities. Here’s our balance sheet as of last quarter. We have $127 million of cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash. We have about $700 million of total assets. A significant amount of that is our existing carbon capture and ethanol operations, but also our construction in progress from our plant designs for Alcohol-to-Jet.

In the previous slides, what I haven’t really talked about yet is the mousetrap, the engineering that we’ve done, that we’ve spent time and money on over the past couple of years to make a good engineered design that takes you from ethanol to SAF because we think that’s the long-term future and a differentiator for us. We also have about $168 million of debt that includes these tax-exempt green bonds, as well as the debt that we use to purchase the North Dakota assets, which is secured by those assets and is non-recourse to the rest of Gevo. That’s kind of where we are and where we’re going in the near term. What we think makes this especially exciting is how durable we are in the longer term because we think that synthetic aviation fuel, the demand for that is increasing and not going away.

At the same time, there’s abundant resources in terms of agriculture, sugar, and ethanol that can be efficiently converted to jet fuel to serve that demand. Let me explain why we like these markets so much. I think it should be pretty obvious why this is important from a sustainability perspective and a low carbon perspective. Talk to any of the airlines, any consultant that’s looking at SAF, and they’ll agree that it’s absolutely critical for aviation to have SAF to reduce their carbon footprint. It’s actually important for other reasons too. Just in the U.S., demand for jet fuel is going to go up by about 2.3 billion gallons per year. That’s according to the latest U.S. EIA forecast that came out in April. At the same time, gasoline demand is declining. Most fossil fuel refineries today produce about 50% gasoline, but they only produce 9% jet fuel.

The U.S. is not a country that’s built really any refineries in the past quarter century. The Alcohol-to-Jet process, however, can target 90% or better jet fuel yield in its product stream. We can not produce more gasoline, really target the jet fuel, and we can do it in a way that ultimately is cost-competitive. Let me talk about why it’s cost-competitive. What you’re seeing here, the y-axis is the price of jet fuel per gallon, the x-axis is crude oil per barrel, and the blue is a scatter plot. As the price of crude oil goes up, jet fuel goes up, and vice versa. We think we can make SAF in this ballpark here, which is first generation competitive with fossil jet fuel. If crude oil is really cheap and corn is really expensive, it might not be as competitive.

If corn is actually cheap and oil is expensive, it could be cheaper than fossil jet fuel. We think that that’s the key. This is a really important starting point to add more jet fuel to the fossil fuel jet fuel supply. We also think this is the cheapest way to make SAF, and it’s also the cheapest way from a carbon footprint perspective. You get a lot of carbon benefit per dollar of investment. It does require capital. You have to build things. To serve that capital, we have to have margin. The good news is because it’s cheap, because the operating cost is low and the feedstock is abundant, you can get that margin. What does that margin look like?

For a 30 million gallon per year jet plant, or what we call ATJ 30, that would consume about 50 million gallons of ethanol and make about 30 million gallons of jet fuel. That would give us about $5 per gallon of EBITDA margin or $150 million per year. The key though is that the technology to do this exists. The technology to take corn and mill it and ferment it into ethanol, that all exists in abundance. The technology to take ethanol and make ethylene, to take ethylene and make other petroleum chemical and fuel products, all those things exist and have existed for quite a while at industrial scale. You have to put all those technologies together in one engineered package, just like you have to architect your house.

You don’t invent windows and doors, but an architect still has to create the blueprints for the right skyscraper or the right house. Same thing here. You have to put these things together so that you use energy efficiently. When you use energy, you try to use it from the right sources. You integrate the ethanol with the ethanol to jet. If you can use carbon capture, you use carbon capture, things like that. Where could we deploy this? Today Gevo has the ATJ 30 design and the ATJ 60 design, basically a big one and a small one. We have two locations, North Dakota and South Dakota, where we want to build serial number one. Both those locations are the North Dakota locations in the engineering design phase where we’re doing copy, edit, paste. The South Dakota one is in the financing stage.

Our view is that when it rains, it pours. We have a good plant design. The industry, here are all the ethanol plants in the U.S. in operation. There’s about 180 of them. We think that the local and community benefits will be welcome and that co-ops, farmers, biofuel producers will want over time to convert some of their ethanol to jet fuel. When they want to do that, which we think is going to happen inevitably, we’re going to be there to supply that plant design. We’re going to say, don’t reinvent the wheel. Also, we’ve been patenting our designs, and we’ve learned a lot from how to design these. We will build these ourselves or license them or both. We got to do serial number one first. That’s what we’re focused on. The U.S. administration supports biofuels, ethanol, and aviation. This is a really important point.

Why does the administration support this? The same reason, basically, the previous administration supported it, which is it supports U.S. agriculture, U.S. jobs, and energy. We also reduce carbon footprint, and our customers care about that. The administration cares about making more U.S. energy, and this is a great way to do that, alcohol to jet. What are we focused on today, putting all that together? We call this project North Star. Our goal is to use North Dakota where we have the ingredients to do alcohol to jet. We got 500 acres, low carbon ethanol, carbon capture, and that’ll be the nexus to then expand onto that map that I showed previously and globally too.

We want this to be a showcase so we can deploy Verity there, we can deploy alcohol to jet there, and also sell voluntary and compliance market carbon from there, use it as a showcase, and then for ourselves and for others, deploy it at other locations in the U.S. and globally. That’s the idea. We think that we can expand our EBITDA from what we have and then go further as this industry is built. Here’s our strategy. What’s next for us? Grow our existing EBITDA, as I mentioned, deploy serial number one in terms of a SAF plant, and then copy-paste in the U.S. and globally. With that, I think I’ll turn it back to you, Robert.

Robert Bloom, Managing Partner, Lithium Partners: All right, fantastic. Eric, thank you very much for the presentation. Thank you to everybody, of course, for watching here. If there are any additional questions or perhaps would like to schedule a meeting here either at the conference today or in the weeks to come, please send me an email. That’s bloom@lithiumpartners. Learn more about Lithium Partners. Make sure you visit our website, and please stay connected with us on LinkedIn so you can be apprised of future events and presentations such as the one here from Eric and Gevo. Eric, again, thank you so much for your time and presentation today. Hope you have a great conference and the rest of the day.

Eric Frey, Vice President of Finance and Strategy, Gevo: Thanks, you too.

Robert Bloom, Managing Partner, Lithium Partners: Thanks, everyone.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.