Gevo's Northwest Iowa RNG Project Hits Major Milestone

Gevo, Inc. announced Tuesday that its renewable natural gas (RNG) project in Northwest Iowa has been producing biogas and is now upgrading and injecting RNG into the natural gas pipeline. The RNG Project generates renewable natural gas captured from dairy cow manure. The manure for the RNG Project is supplied by three dairy farms located in Northwest Iowa totaling over 20,000 milking cows.

When at full operational capacity, the RNG Project is expected to generate approximately 355,000 MMBtu of RNG per year, which will be transported and sold in California. BP Canada Energy Marketing Corp. and BP Products North America Inc. (collectively, "bp") will market the RNG in California on behalf of Gevo, and Gevo expects that the RNG Project will generate between $16 and $22 million of Project EBITDA per year beginning by 2023 depending on a variety of assumptions, including the value of credits under the federal Renewable Fuel Standard Program (RFS) and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) in California. Gevo expects to be able to get approval for Renewable Identification Numbers (RINs) through RFS and carbon credits from LCFS later this year or next year.

"The success that Gevo is achieving in Northwest Iowa right now is the result of the team of dedicated people who are working to change the world by converting waste into useful energy, animal bedding, and soil fertilizer," says Dr. Chris Ryan, Gevo president and chief operating officer. "These talented people have been tasked with an important, complex job, and work every day to identify issues, formulate solutions, and execute their plan to achieve our goals. As this renewable energy supply becomes reliable, the entire circular economy model can grow and prosper. Supplying value added animal feed to dairies and to other animal feed operations, capturing the manure, then converting the manure to make RNG for use in the production of transportation fuels, more animal feed, and later, jet fuel when our Net-Zero 1 plant operates. This is an example of the circular economy in action."

"In addition to being good for us, California and the world, our dairy partners are also expected to reap benefits from the RNG Project over the long term," Ryan said. "The manure digesters are expected to improve the farms' sustainability and lay the groundwork for more efficient recycling of nutrients and better soil health. It's important that they share in the value," Dr. Ryan said.

Gevo's mission is to transform renewable energy and carbon into energy-dense liquid hydrocarbons. These liquid hydrocarbons can be used for drop-in transportation fuels such as gasoline, jet fuel and diesel fuel, that when burned have potential to yield net-zero greenhouse gas emissions when measured across the full life cycle of the products. Gevo uses low-carbon renewable resource-based carbohydrates as raw materials, and is in an advanced state of developing renewable electricity and renewable natural gas for use in production processes, resulting in low-carbon fuels with substantially reduced carbon intensity (the level of greenhouse gas emissions compared to standard petroleum fossil-based fuels across their life cycle). Gevo's products perform as well or better than traditional fossil-based fuels in infrastructure and engines, but with substantially reduced greenhouse gas emissions. In addition to addressing the problems of fuels, Gevo's technology also enables certain plastics, such as polyester, to be made with more sustainable ingredients. Gevo's ability to penetrate the growing low-carbon fuels market depends on the price of oil and the value of abating carbon emissions that would otherwise increase greenhouse gas emissions. Gevo believes that its proven, patented technology enabling the use of a variety of low-carbon sustainable feedstocks to produce price-competitive low-carbon products such as gasoline components, jet fuel and diesel fuel yields the potential to generate project and corporate returns that justify the build-out of a multi-billion-dollar business.

Gevo believes that the Argonne National Laboratory GREET model is the best available standard of scientific-based measurement for life cycle inventory or LCI. It also has a plant in Luverne, Minn.