Gevo Inc (GEVO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Gevo Inc (NASDAQ:GEVO) Q4 2022 Earnings Call dated Mar. 09, 2023.

Corporate Participants:

John Richardson — Investor Relations

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Lynn Smull — Chief Financial Officer

Analysts:

Dushyant Ailani — Jefferies — Analyst

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

Manav Gupta — UBS — Analyst

Amit Dayal — H.C. Wainwright — Analyst

Presentation:

Operator

Good day, and thank you for standing by, welcome to the Gevo Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Mr. John Richardson, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

John Richardson — Investor Relations

Good afternoon, everyone. This is John Richardson, Gevo’s Director of Investor Relations. Thanks for joining us to discuss fourth quarter results for the period ended December 31, 2022. I would like to start by introducing today’s participants from the company. With us today are Dr. Patrick Gruber, Gevo’s Chief Executive Officer; and Lynn Smull, Gevo’s Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today we issued a press release that outlines the topics we plan to discuss. A copy of this 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 and 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 sustainable aviation fuel projects, our agreements, our renewable natural gas project 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 and 10-K, which can be found on our website at www.gevo.com in the Investor Relations section. Following the prepared remarks, time permitting, we’ll open the call to your questions. I would 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 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, Dr. Patrick Gruber. Pat?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, John. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining us on our call. We are filing our Form 10-K today, and we ask that you refer to it for more detailed information after this call. You’ve probably read that Carol Battershell has joined Gevo as its newest member of our Board of Directors. Carol has had a long and successful career in the energy industry provides our Board with additional depth in the field of federal energy regulatory policy. Carol was Principal Deputy Director in the Office of Policy at the Department of Energy, she spent 10 years at the DOE. She spent over 24 years at BP, her last role at BP was Vice President of Policy and Strategy in the Alternative Energy division. We are very glad that Carol could join our Board and I expect she’ll be able to contribute greatly.

We successfully commissioned our northwest Iowa RNG project. It’s been up and running since the third quarter of 2022. We’ve worked through the start-up issues and we’re able to achieve greater than designed raw gas production from that adjusters in late fourth quarter 2022. We made the decision to expand the capacity of our system to 400,000 MMBtu per year, that’s up from 355,000 MMBtu. The digesters have already been optimized to achieve that capacity and we’re expanding the gas upgrading system at the pipeline injection site to be able to inject that 400,000 MMBtu. This expansion should be completed by — in the third quarter of 2023 and operational in the fourth quarter. We have already RIN approval from the EPA. And of course, we’ve already applied for the temporary pathway from CARB for the LCFS credits.

This approval would apply to all the gas we produce to date and until we get a final pathway from LCFS improved. That could happen later this year, it could possibly even drag into next year depending upon their workload at LCFS CARB. It’s temporary pathway is assumed to be in place all year, which that’s a good assumption for the moment. Without being superseded by the final pathway we’d expect the revenue for our RNG project to be about $30 million in 2023, based on the production of about 360,000 MMBTUs and using current low prices. Just projecting it forward throughout the year.

We expect that we should see the RNG project being operating cash flow positive, even using these low values of the temporary pathway and the conservative assumptions for pricing. When the final pathway gets approved, we’d expect an uplift of about $400,000 per month. Now, if anyone’s trying to model our RNG business, note that the 2023 revenue expectation takes into accounts RINs lagging by a month and LCFS lagging by about a quarter. For example, we carried $4.2 million worth of RINs in LCFS value in inventory into 2023 that was actually attributable to 2022.

In the fourth quarter of 2023, we may choose to delay monetizing RNG inventory until the first quarter of 2024, if we believe that our final LCFS pathway approval will be delayed until that. Although this would reduce the RNG revenue in 2023, it would be more than made up for in 2024 by a higher-value and pricing. Our NZ1 project continues to be on track with its first volumes targeted for 2025. We plan to use our balance sheet to execute the remaining detailed engineering purchases of certain long-lead equipment and enter into construction contracts for mobilization this year. Fortunately, because our balance sheet is healthy, we can keep the project on schedule, while we renegotiate detailed agreements, including the EPC contracts required for the financial close later this year. In other words, the EPC contracts are not on a critical path for COD which they often are for project developers. We’re lucky, in this case.

We will begin purchasing certain long-lead equipment for NZ1 in the coming months and we have already advanced funds to support the wind project development, and the hydrogen plant development, including some wind turbine in hydrogen electrolyzer purchases and money to support development and long leads for electricity service at NZ1. We expect to start construction in earnest by this summer with a limited notice to proceed in advance of full financial closing. We intend to keep the project on schedule with Gevo continuing to fund the first phase of the project as needed prior to financial close, which will fund the complete construction work of NZ1.

During this time, we will continue to work with potential equity and debt partners including the Department of Energy in order to secure third-party capital that will help to conserve Gevo’s balance sheet. We expect that Gevo will have the option to leave some or all of the development money in the project as project equity or to take reimbursement up capital from potential partners for some amount of the development capital in order to recycle it into other NZ projects.

We are working with Guggenheim and Citigroup on the equity financing and Nomura Green Tech and Citigroup on the debt financing. We’ve engaged with investors and are finding strong interest many interested parties are in the due-diligence phase doing deep dives. And we’re in the midst of securing term sheets. Some potential investors have expressed interest in both equity and debt. However, all of this will take several months to get arranged and get in place.

Additionally, we estimated part two of the application for the DOE loan guarantee process. DOE appears to be very supportive and it is possible that a DOE loan guarantee will provide the lowest-cost debt to the project. So we need to work through that process along with the process that would secure commercial debt. We’re running these things in parallel. DOE timeline is expected to take incrementally longer than a commercial debt process, but it potentially increases the equity distributions in the product and the overall profitability.

One of the special things about this NZ1 design that we’re doing is that can have a very low-carbon footprint with lots of optionality. As we’ve previously discussed, Zero6 Energy that’s formerly Juhl Energy is our partner for wind and hydrogen. Zero6 is developing both 99 megawatt wind site and a 20 megawatt hydrogen plant for NZ1. As we recently announced, Cummins has been selected as a supplier for the green hydrogen electrolysis now.

Turning to the NZ1 plant site build-out itself. We have been working through the EPC contracts to get favorable terms for debt financing, while also working on limited notice proceed contracts, which will cover the initial phase of construction prior to finalizing the debt and equity financings. Because we’re using our own cash for the NZ1 project until financial close, we can keep the project moving forward in parallel to get the EPC agreements in place. As we negotiated the EPC contracts, we expect to arrive at final terms that derisk the project and lower the financing costs.

ATJ plant is expected to be heavily modularized and we have our favorite fabrication shops, identified, and what has been a competitive process. However, we still need to finalize the pricing guarantees, the ATJ plant details are coming together. One thing we’re doing to reduce project risk is that we are planning to have the ethanol plants start up well ahead of the ATJ plant. So we ensure it’s running at a stable rate prior to feeding it into the ATJ plant. This sequence of construction in this way is expected to reduce overall execution risk and give people comfort.

We are also in the midst of engineering our NZ2 plant. We have committed $25 billion for the development and engineering of NZ2 and NZ2 is expected to be 3x the size of NZ1 and is being designed to utilize fossil-free electricity, process energy and hydrogen at a commercially advantaged location convenient to supply Chicago O’Hare International Airport with sustainable aviation fuel. We expect to be able to say more about NZ2 in the near future.

Now, we’ve had several questions from investors related to the recent comments from actions about their exposure to projects with Gevo. We referenced three projects and obviously, we are working with them on NZ1, NZ2, however, the details of the third project are still confidential, I confirmed there is one, but it’s confidential. We are planning several sites that would be developed in cooperation with existing ethanol plants. We have a partner network of ethanol producers that understand how to decarbonize their ethanol plants lowering this GI scores far below where most ethanol plants are currently targeting. We expect to carbon copy the design and modules of the ATJ portion of the plant from our NZ1 site. Some of the potential partners for equity in NZ1 have also expressed interest in developing and investing in multiple plants along with us.

It’s obvious to everybody that Gevo doesn’t have the balance sheet to build all these plants by itself. We plan on raising money, we’ve already disclosed, that we plan on raising it at a project level. Now I expect that Gevo will play the role of project originator, developer and investor in these projects. As such, we’d expect to recycle capital from project to project. The implication is that Gevo expect to see cash flow much sooner of the NZ1 operation date. We expect to provide guidance on our potential revenue and cash flows once we define the details of our partner deals.

The idea that Gevo will have to wait for cash until 2026 or so, that’s the wrong paradigm. We should see it sooner, as we get into this developing business. In addition to revenue from developing and investing in projects, we’d also expect to generate cash from licensing and/or assisting others to build-out ATJ projects. These markets are huge and growing. The Axens Technology combined with Gevo’s low-carbon integration technologies is attractive and the most commercially ready and scalable technology compared to others in the field, at least in our opinion and that of our potential partners.

We would expect to see some revenue streams for licensing and/or assisting others in the relative near-term. The details are renegotiated or report them after the deals or deals are signed. We are in the midst of creating a new business line called Verity Carbon Solutions, which includes a proprietary very tracking digital MRV or measurement reporting and verification platform. Over the past year, we’ve realized that the solutions, we are developing to beautifully track, count and report and monetize carbon intensity reductions from the fuel fuel for SAF is the same solution needed for the biofuels and bioproducts industry. Therefore, we are planning to develop and launch the Verity Carbon Solutions business to service the needs of the broader industry.

Now, I’ll pass it off to Lynn to talk through the numbers.

Lynn Smull — Chief Financial Officer

Thank you, Pat. We ended the fourth quarter of 2022 with a strong liquidity position of $482.8 million in cash, restricted cash and other liquid investments. The restricted cash component of that number was $78.3 billion and is associated with the Northwest Iowa RNG bonds and certain collateral we’ve had to post related to the development of Net-Zero 1. Long-term debt outstanding was $67 million and is related to the Northwest Iowa RNG projects. Our corporate spend that is SG&A was approximately $7.3 million for the quarter, net of non-cash stock-based compensation of $3.4 million.

During the fourth-quarter of 2022, we invested in capitalized $15.6 million cash in the capital projects comprised of $8.6 million into Net-Zero 1, $5.3 million into Net-Zero 2 and $1.7 million into the Northwest Iowa RNG project. We are progressing our Net-Zero program and are in the process of seeking debt and equity partners for NZ1 and projects beyond flagship projects. Third-party debt and equity financings for the program are currently being structured at the Net-Zero 1 subsidiary level rather than the Gevo Inc. level. The equity outreach is going well with substantial market interest and we expect to secure one or more investors as a result of those efforts. The NZ1 debt process is underway with dual tracking of commercial debt sourcing and DOE guaranteed loan sourcing both tracks are progressing well and we expect to secure debt to the plant construction late this year.

As Pat mentioned, we continue to spend development and engineering capital to progress the project and maintain its timeline in advance of securing the full construction financing.

Now I will turn the call back to Pat.

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks, Lynn. And with that, we can open up for questions.

Questions and Answers:

Operator

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Dushyant Ailani from Jefferies. Your line is open.

Dushyant Ailani — Jefferies — Analyst

Hi, team. How are you? Thank you for your time. Good. Wanted to quickly ask if you’re seeing any inflation on the long-lead items that you guys have planned purchase. Maybe just kind of remind us for the overall capex budget for NZ1?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

The overall — we’ll probably spend about — in the next year or so about $100 million or something like that of getting the project going and putting the money in on long-lead equipment. And it may go — we’ll have to see how it goes along the year. The — we’re not finding big delays on long-lead equipment. We don’t have anything super fancy. So, so far things are looking pretty good. A lot of this will be in deploying capital about the site development and early construction off our balance sheet. And I think within a year, yeah. So we’ll see it. There’s nothing on our critical list that’s popped up as the big-ticket items that we got to laid money down now, except for the hydrogen modules that we already did.

Dushyant Ailani — Jefferies — Analyst

Got it, thank you. And then, I guess, so you talked about roughly $100 million for 2023 and just wanted to understand your total capex for 2023 and then how do you think about next year as well?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Lynn?

Lynn Smull — Chief Financial Officer

Well, as we disclosed in the 10-K, we expect that the next 12 months for Net-Zero 1 will open both somewhere between $100 million and $200 million. The reason why the range is wide is because we are managing through the EPC contracting process and limited notice to proceed and the timeframe of the project spend, but that’s the range that we feel comfortable with.

Dushyant Ailani — Jefferies — Analyst

Understood. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. One moment. We have a question from Derrick Whitfield from Stifel. Your line is open.

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

Thanks and good afternoon all.

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Hey, Derrick.

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

Regarding your capital-raising efforts for NZ1, how should we think about your equity ownership of the project and its production stream as you advance the private capital market solutions? And more specifically, is there a minimum or maximum ownership, you want to maintain?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Well, it’s hard to say because it’s a — the discussions have ranged, believe it or not, from people saying, hey, we want to do all equity to we wanted to do some partnership and we got to collect everybody and see what we can get done. The one thing that’s interesting is a pure developer model. If we were to go a pure developer model, but what would happen then we get a retained interest. That’s a possibility here. We have to go play it out and see what happens, retained interest means we don’t have to invest, we still get equity in the deal. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a very efficient use of capital allows us to use more money for developing other projects and collecting more retained interest. That’s a possibility. It may be that we invest the capital straight away it will be whatever percentage money pursuant to how much — related to how much money we have on our balance sheet that we feel comfortable with.

Now, we have multiple projects to develop this isn’t a one-and-done deal on NZ1. So that’s the balancing act. And it will depend a lot on what our partners say, what they want to do, they want to — some of the folks want to invest in multiple plants. We just got to pin everybody down and get on with it.

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

Terrific. Regarding Net-Zero 2, are you seeing the potential for capital synergies, if the project is designed to be 3x the size of Net-Zero 1?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

There is.

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

Any that you could elaborate on just to give us a feel for how that scales?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Not at this time, it’d be premature, but there’s advantages in these processes and economies of scale. And the site that we’ve selected is, it’s a good site. It’s a really good site and we will see more on it pretty soon, but that’s the same at Chicago, it’s a very practical place to be then for us in where we’re putting this thing. And we have a good solution for the dephosphorylation, we’ll talk more about it when we’re at liberty to fully disclose everything.

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

And Pat, if I may, just maybe one build on that comment. While the ink is still dry on the Illinois SAF tax credit bill, could you offer perspective on the degree at which airlines — or I suppose the degree you expect they will be willing to share with industry that SAF tax credit?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Everybody seems — everybody’s cooperative. So what’s been done on the — so we’re talking about here for everyone who doesn’t know is that there is a $1.0 5 tax credit for SAF in the State of Illinois. So makes it a good place to be. And everybody understands thae need to have SAF, they want it in large scale. We have a lot of customers who work out of O’Hare and they’re our friends and partners in this. So everybody has that perspective and is very open-minded.

Derrick Whitfield — Stifel — Analyst

Perfect. Thanks for your time.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from Manav Gupta with UBS. Your line is open.

Manav Gupta — UBS — Analyst

Hi, guys. I actually just wanted to deviate a little and talk a little bit more about your RNG business, is this something you can grow? Is this something you want to keep? Is something you can monetize to fund some of the other developments? We’ve seen some attractive investments in R&D, so what’s the thoughts forward for your RNG business here?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

All right. So to step back of why we started it in RNG in the first place. It was — it is that we are the belief that bio-gas and RNG are going to be really important in long run to displace fossil-based natural gas. If you want to really be fossilize something and achieve low CI scores. And that also is true as we apply it to supplying a plant like ours up at NZ1 or one of our other plant sites in the future. That’s how come we got into this. And it’s very practical to put into a pipeline and distributed through BP into the transportation market in California because you can make money at that in the near-term. However, it also makes money to send it to our plants.

I view that solving the natural gas heat problem implants is one of the bigger problems we have in general. So for us, you can anticipate that we’ll be involved in other RNG projects. It isn’t lost on us that people are interested in it, you see that we’re expanding it already. It has even operating a year we’re already expanding it. And there’ll be other opportunities for us to do more. What to make the decisions about what we would do in the future investments. Based upon what balance sheet we have at other capital commitments that are in play. I can tell you that doing RNG is — we did three dairies connected by pipeline that we built to an upgrading unit.

Getting these things to stabilize and run, we took a lot of effort to do it and get it right and get our working right. And now we’re expanding it, now we’re getting some good expertise here. That expertise is going to be hard-fought for other people. So it hasn’t lost on us either. So in front of us is the decision of how much more do we invest in RNG, when? We’re going to continue to go down the path of learning and working to develop site that benefit our other plant locations for NZ plants, the jet fuel plants. That’s how we think about it.

So we aren’t doing it just to do transportation fuels in California, that’s not the game foot. The game of foot is to defossilized ethanol plants who can supply ATJ players and decarbonize ATJ plant themselves. Does that makes sense?

Manav Gupta — UBS — Analyst

Absolutely. Quick follow-up here. I know you are in the middle of raising financing for NZ1 and maybe NZ2 one day kind of like looking out there, one of the companies I cover PBF, they got a deal of lifetime from Eni walked in $7 a gallon capex fully refunded the project. And I’m wondering, if a European major or U.S. major walks up to you and says, okay, I want 50% of NZ1 or 50% NZ2 and here is all the money they offer the capex, would you be open to that?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

If we had, yeah. Those are — that very similar to the discussions that we’re having, it’s along those lines. And so that is we got to pin down all what’s real. Right now, we see lots of people learning from us, they see what we’re doing. They’re validating everything. The signals are strong and positive and we got to go through finished the work with them and their diligence and then bring home the investment. And people recognize that Gevo has — we think differently about how to do all this whole business system. That I think you would find that people will say this probably about us, as we think about the whole value chain from agriculture, the dephosphorylation of the plants, the dephosphorylation of the ethanol, how do you integrate ATJ, Axens based at a road show talking about our relationship and the things we’re doing together and that’s what they think is special about us too. And of course, then we collaborate with Axens anyway on the hydrocarbon stuff and improvement.

And so it makes for a pretty strong story and I think we’re going to see people who want to grow, they want bigger plants and then we have other ones that are going to want to have it more smaller plants are okay, but they’re going to be more keen on driving the CI score down even further and faster. So I think it’s going to look something like that. A couple — and there might be multiple investors here. I would — in fact, I’d be surprised if there wasn’t.

Manav Gupta — UBS — Analyst

Perfect. We are rooting for you and we hope you get the best deals just like we have done.

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Manav Gupta — UBS — Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. And we also have a question from Amit Dayal with HCW. Your line is open.

Amit Dayal — H.C. Wainwright — Analyst

Hey. Good afternoon, Pat, Lynn, how are you?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Hi, Amit.

Amit Dayal — H.C. Wainwright — Analyst

Thank you for taking my questions. With respect to the DOE loan guarantee, Pat, could you provide some additional color on maybe what the process is in terms of where the differences are relative to going to typical project financing lenders? And then in addition to that, is there a cap on the amount for several the loan from DOE?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Well, I’ll comment on the CAF part and the amount of money that’s available from DOE and then, Lynn, can talk about the process because that’s just life these days. The overall — one of the good things about IRAs that funded the DOE well. So this program is super well-funded. So there’s not a limit like that. In fact, there’d be money available I think for multiple plants, which isn’t lost on us either. And so we’re pretty good shape on that front. And that would have been an issue prior to the IRA Bill potentially, but we’re in good shape. Lynn, you can talk about the process comparison.

Lynn Smull — Chief Financial Officer

Sure. In terms of process DOE is very well laid out process. We are in Part 2 now, and that’s a key milestone because that starts the clock ticking on the DOE’s due-diligence and they engaged consultants and begin to engage in earnest with the financing process. The terms and conditions — well, let me comment first on the commercial debt — sort of debt funds. Those are mostly private equity run funds, maybe some institutional, but a lot of PE run debt funds who do infra debt, they’re a little more nimble. Their terms are not going to be as good as the DOE terms.

The terms that we had to request in our Part 2 are long-term fixed-rate debt, construction plus term and we’re seeking a pretty good debt deal out of that. We’ll see where we end up. But if we were to get that it would probably be better than what would be available in the commercial markets, which would likely be construction plus the short-term and a balloon. So what’s known as a mini-term, say, two years construction plus three to five years term with a balloon and a refinancing need at the end of that balloon.

But we’ll have to trade the two-off because I think the commercial debt will be faster. If we have a burden hand, we’ll have to look at that vis-a-vis where we’re at with DOE and how much longer it may take and what the economic benefits would be to distributions, ultimately to equity between the two options.

Amit Dayal — H.C. Wainwright — Analyst

Understood, thank you for that. That’s sort of leads to my follow-up question on this. Now that you have the DOE as well as a potential financing option. From the potential close aspect, it’s understandable that timeline for that could be moved around a little bit depending on how DOE comes in or not, but should we assume that the project timeline itself, given that you have the capacity to fund some of these initial development requirements from your own balance sheet. The project timeline for completion should still remain in line with what you have indicated previously, right?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

That’s right. You thought about it correctly. And that’s one of the big challenges. A lot of folks ask questions about, hey, what’s going on and we want to see these rigid milestones. That’s not how real world works, it’s about keeping the whole thing on track and doing the balancing act. And you’re exactly right. The DOE may take longer, but it might be the right — economically right. So that’s part of it. And the same thing is true about doing these deals that we’re talking about earlier. We can do a deal not as bad, but we got multiple parties involved here. We should work through — we got to work-through the process of doing it in a disciplined way. So we’re getting the right deal done for us, because it’s not just NZ1, it’s NZ1 plus the other plants.

And then finally, this last thing that I really want to emphasize again and was in my comments. I mean, I say it again, a lot of times we’ll get questions that people have this paradigm that we’re somehow just got to wait to see revenue from NZ1 in whatever year that is ’25 or ’26 or ’27 whatever they assume, right. Oh Gevo does it, how they’re going to do that? What are they going to do in the meantime? Well, hey, look, we plan on growing the RNG business, we talked about that, that brings in cash. We’re doing a model that is a developer model too. So we can take cash back out of these projects and recycle it going to change our ownership percentage. But as a developer, we could also get expect to carry that is possible as we develop projects, that means we don’t have to invest to get a percentage of the project. We might invest more than that carry, we’ll do that. That’s a choice.

And then the other thing I mentioned was the licensing and facilitation. That’s another threat, that’s another potential revenue stream too. We just got to get deals done, put the numbers together, that people paint the picture for people, but they’re going to be I think pleasantly surprised. I hope so.

Amit Dayal — H.C. Wainwright — Analyst

Understood. Thank you, Pat. And then just on the Verity, the tracking solution, who are we sort of targeting as near-term customers? And is this product ready to launch and are you building sales pipeline for this right now?

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Yes, so the Farm-to-Flight grant that we got the USDA is in the final strokes of getting it finalized, but that’s in support of developing this whole Verity Tracking. Verity Tracking is the technique of paying attention and documenting what happens on a field and then how something is manufactured and then taking it off to the marketplace and put it in it. We’re using DLT technology, which is the stuff that’s underneath the blockchain type stuff to be able to make digital — think of as digital quality certificates or digital sustainability or carbon certificates that could be transfered to another party. But in DLT technology you guys all understand that all the data stays attached to it the whole way through with smart contracts.

So that’s part of what we’re doing here and developing, it’s far along, we’ve already made tokens. So we already know that it can be done. We’ve already had interest in tokens. So now it is in the midst of working through the commercialization steps. We’ll commercialize it first with other people, because we don’t have — our NZ1 plant isn’t running. So we’re going to — we’re setting it up to get that done with other people. We’ll talk more about that. Paul Bloom is incharge of that business, he has got to decide when he wants to talk publicly about it more. But that is something that’s pretty exciting, and it’s a way of bringing value to farmers to sharing value across the whole supply-chain. Remember, we’re going to be making immutable, documented, bullet proofed validation of carbon savings. It applies for other fuel products. It could also apply to food products.

So we’ll be working with a variety — expect us over-time to work with a variety of folks on this outside of what we do ourselves. It’s a bigger — it’s bigger than us in this case, it’ll be interesting to see. So it’s getting traction already. So we got to go through the commercialization of it.

Amit Dayal — H.C. Wainwright — Analyst

All right. Thank you, Pat. That’s all I have. Appreciate it.

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Yeah.

Operator

Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call-back over to Dr. Gruber for his closing remarks.

Patrick Gruber — Chief Executive Officer

Thanks all for joining us. It’s an exciting time for us at Gevo. We’re bringing in — working on these partners and stuff, it’s going to be very interesting to see how this all comes together. I’m glad that we’re able to share a little more color than we have in the past. Talking about how we see commercialization of these multiple plants actually occurring. And I look forward to being able to talk about it a whole lot more, as all the pieces come together. Thank you for joining us.

Operator

[Operator Closing Remarks]